Use reCAPTCHA to digitize old books and newspapers

[archerships]

About 200 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

via google.com

Awesome idea! Via Winnie Cassiopeia.

Posted via email from crasch's posterous

Comments

i never remember details

[vyus.livejournal.com]

I thought we do? I seem to remember at least one type of capcha that was actually using old scanned books and somehow was using people's responses as a way to verify an OCR or something.

[fitfool.livejournal.com]

Very cool. Thanks for posting that!