Harnessing Internet Work
There’s a very interesting article at Ars Technica on the use of CAPTCHAs in order to help computers digitize images of text. A CAPTCHA is essentially a slightly distorted image of some text (letters and numbers) that is supposed to make sure that the user of a website is a person and not just a computer program. If you try to comment on a Blogger Blog, for example, you’ll see the CAPTCHA.
What these researchers did was take the CAPTCHAs and instead of scrambling random text, they would use images of text that was difficult to digitize, and people could then help the computer. So if I had a scanned page of an original page in an old edition of Shakespeare, for example, and my computer couldn’t recognize one of the words, then they could disseminate this word’s image on the internet to ask people to figure out what the word is. So, the “useless” work that people do on a constant basis on the web can be harnessed to accomplish something real. It’s a really neat idea!
