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It's time to admit it publicly.
I've fallen addictively into what has to be the world's geekiest hobby: Distributed Proofreaders. It's a way of getting books into Project Gutenberg faster and with higher quality. Well, the quality part at any rate.
Someone scans a book, or harvests scans from Google or Internet Archive, potentially someone else OCR's it, then everyone starts proofing. Each page goes through 3 rounds of proofing, then two rounds of formatting, and only then are the pages collated into a book (which is verified by someone else, of course).
It works, and books come out of the pipeline at a rate of several per day, but it's a long pipeline, and there are several bottlenecks that can stall projects for as much as 3 years. I'm doing what I can, but so far I'm working in the lower rounds (i.e. pushing more pages into the bottlenecks).
And now for something completely different. Because no one's going to read the words without a picture.
Philadelphia, over the entrance to the City Hall subway station, at the very center of the city.
I've fallen addictively into what has to be the world's geekiest hobby: Distributed Proofreaders. It's a way of getting books into Project Gutenberg faster and with higher quality. Well, the quality part at any rate.
Someone scans a book, or harvests scans from Google or Internet Archive, potentially someone else OCR's it, then everyone starts proofing. Each page goes through 3 rounds of proofing, then two rounds of formatting, and only then are the pages collated into a book (which is verified by someone else, of course).
It works, and books come out of the pipeline at a rate of several per day, but it's a long pipeline, and there are several bottlenecks that can stall projects for as much as 3 years. I'm doing what I can, but so far I'm working in the lower rounds (i.e. pushing more pages into the bottlenecks).
And now for something completely different. Because no one's going to read the words without a picture.
Philadelphia, over the entrance to the City Hall subway station, at the very center of the city.
