Thursday 23 June 2011

What I found on BBC News

Digitisation seems to be taking the world by storm. Everyone is doing it. So while perusing BBC News over the last couple of days I came across two things I quite liked.

The first one I noticed yesterday and is called Digitalkoot this is the National Library of Finland's game to correct words from their scanned newspapers. Because of various factors automatic recognition doesn't always work, as a result these words need human intervention. The National Library of Finland have chosen to create a game where you have to get a mole, or numerous moles as the case may be across a bridge, a bridge built from words you've corrected. I've had a go at this and I'm not very good, I would like to give it a go in Welsh or English though. Some of the Finnish letters were a bit beyond me. Give it a go if you've got some spare time on your hands it's quite fun!

The other one I saw was the Your Paintings tagger. Your Paintings is a project which aims to digitse more than 200,000 oil paintings in the UK. For more details about the project see here. This project also brings in the public, this time to tag the photos with what you can see, who you can see, where you can see and more. It's quite relaxing. I've enjoyed playing with it and am going to go back an play some more in a minute. It's definitely a good way of seeing paintings that aren't usually on display to the public. To tag away go here and press Start Tagging.

Just something for you to look at if you're a bit bored and need something to fill some time. I've a feeling I may spend a lot of time procrastinating with these things, but it's all to the good. How can it be procrastination if it's helping these projects out?

1 comments:

Stella Wisdom said... Best Blogger Tips

Digitalkoot is indeed an interesting use of crowd sourcing. Ville Miettinen from Microtask, who partnered with the National Library of Finland on the project recently gave a talk for staff at the British Library (where I work) and it was really inspiring.