What they should do is make a crypto platform like curecoin but for this where you earn coin for transcription of these documents (and others, could be a cool platform).
UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
11–20 of 43 posts
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#12It would be great if the data entry panel and the main document scrolled separately. Right now I have to scroll up and down to enter data, which is frustrating.
On desktop you can drag the document (image) up and down which helps :-)
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#13Why hasn't this been automated? Digit recognition technology is pretty good and it seems like the forms are pretty standardized.
Is there a technology that would help ocr-ing standardized forms? I’ve got a couple thousand pages of historical train schedules that i would like to digitize (tabulated, printed data, including symbols/icons), but I’m not sure how to automatically recognize the structured data.
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#14Mechanical Turk?
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#15Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because 99% accuracy isn't good enough.
What accuracy do you think humans have? If I give you 1000 handwritten numbers, do you think you'll make less than 10 mistakes?
The forms are in open access, anyone can fill one form, so they surely did consider variations in accuracy (if not plain sabotage). They are probably submitting the same data to multiple people and the cross-checking the submissions. Also, the totals help to filter out submissions with mistakes. One can also add bound checking for individual values (misplaced decimal point, extra digits etc.). I would love to see how they do it, but they'll probably keep it confidential because trolls and other vandals.
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Run both OCR and human in parallel and double check anomalies
I would expect humans to make similar errors.
AIUI the classic procedure for tasks like this is/was:
Hide some graduate students. Tell each to transcribe, and to mark the difficult spots. Give each page to two students. Next, have someone else process the page pairs and resolve conflicts and the marked trouble spots.
As long as one of the students notices that a particular spot is difficult to read, the error is discovered and can be handled by someone who isn't numb from transcribing pages of simple numbers.
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably because 99% accuracy isn't good enough.
I've had a look at a few of those and I doubt you'd get 99% accuracy. A lot of the footnotes especially are very hard to decipher. They're also 50 years old, handwriting has changed over time. I'm not sure how well models are trained to read old handwriting, I know that I struggle with it. For humans, much can be deciphered through context. That's much more complex to do with OCR.
The National Archives in the UK has a research project to try to read > 200 year old handwriting with OCR reliably. They use various tricks like training per-century or per author models which gives a big performance improvement. They also have ways to handle symbols that no longer exist (not in unicode).
Give me a shout if anyone here wants to collaborate.
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've had a look at a few of those and I doubt you'd get 99% accuracy. A lot of the footnotes especially are very hard to decipher. They're also 50 years old, handwriting has changed over time. I'm not sure how well models are trained to read old handwriting, I know that I struggle with it. For humans, much can be deciphered through context. That's much more complex to do with OCR.
The National Archives in the UK has a research project to try to read > 200 year old handwriting with OCR reliably. They use various tricks like training per-century or per author models which gives a big performance improvement. They also have ways to handle symbols that no longer exist (not in unicode). Give me a shout if anyone here wants to collaborate.
I work on the visualization and publishing side of this kind of data, but I do know our HTR works even better if we combine authors and centuries into one model, instead of separating. Did you try and compare results?
Re: UK scientists ask for help in transcribing 200 years of rainfall data
#20Why hasn't this been automated? Digit recognition technology is pretty good and it seems like the forms are pretty standardized.
Is there a technology that would help ocr-ing standardized forms? I’ve got a couple thousand pages of historical train schedules that i would like to digitize (tabulated, printed data, including symbols/icons), but I’m not sure how to automatically recognize the structured data.
I don't know about out-of-the-box ready software. Depending on how much time you have you'd either train your own model with your own ground truth or you can use an open source model. Libraries and archives sometimes make theirs available (I know the Dutch National Archives do). You can train the model and/or HTR the data with software like Transcribus or Kraken (open source).