Just One Page a Day 389
Charles Franks writes "Two years ago I started building an online proofreading system as a way to help Project Gutenberg (PG) get more books online: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). The concept is simple, we scan books and load the image and OCR output for each page into the online system. Next, proofreaders compare the OCR text to the image making any corrections as necessary, each page gets looked at twice. Finally the output from the site is massaged into a PG e-text and submitted to PG for posting to the archive. Now, nearly 600 books and a lot of PHP code later, we have snuggled into our new home which is graciously provided by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Now that we have 'real' resources available to us (the original site ran on a Pentium 200 over my 128kbps upstream cablemodem) I would like to invite the online community at large to help us put even more books online. To this end I would like to ask everyone to do 'Just One Page a Day'. Thank you, Charles Franks"
Stop reading this (Score:5, Insightful)
After that come back and you may continue();
Re:Stop reading this (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, I've already bookmarked the page, but that's on one machine. What happens six months down the line when I need to rebuild my bookmarks? Search for the article on Slashdot? Ick.
Proofing FAQ (Score:3, Informative)
...but first read the Proofing FAQ on the site and save yourself some confusion:
http://texts01.archive.org/dp/faq/ProoferFAQ.html [archive.org]Especially read section 5 for some of their typesetting-to-ASCII conventions which would be non-obvious otherwise.
And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, what a scary thought (Score:5, Funny)
(That hurts my brain just trying to type it in...)
Re:Wow, what a scary thought (Score:2, Funny)
I must get out more - I was actually able to figure that out!
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Funny)
Or grammer...
("it's" == "it is", "its" == possessive form)
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Funny)
Or grammer...
Or spelling?
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And you ask the /. community... (Score:5, Funny)
This'll be a fun one to read through.
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Funny)
Are you kidding? With the number of people bitching about grammar and spelling in the comments, you just know there's a pool of talent here!
(BTW, there's no apostrophe in the possessive form of "its.")
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:4, Funny)
:)
--
It's past the blind leading the blind; this is the blind and deaf leading the stupid.
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:2)
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:4, Funny)
Not to mention it's [sic] excellence at spotting grammatical errors.
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since Project Gutenburg can only publish books whose copyright has expired, it's quite likely that a spelling "error" may instead reflect language evolution, that is, a change in the way words are spelled over time.
Re:And you ask the /. community.. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Apricocr" I can see being a legitimate typo, but perhaps in converting "Lemon" to "Lemmon", you are eradicating one of the earliest uses (intentional or not) of the now-current spelling.
My personal opinion -- and I yes, everyone on
Ask anyone who has studied the First Folio of Shakespeare about the importance of spelling.
(And just incase you don't have a Shakespeare scholar handy: since Shakespeare's plays were almost always written down after they were first performed (and written down by someone else), there are many clues to the the original performance in how certain words are spelled, capitalized and how sentences are punctuated. Hamlet's "What a piece of worke is a man" is a good example of this.)
Excellent (Score:2, Flamebait)
And I shall call it... the wheel! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Funny)
Not to mention malapropisms!! :-)
http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=duplicity&d b=* [dictionary.com]
I like the first definition better!
Duplicity? (Score:2)
Just one page a day? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Just one page a day? (Score:4, Funny)
OCR Software (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:OCR Software (Score:4, Informative)
gocr (http://jocr.sourceforge.net/) is open-source, and includes interesting bits like deskewing.
As a proofreader, I really appreciate the best ocr, and the free guys are not the best.
Re:OCR Software -- Clara, perhaps? (Score:5, Informative)
Here's the web page: http://www.claraocr.org/index.html
timothy
Re:OCR Software -- Clara, perhaps? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:OCR Software (Score:2, Insightful)
Generally not nearly as good as the top two (Scansoft (http://www.scansoft.com/sdk/: seems to have engulfed the Xerox/Textbridge and Caere/Omnipage technologies), ABBYY).
When you scan for public use, think about the time of *other people* you waste if your OCR is not optimal or your scans are off-register/ skewed etc.
Obvious... (Score:5, Funny)
:-)
Copyright is not an issue (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Copyright is not an issue (Score:3, Informative)
Sadly, copyright is an issue in this sort of work. Just because Dickens' works are no longer copyright, doesn't mean you can go and pull a Dickens novel off the library/bookstore shelf and OCR it. Publishers tend to be careful to make slight alterations to the text here and there (formatting, spelling, come clarifications and corrections) which turns a copyright-expired work into a derived work over which they own the copyright. Shitty, isn't it?
Re:Some PG books ARE copyrighted... (Score:5, Informative)
Also, Project Gutenberg of Australia [gutenberg.net.au] publishes a number of works that are out of copyright in Australia, but still under copyright in the U.S. It is a copyright infringement for readers in the U. S. to download these works, which include, among others, Hervey Allen's _Anthony Adverse_(1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Great Gadsby_ (1944), Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet_ (1923), D. H. Lawrence's _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ (1928), all of George Orwell's novels, most of Virginia Woolf's, etc. etc.
Not exactly "the latest Stephen King" but a lot newer than Dickens.
The best thing next to GNU/Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Constructive criticism points me in this general direction, GOOD STORY /.!!! The above mentioned questions are null and void for a story like this. You're giving massive exposure for a project who's main goal is to make sure that even if a book goes out of a print and all copies are burned, the book will never die. This is not a novel (no pun intended) idea, this is an actual working project in which I have used on numerous occassions. If anyone can help out I would highly encourage it, this project is about as non-crontroversial as you can get, hell you can even do grammer checks in vi OR emacs.
Donate something, you'll feel better, money, skills, or whatever you think you can give to help them out. Donating money isn't nearly as rewarding as proofreading an OCR and knowing that generations upon generations will be able to see it and use it.
Re:The best thing next to GNU/Linux (Score:2, Redundant)
Re:The best thing next to GNU/Linux (Score:2, Funny)
You spelled "controversy" wrong.
Re:The best thing next to GNU/Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
A better use of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A better use of time (Score:2, Informative)
No, not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, having people make verifications against the OCR results establishes the ground truth which someone could use to improve the OCR engine so by doing a Page a Day, you are helping to make future Open Source OCR engines better.
Re:A better use of time (OK, here's mine) (Score:5, Funny)
OK, here's mine:
#include stdio.h
next...
server test under load (Score:2, Funny)
Dirtributed OCR? (Score:4, Interesting)
Graphics (Score:4, Interesting)
Will there be any support for proofing in other languages (french, spanish, arabic, etc...)?
What about books published in other countries. Would we be able to post those books if they're not copyrighted in the US but copyrighted in other countries? or vice versa.
Re:Graphics (Score:4, Informative)
DP has had books in Dutch, French, Spanish and German. No Arabic - no one has mentioned being able to do it, for one thing.
Would we be able to post those books if they're not copyrighted in the US but copyrighted in other countries?
Project Gutenberg only worries about the US copyright. If it's not copyrighted in the US, they'll do it.
use proofreading meta-data to improve OCR! (Score:5, Interesting)
Then, couldn't you just selectively have the humans review the highest probably error prone sections of a book, instead of every single word of every single page?
What do you think?
Re:use proofreading meta-data to improve OCR! (Score:4, Insightful)
It might help a bit but most OCR programs already tag letters that it is unsure about. They don't mention in the article if the distributed system incorporates OCR ambiguity in prioritising proofreading.
As an aside why not just store the raw image for any ambiguous text within the documents in the PG archive (Think of an HTML sort of thing). As people read the document just poll them as to what they think the letters in the bitmap are.
I guess a lot of the stategy rests on how frequently the ocr software makes an error or find ambiguity.
OCR errors mostly caused by poor scan quality (Score:4, Informative)
OK it's only four pages, but the errors I've corrected so far have been when the scan has been poor and the OCR software has had to make a guess.
Re:use proofreading meta-data to improve OCR! (Score:3, Informative)
The program is Gutcheck, [sourceforge.net] was developed by PG's Jim Tinsley.
Catches a lot!
Read? (Score:5, Funny)
You don't actually want us to read a
page of literature do you?
A better way - have computers do more work. (Score:5, Interesting)
In order to make the proofing faster, maybe you could OCR a document 2 or 3 times, and then have only the disagreements proofread.
We use omnipro here at work, and I'm surprised at how well it works, even recreating page formats.
Of course, it doesn't work 100%, but it sure does get about 95%. If you were to OCR a document 2-3 or more times, and most of it was identical, it would save a lot of time if you had humans going over only the parts that the different OCRs didn't agree on.
Steve Lefevre
Re:A better way - have computers do more work. (Score:2, Insightful)
This may eliminate some of the OCR errors, but it won't speed up the process because a good editor reads every word. You are asking for more errors when you ask your editors to become lazy and skip words.
Most OCR will probably misread the same character incorrectly every time (read 'B' as '13', for example). That kind of error will not be flagged, and will be overlooked by editors who are used to only looking for flagged errors.
Re:A better way - have computers do more work. (Score:4, Informative)
The works put out by Project Gutenberg are going to be around for decades, if not, centuries. 95% accuracy is shit for those purposes. An issue that comes up on the PG mailing list (gutvol-d) every once in a while is whether or not to correct spelling mistakes that appear in the real, dead-tree versions of the books. What if, for example, it's obvious to almost any reader that the author meant the word "by" instead of "bye". Surprisingly (or not, depending on the way you look at it), the general response is *not* to correct those kinds of "mistakes". The rationality being that PG is -not- an editor, but simply a library (which is actually its legal status).
So, in short, for works with millions of characters that are going to be around for many decades, 95% accuracy. The "bar" might be high, and, when proofreading for DP, I strive for 100%.
Re:A better way - have computers do more work. (Score:3, Insightful)
THAT IS 2000/20=100 errors per page.(That is the way OCR works, if it 99% ok, it is still 20 errors per page.
And that doesn't include "strange" formatting like things scribbleing things in margins or heading above pages, italics and extra spaces.
By the way you are not supposed to correct spelling errors made in the original pager. especially since this is often "old" english.
Better make it quick (Score:3, Funny)
will this work? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:will this work? (Score:3, Insightful)
Gutenburg often has published the same 'book' but of different publications due to slight variations in the text.
Re:will this work? (Score:4, Informative)
charlz has a workflow diagram [archive.org] for the works that go through his site. As you see, each book has a project manager, who has final processing/proofing responsibilities.
Also, I'm not sure you get the idea of two rounds of proofing. They don't see different versions of a corrected page -- the first one sees the straight OCR output (or, sometimes the project manager will do some automated corrections on it first) and then the first round proofer edits the text. Then, when all the pages have gone through the first round, the second round proofer reads the text as it was edited by the first round proofer. This helps because it builds off the edits of the first round proofer and allows the second round proofer to perhaps catch things not caught in the first round.
When proofreading, you're never going to capture all the mistakes with one pair of eyes. A distributed proofreading effort is very beneficial to the goals and efforts of Project Gutenberg, and I applaud the efforts of all those who have proofed even one page.
Having said that, I've done over 300 (under a different name).
Why he came to slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"
Books read to you while commuting (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
(n
would be pretty cool to get some good novels read to you w/o buying the tapes.
Just one page a day, huh? (Score:5, Funny)
You stop going out with friends or even returning their calls, personal hygiene takes a back seat and even Counter Strike and Warcraft III become unappealling. And, finally, after countless chapters and hundreds of pages you realise that you're friends were right: you're an addict.
Just one page a day, huh? Yeah, right.
Opium. Pot. Cocaine. Now pages.
It might not be your older brother's drug, or your Daddy's or your grandfathers, but, trust me, this stuff can be dangerous.
Do what I do. Just say no.
What books need to be done? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What books need to be done? (Score:3, Informative)
Check out the following for a start:
Possible Enhancements (Score:5, Interesting)
Add a "Quality" stat for each person. Base it on the number of things that were missed(another words, the number of things that the second-string proofer finds).
Use more than just two proofers. Have one "First String" proofer, who could be anybody, but have two second string proofers (who both get the output of the first string proofer). If the second string proofers have any differences in their output(with the exception of white space), then another second string proofer should be used. Only proofers with a certain quality rating(slightly higher than what a newbie's would be) should be able to do the second string proofing.
The "User rating" should be a combination of the number of pages done and the quality rating of those pages. Note that quality rating would only be increased by doing first string proofing. Page count would go up for any proofing.
Quality could be a float, starting at 1.0 for newbies. Every page that is completed and has a second-string person check would then go into a calculation like:
_new_quality_ = _old_quality_ + (0.01 - (_num_differences_between_their_proof_and_final_p
Thus, for every page proofed that requires NO corrections by the second string the user's quality would go up by 0.01. ( 0.01 - 0/1000 = 0.01 )
if there were more than ten errors in the proofing, their quality would go down ( 0.01 - 10/1000 = 0.00 ), (0.01 - 20/1000 = -0.01)
Have a threshold of 1.10 or some such for second string proofers... That way it would require the user to do at least 10 perfect pages, or 20 pages with 5 errors, etc, before they could do the second string proofing.
Obviously, make sure that the second string proofer can't see who the first string proofer is.
The "User Rating" (mentioned above) could just be a multiplication of the Quality and Page Counts...
Non-native proofers (Score:3, Informative)
A very very expensive way to do it.
See, an illiterate person won't introduce any bias into the text. They will faithfully duplicate any spelling mistakes that they find. In the case of an English scholarly collection, the mistakes are amoung the most important part, since they can identify different print runs, and how language shifts over time.
As a side note, the software project is hopeless. The best that cann be managed is to automate the administration of their current systems--no OCR will ever meet the level of accuracy that their current system provides.
ASCII Only? (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer. Why not, instead, store docs in some sort of SGML format to handle the special markup (which must be rare) and then down convert to ASCII when needed.
I've tried reading these things on my Palm. Very difficult. But if I could get a nice typeset PDF version, that would be a whole different story (no pun intended).
Re:ASCII Only? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ASCII Only? (Score:4, Informative)
Using things like BOLD and L for british pound were workarounds to have a common way of presenting the data. I suspect that it would be trivial to build a formating filter in perl, or another language that would convert BOLD to bold though it would require a bit more work to recognize that it really should be Bold or even that it should be BOLD.
Converting monetary symbols would require a bit more work, but would also not be impossible.
Re-inserting any diagrams, figures, illustrations or other graphics would require more work. If the original scanned pages are still available, as this part of the project suggests, even that would not be impossible.
One variation is the free bookmobile project that is out there. They use scans of the original book to build a new book for kids. Preparation for printing involves downloading the book over the internet, via a dsl speed sattelite link. I am not sure however if the working material is suitable for e-book reading however.
-Rusty
Re:ASCII Only? (Score:3, Informative)
Distributed Proofreading has a "high score" table. (Score:3, Insightful)
Scanning without damaging the book? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Scanning without damaging the book? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes indeed! *Any* decent academic library should have a photocopier which can do this. Older models tend to have a glass platen which extends right to the edge of the photocopier, and the side slopes away at around 60 degrees rather than dropping at a right angle. Newer models, such as the Minolta PS3000 will support the book in a cradle, face up, so that contact with the pages is minimised. They also tend to have a host of features, such as automagically erasing the gutter shadow that one gets with such a system.
Are any of these resources distributed? (Score:3, Insightful)
So that work isn't lost or destroyed, are any of the mega-sized projects replicated elsewhere in the event that a "it'll never happen" situation crops up to this unsuspecting resource?
Can't get through? Try ibiblio (Score:3, Informative)
It looks like the texts01.archive.org/dp site is holding up fairly well! If you cannot get through today, though, please check back later. Slashdot effect aside, it's usually quite speedy and has a decent 'net connection. If you want to keep informed of current events, get on one of our mailing lists via (when it's not slashdotted) our subscriptions page [promo.net].
Dr. Gregory B. Newby // 919-962-8064
Chief Executive and Director
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation http://gutenberg.net
A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541
gbnewby@ils.unc.edu
Looking for proofreaders on slashdot !! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Legal Implications (Score:2, Informative)
You do know about Project Gutenberg [promo.net], right?
Re:Legal Implications (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Legal Implications (Score:5, Interesting)
While publishers sell dead-tree copies still, they have no copyright over the original text contained within.
What? You mean to suggest that you have an actual example of a publisher making money without tyranny over the content?
Gasp!
Re:Legal Implications (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Legal Implications (Score:2, Informative)
Nope. Copyright holders (not necessarily the publisher) would have copyright on editorial corrections and (for music: a weird case) some on appearance, but not on the original text.
Publishers often claim copyright on the entire contents of 300 year old works, but they have no legal basis for this.
Re:Legal Implications (Score:2)
Re:Legal Implications (Score:4, Informative)
Due to copyright laws, it is only legal to do this with older books (copyrighted 75 or more years ago). As a result, Project Gutenberg is mostly comprised of the "Classics."
Mod Parent 'Twat' (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Book Pirating? (Score:2, Informative)
Yup.
It doesn't seem like there would be that many books in the public domain that haven't already been made available on the net.
How do you suppose they make it to the net? Most of the public domain books were written before word processors, so there's no electronic text around.
Of course I could be wrong.
Yeah. Go look at Project Gutenberg's site - think of it as you homework assignment for the weekend.
Re:Book Pirating? (Score:4, Informative)
And you probably are. The best efforts of our duly elected Congressional representatives notwithstanding, copyright still does expire. After that, a work passes automatically into the public domain. That means there are hundreds of thousands of books available.
In fact, if you've previously seen the classics online, they probably came from this project, which has been around for almost as long as I can remember.
Re:How do I get to plug my online website? (Score:2, Insightful)
And where do the poor get online? In libraries.
D'oh!
Re:How do I get to plug my online website? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:copyrights? (Score:2)
Re:copyrights? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:copyrights? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:copyrights? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, copyrights weren't perpetual. Whether they will be or not remains to be seen.
Re:Which books are getting converted? (Score:5, Informative)
Don't think your favorite authors are being represented? Can you demonstrate that the work is out of copyright? Make the conversion yourself!
Doing the hard work yourself is the best way to guarantee your interests are represented.
Re:Which books are getting converted? (Score:2)
I'm trying to make sense of this, please help me out. Are you saying that if people could vote on which books are converted (or "electronificated" as we sometimes call it in the industry), that more people might be interested in the project?
Re:public domain books? (Score:2, Informative)
So, the answer to your question is no. But that's what p2p is for
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Umm... (Score:5, Interesting)
1. It is for the greater good of society as other people build on earlier works.
2. It keeps the artist busy as they were supposed to have to keep releasing work to feed themselves as their early work passed into the public domain, just like any other job.
Re:Umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright law is supposed to give incentive to create, for the betterment of society, and allow the creator to derive direct benefits as a reward. An artist who has created a work so successful that (s)he can live on it indefinitely has arguably provided a suitable level of betterment to society.
Saying that copyright law is an incentive to "work" is accepting mediocracy. Artists who produce works that society values more highly should (have the opportunity to) receive more benefits.
On the other hand, I don't necessarily agree that copyright should last the lifetime of the creator (although there are strong arguments for this in the case of a natural person). But what is a "fair" limit?
Is 5 years enough? Almost certainly not. Many authors only achieve popularity after 10 or more years, and then make a fair amount of money off increased sales of their older works. A good number accept this as a risk, and plan to use this phenomenon to their benefit - work up a good number of titles with varied content, and you'll pull more readers, who are then likely to try some of your other titles.
Is 20 years enough? Maybe. But some of our best-loved authors were 15-20 years ahead of their time in terms of what readers wanted.
Is life enough? Strangely, no. If an aging star has just completed his/her autobiography, concludes the publishing deal, and dies ... well, the family could well be screwed.
Maybe the answer lies in a compromise, rather than an all-or-nothing approach. Copyright over a work lasts for the greater of 10 years or the creator's natural life (which gets very interesting when we get eternal life medications ...). But some rights fall away after the LESSER of those two times, such as exclusivity over derivative works (but not translations).
This allows society to (culturally) enrich itself by building on a work after a shorter amount of time, while the creator (and/or family) can still derive value from the original work for a longer time.
In the case of books this is easily understood: author writes book; 10 years later other people can write preludes and sequals, extend the world and characters, etc; 30 years later author dies and original book falls into public domain.
Re:Umm... (Score:2, Interesting)
Beowulf, Moby Dick, Shakespearre's plays, etc are all free as in speach and beer. Edited versions of the original text can be copyrighted. Examples of that are edition of Shakespearre's plays with "translations" next to the original text. You can buy his complete works, unedited, for very little $ these days. The only cost for the publisher is printing and typesetting.
Re:I am programmer, let's automate this (Score:3, Insightful)