Ian Austen, A New Script for Searching Texts Written by Hand, New York Times, December 30, 2004. Excerpt: '"There is an enormous amount of handwritten stuff locked away in many archives, libraries and museums," said R. Manmatha, a research assistant professor with the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "Most of the time when people do research they just ignore this stuff because it's not accessible."...To develop their system, Dr. Manmatha and his students obtained about 1,000 pages of George Washington's correspondence that had been scanned from microfilm by the Library of Congress....The breakthrough came from looking at research into how people read, Dr. Manmatha said. Rather than analyzing individual letters, he said, people look at words and even parts of sentences as whole units....Even after training, the resulting software lacks the accuracy of programs used to read and digitize printed books, Dr. Manmatha said. But that it is not a significant problem. "That's the difference between having to recognize a thing and having to search it," he said. "You don't have to get every word right." Right now, Dr. Manmatha believes that the system is about 65 percent accurate....Though no library or archive has yet approached Dr. Manmatha about the system, he will brief Google about it early next year. With sufficient funds for software development and document scanning, Dr. Manmatha said, it may be possible within a decade for people to search historical manuscripts from home as easily as they now locate anything else on the Web.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2005 01:58:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
