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NASA Requests Help With Von Braun's Notes
DynaSoar writes "NASA is soliciting ideas from the public on how best to catalog and digitize the collected notes of Wernher von Braun. 'We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public,' said project manager Jason Crusan. 'We don't always do the best with putting out large sets of data like this.' The PDF notes are those of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, the first director of NASA's Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and are typed with copious handwritten notes in the margin. According to the official request for information, NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF), how to index the notes, and how to create a useful database. The unique nature and historical value of the data, literally discovered in boxes six months ago, is what motivated NASA to ask the public for ideas."
Seems to have a habit of just dumping things in warehouses and forgetting about them.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
Just use one of those companies that is always spamming me to do piecemeal typesetting... though i'm betting there's someone in North Korea who could do it for even cheaper.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
group-iv tiff + ASCII, key-value metadata descriptor in XML. Keep it generic.
They got that million dollar touchless scanner that can digitize the papers with ease, then put them into either Open Source or PDF formats.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count down
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
Nasty..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
On the next thing that goes up to space (or even just a suborbital flight), crank down the window at about 20km up and throw the stuff out (or have some automated thingy with an explosive bolt that distributes it into the atmosphere). Now THAT would be a "creative way to get it out to the public".
Then again, maybe that would be TOO creative.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Scan it at high resolution, OCR what you can, and load it into Distributed Proofreaders. Or if the material is too technical for the layperson, ask for a copy of the web-based software and set up your own private site. Let bored grad students work on it in exchange for some kind of minor credit on the final digitized work. (I believe that the bored grad students phenomenon produces half of the highly-technical articles on Wikipedia.)
Just scan everything and allow private companies, individuals, and non-profits to come up with their own scheme, then combine the best non-proprietary techniques and make your own.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Boy do I not want to work for that particular department.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Just put it in a box and send it to Google...
Only do this for notes that are in the public domain or which the copyright-holder is willing to license very liberally.
For encumbered notes you'll want some other idea.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Lets go with a format almost anyone can read. As soon as their all scanned in as high res TIFFs THEN you can begin to OCR them and create hybrid PDF's which CAN be indexed. From there we have a good start with high quality originals and searchable dirivitives. Then people can start rolling whatever custom solutions they want to.
Yes, I know that OCR is going to be very crude, especially for anything hand written. But what it will do is get us a very good starting point. Id like to see a wiki set up with the OCR'd text as the beginning text, a link to the document and then the public can begin to go in and correct the OCR mistakes, and fill in what just flat out couldn't be OCRd.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Well, considering they host over 6,000 pdfs and the RFI is in PDF with the title of the document being "Microsoft Word - WvB RFI 6-24-09.doc" by Jason Crusan who used Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5(Windows), I think we know what everyone uses at NASA. Fine. I'm not going to bitch about that. Instead I'm going to point out that if you're already dependent on Adobe Acrobat Reader & Microsoft Word being around until the end of time supporting your old doctypes, you might as well release these in PDF from DOC sources too.
... you will need at least one or two people on your staff to administrate. Diagrams and drawings will probably need to be cropped and retained as images. Keep those in a lossless format but distribute whatever saves you bandwidth.
But, if I were doing this: Assuming these are all in images, put the images in whatever format you want and make a generic wiki page for each of them. Then let users log in (NASA fans should pour in) and translate the pages to annotated wiki pages with the footnotes (normally references) being all the side notes that were penciled in. They can categorize them by related missions and maybe even tag them
Once that's done, ideally you'd put it in some XML standards based format (ODF or OOXML, yeah, that's another argument to be had) that you will always be able to read even if you have to build your own viewer/converter. Keep these sources indexed and provide for people the rendered PDF/PS/PNG/whocares and then you could probably build scripts to rebuild all from sources if you want. New technology comes out or people want to view them in HTML 5--no problem, just build a neat little XSLT for them.
As for indexing them, I can tell you one way not to do it. Don't do the thing that curators of classical music did. Man, that's like speaking another language to me. Arrange the notes by mission or date if you can and any natural titles that arise for the favorites, add to it as an alias.
My work here is dung.
Why don't they release it in the open standard PDF, with annotations for the handwritten notes, which I believe are in the in the standard. (I might be wrong.)
Thanks NASA for making me feel like my opinion is valued and useful. Kind of like that, oh what was it called? The vote for the name of that satellite thingy? When really you're just passing the buck because your budget didn't include "digitizing old notes."
You guys clearly do not read enough electronic media. PDF and Djvu are the more widespread and relatively ubiquitous modern electronic book formats. Djvu tends to be vastly superior to PDF in terms of file size though.
Read all about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Djvu
Discuss.
Sounds like a job for this project.
Best part is, hand written is going to be more difficult to solve for computers...
We're looking for creative ways to get it out to the public
By rocket mail!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_mail
Call me selfish, but I'd love to search Von Braun's notes for one particular name: my late grandfather worked for him at MSFC for over 30 years.
http://recaptcha.net/
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
How about take a page from the Talmud? Seems a perfect format, and there's been thousands of years of indexing of that document.
Just ask Google to scan it. I am sure they would love to do it. They have a fabulous scanning system that they were using on books, so I would suspect that they could scan it for NASA. Why reinvent the wheel when there is GOOGLE!!!!!!!!!!!!
But the USA did also a deal with the Japanese and covered up Unit 731 deeds to become the sole owner of this Biological Warfare knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
the country which always made deals with the devil(s)
some might call it a pact!
Mr. H. Oberth said to me that he was satisfied when WvB died (of cancer) before him.
Hand them over to google they have experience with this type of thing
Make high res scans into tiff, then let people decide how to process it on their own time (recaptcha?). Also output this (at a lower res) to pdf for reading with the ability to annotate (and maybe ocr it a bit).
most people probably wont care what format its in.
Project Gutenberg might be interesting choice.
Who cares where they come down.
That's not my department, says Wernher von Braun.
personlly, i'd love a printed hard copy on my book shelf. right there with my Goddard books.
An infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters typing for eternity will surely reproduce the works of Von Braun. Or is there a deadline...
Oh, wait.
make it into a wiki,
then upload the files as .djvu files, and copy a bunch of the 'page' templates from wikisource. basically it gives you a handwritten graphical picture of the page, right alongside the wikified hyperlinked annotated text.
you could also then allow teams of remote people to do the transcription ... either pay, or see if volunteers go after the project (like they have done for many old works at wikisource).
and make the site sort of like wikisource, but with more policy latitude about adding annotations, hyperlinks, etc, all of which will be necessary to understand wtf he was talking about.
wikia.com has free accounts! or you could pay some kid a few hundreds bucks to set you up vonbraunwiki.nasa.gov using mediawiki (and a copy of wikisource's and wikipedia's appropriate templates)
---
How about something like this? http://tobaccodocuments.org/
NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF)
Why do I have this subconscious urge to suggest.... PDF?
They might know a thing or two about dealing with historical items, and they do have a museum devoted to air and space flight. (That said, the fact that NASA are asking for suggestions at all is encouraging.)
instead of focring people to pay taxes on some project of dubious desirability, they are trying to see if the public has any support for their idea, before they thrust headlong into it.
government workers should ask the opinion of the taxpayers more often, we are after all , their bosses. i have a lot of respect for the government employees that remember this, and nothing but contempt for those who want to 'play social engineer and tax waster' without regard for what the public thinks.
if they'll ever find backups of the plans for the Saturn 5. They threw out the originals years ago to save space. Von Braun would probably have wanted those to remain rather than just his notes in the margins.
I'm all for saving historical documents and everything. But with the economy the way it is right now, is this really the best thing for our _space_ agency to focus on? Don't we have some government departments just for handling historical records? Can't we just turn this over to them and let NASA focus on its basic mission?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Post them via twitter. Get Ashton Kutcher involved.
I went to the Space Camp place. They have only one area for Von Braun. While others wandered in Gemini, Apollo, I was captivated by this single video of Von Braun. How could this man raise that much money on two continents and with opposing sides of a war. My friends from Huntsville agree. This man was above war, knowing perhaps that only war could fund space exploration. I am only imagine him saying, "war will come and go, come and go", we must build a new rocket!
If they put the scans up in high-res TIFF files, but put them in the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, then good things will happen. And then send the originals to the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum and let the professionals curate them. But if you don't get the rights right, then you could easily end up with the content all locked into some screwed up Windows-only access or via Silverlight or some other lock-in technology. Let's not fall into the same trap that the British Library did. Secure the public domain rights, then put the content out in the highest resolution practical, and then let the fun begin.
Seems to have a habit of just dumping things in warehouses and forgetting about them.
Hmm, let's see here.... Von Braun was the most famous rocket scientist in history and whose knowledge was critical in our learning how to make very effective rockets that ultimately took us to the moon, and fostered the technology upon which our own military missles are based. If that information is to be made public, it might readily be used by the North Koreans, Iranians, or others to further improve their missiles which are inevitably going to be used to attack us and/or our allies someday.
WTF is NASA thinking? Oh, they're not. I think I see a problem.
I would suggest putting it on Wikipedia, but it wouldn't pass WP:OR.
Let other people format them to their hearts desire.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
you cannot crank down the window at 20km up since the gas pressure keeps the windows shut.
But it would probably be easier to just convert it into HTML and let Google's spider index it all.
Wernher von Braun
by Tom Lehrer
Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi schmazi," says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braunv
You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German oder English I know how to count downv Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Seems appropriate for the Nazi's notes. Of course all of the liner notes will need to be stored as revisions and hidden.
http://drawarea.com/demo/static.html
"We aim for the stars. Sometimes we hit London."
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
to commorate allthe people gassed, and killed, partly with the help of Dr. von Braun
Oh, and lets not forget something to commeorate the hypocrysy of the US - maybe make all viewers where rose tinted glasses
This is not dead history, there are still living people with tattos on their arms with the jew number
Sorry I would like to sit this one out, on the count of who Werner von Braun was, however when you need help deciphering the notes stolen from Nicola Tesla, you can count on my "help".
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
...that the software they need is here MediaWiki
Go see the galaxyzoo
website where people like you and Me catagorize galaxies.
Its human powered picture clasification.
Perhaps looking at cool space images are quite the draw
that Von Braun's Notes can't live up to.
How about OCR the typed parts, and use prison labor to manually type up the handwritten parts? I don't think von Braun would be opposed to such use of slavery, in fact we'd be doing his memory an honor. With the army of drug-addicts in US prisons, this should be a piece of cake, done in no time.
Read what I mean, not what I wrote.
"According to the official request for information, LINK[NASA needs ideas on what format to use]LINK (PDF)"
Should be
"According to LINK[the official request for information]LINK (PDF), NASA needs ideas on what format to use"
.
Otherwise it looks like someone's implying that PDF is a proposed/preferred format. Also, links should be attached to the text of what they are, not what they say!
Outsource this job to a low-cost country that doesn't have a potential to build a weapon out of the notes. Micronesia looks promising.
OutputLogic
Hey, so, not super familiar with TeX as a writing instrument, but I am pretty familiar with it's output, and it seems that if we're talking about someone's notes that will be in mathematical/scientific notation, then we might as well use a product that's geared towards that. Everything will look right, everything will be readable. With regards to making it searchable, it seems like that shouldn't be too big of a task if TeX doesn't already support it. Yeah, sure, TeX isn't a product that everyone has on their computer, but my guess is that most people can install a viewer program, and mostly it's going to be sciency people reading it anyway.
----- Redacted by Homeland Security -----
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
"NASA needs ideas on what format to use (PDF)"
C-x C-s C-x k
This is the sort of thing that Project Gutenberg does all the time. Why not see if they are intrested?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Load the notes into a V2 and use it to scatter them over London.
"Once rockets go up
"Who cares how they're writ down?
That's not my department!"
Says Werner von Braun
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Wernher von Braun, his mentor Herman Oberth, ...
and nobody gives a fuck from where they really came from and that they were SS officers.
What is actually more interesting that von Braun and also Oberth states really clearly that we have been helped by the people of other worlds in certain scientific fields.
See also project Paperclip.
Do not be ignorant.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Csj7vMKy4EI
You could encode the text using TEI, and extract the data as a Topic Map or Linked Data.