Can You Help us Make the 19th Take for example Century Searchable?
Post on August 21, 2020 by Brewster Kahle
In 1847, Frerick Douglass start a newspaper advocating the abolition of slavery that ran until 1851. After the Civil War, there was a newspaper for fre slaves, the Fremen’s Record. The Internet Archive is bringing these and many more works online for free public access. But there’s a problem:
Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while the best commercially available OCR technology, is not very good at identifying text from older documents.
1847. The images are not that great, but a person can read them
The problem is our computers’ optical phone number list character recognition tech gets it wrong, and the columns get confus.
What we ne is “Culture Tech” (a riff on fintech, or biotech) and Culture Techies to work on important and useful projects–the things we ne, but are probably not going to get gushers of private equity interest to fund. There are thousands
of professionals taking on similar challenges
in the field of digital humanities and nevada state corporation – point to point we want to complement their work with industrial-scale tech that we can apply to cultural heritage materials.
One such project would be to work on
Take for example technologies to coupon b2c bring 19th-century documents fully digital. We ne to improve OCR to enable full text search, but we also ne help segmenting