I'm posting now, just before I win the lotto this evening. It's gonna be great!
This evening I came across project gutenburg, which I'd heard of before but never investigated. It's a Web2.0 project to publish ebooks for free - presumably out of copyright texts. Maybe more on that later. Anyway, through that, I joined up with distributed proofreading - as an important part of the Gutenburg project.
The way it works is this - someone scans a page, and uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to turn the scanned image into text. This doesn't always work smoothly, which is where the first stage of proofreading comes in (this is as far as I've got - you have to have 300 pages successfully proofread before proceeding, presumably to weed out the unhelpful). Your mission should you accept it is to ensure that the OCR has properly reflected the actual text - an image of which is presented to you on your monitor with the OCR text below.
I've done 3 pages so far, I reckon if I try and do one or 2 a day I'm helping bring books to the masses. And I love books, whatever about the masses......plus, I might get to read some interesting stuff?
I've bought some Guinness in a bottle - not the draught kind, the "old fashioned" kind. More on that experiment another time. When I win the lotto, I'll be able to proofread all day, while drinking beer!
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