Reading in the dark
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Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in the "Kestrell" journal:
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07:06 pm
[Link] |
Looking for Linux scanning program
Anyone have any recommendations?
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.937mikefm.com
Tags: ocr, scanning
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01:11 pm
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Books read in January 2008
This is part of a project to not only record what books I read, but indicate which books I have scanned myself and what other sources are available for etexts and accessible ebooks. Things which I hope this project demonstrates: 1. the availability of science fiction books in alternate formats.
2. What kind of sources are available for accessible ebooks.
3. the number of books I scan per month and the amount of production time these books represent, each scanned book requiring 6-10+ hours of time flipping and scanning pages.
True Names by Vernor Vinge with an afterword by Marvin Minsky (1984) [etext from somewhere[
Before there was the Matrix, there was "the Other Plane," Vinge's conception of what an interactive online environment would look and feel like and how this other world would ultimately influence people's sense of identity. Mindboggling to find a note indicating that this story was written in 1979, and Minsky's afterword is fascinating also if you are interested in following the links between science fiction and science theory.
Precode Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934 by Thomas Doherty (1999) [Bookshare.org]
Doherty, a professor at Braindeis,
as in the case of another one of his books which I read and found fascinating, Cold War, Cool Medium about television during the McCarthy era, Doherty explores how this time was far from being the uptight black-and-white repressive era that it is portrayed as in less in-depth studies. Good book as much for the development of the "talkies" as the development of ratings systems.
Coyote Road Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow editors (2007) [scanned by me]
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Current Mood: Hermione-like
Current Music: www.wmbr.org
Tags: books, ocr, reading
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02:29 pm
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Zoom-Ex to introduce new portable scanner/magnifier at NFB conference
I spent some time over the past month doing testing for this new portable scanner, which is both very lightweight and durable. Additionally, the stand that the camera is attached to also acts as a guide for placing documents to be scaned, so the camera is always getting a precise scan of the document. Anyone interested in a portable scanner will want to check these folks out at the NFB conference. Here is the flyer I wrote:
ABISee, Inc., developer of products for low vision and blind computer users, is proud to premiere
the Zoom-Ex Portable Scanner
which makes it possible to turn any computer into an accessible scanner and reader for blind users.
The durable but lightweight design of the Zoom-Ex Portable Scanner consists of a 2 1/2 inch by 2 1/2 inch digital camera on a stand, with the stand also acting as a guide for lining up the book or document to be scanned. Because of this unique camera and stand design, the camera is always at the exact distance it needs to create a clear image and the blind user always knows exactly where to place the material to be scanned.
The Zoom-Ex Portable Scanner can operate in either manual or automatic mode. When in automatic mode, Zoomex senses when a page has been turned, leaving the user's hands free to easily turn the pages.
Because the Zoom-Ex scanner includes its own text-to-speech and OCR programs and runs off any Windows-based computer or laptop, you can use it almost anywhere that there is a computer on which to install the software: in the classroom or library, at conferences and on vacation.
Product features:
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Current Location: aerye
Current Music: air conditioner
Tags: disabilitytech, gadgets, ocr, scanners, tts, writing
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10:12 am
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Bookshare Online Chat Room to discuss scanning tips this eveningg 8 p.m. EST
FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
The opening of the Bookshare Online Chat Room was a big success. At one
point in the session we had 30 participants plus four moderators. This was
more than we hoped for. What made this opening so special was the
communication between Bookshare staff, volunteers, users and people who are
interested in having Bookshare in their future. A team like this can only
augment the effort to utilize the power of the Internet to enhance
communication between those of us who are actively working to expand the
Bookshare.org collection, Bookshare volunteers reside in many parts of the
world so attending a meeting in a brick and mortar building isn't possible.
The chat room will allow everyone to attend and share ideas, get answers to
questions immediately, and form a community of friends with a common
interest without leaving home or office.
During the first meeting, we held a discussion to decide the best day, time,
and length for weekly meetings. In order to include those who are employed,
it was decided future meetings will be held each Tuesday at 5:00 p.m.
Pacific. 6:00 p.m. Mountain; 7:00 p.m. Central; 8:00 p.m. Eastern.
This Tuesday Jane Dickison will be presenting Tips for Scanning.
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Current Location: aerye
Current Music: www.wumb.org
Tags: books, disabilitytech, ocr
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04:41 pm
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Next gen book scanning system for Google to be released as Open Source
Posted to the Book People mailing list
From
http://www.iupr.org/projects:
``The Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition (IUPR) research
group at the DFKI is developing the next generation system for
Google's massive book scanning project. The system will incorporate
state-of-the-art pattern recognition, statistical natural language
processing, and image processing methods. The resulting system will be
deployed by Google in the field, and it will also be released in open
source form as a system for both desktop OCR and high volume
conversion efforts.''
Tags: google, ocr, opensource
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12:55 pm
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Torture me with typefaces
So yesterday I got my copy of Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron but it has been mocking my OCR program. Can anyone tell me if the typeface being used has little squiggles on the letters s and w? Every third s is being recognized as a d, and every other w is getting a dash or a broken bar before it. I'm hoping it won't join my half-scanned copy of John Crowley's Lord Byron's Novel, -which aldo uded some sort of -weird typeface that defied my dcanner 'd abilitied.
Apologies, I felt compelled to share the torture. It's a bit like reading Old Norse, isn't it?
Current Mood:  frustrated
Tags: books, ocr
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05:20 pm
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tesseract-ocr: Open Source OCR
Kes: OCR=optical character recognition, or the program used to scan paper text and render it into digital format
From the Book People mailing list:
snip
"tesseract-ocr", with "lvincent" listed as admin -- presumably Luc
Vincent (a document image processing expert now at Google). There are
no files there, but they do seem to be at the University of Nevada -
Las Vegas ISRI site, at
http://www.isri.unlv.edu/downloads/ocr-prerelease-20051201.tar.bz2,
under the Apache 2 license. According to the report at
http://www.isri.unlv.edu/downloads/AT-1995.pdf,
it does a nice job, as far as accuracy goes.
Additional information from SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr
A commercial quality OCR engine originally developed at HP between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, this engine was among the top 3 evaluated by UNLV. It was open-sourced
by HP and UNLV in 2005.
Project Admins:
lvincent
Tags: ocr, opensource
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