I don't think I would put a typist in a "superior" category to OCR. Just a different category. For instance, OCR will often make errors like this: Tbe quich brown fox jumps ovcr the lazy dcg. (This is an extreme, but you get the idea). A human typist would make errors like this: Th equick broen fox jumpa over the lazydog. Because DP has dealth with OCR "scannos" quite a bit, software has been developed the can "pre-process" OCR text and clean up the most common scanno problems. The OCR would come through MUCH cleaner by the time the first human viewed in at DP. Plus, human attention will waver eventually on an entire book. The computer has no attention span, so it works just as well one page 1000 as it did on page 1. That being said, no one will discourage you from a type in project. If that is what you like, then by all means go for it. Have fun! Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bill Landis" <bill.landis@gmail.com>
Greetings!
I'm new to Project Gutenberg, but for the moment at least mildly excited about the possibility of helping out. As one of the FAQs suggest, I will probably start out with a bit of "distributed proofreading" over at http://www.pgdp.net
Looking forward to the possibility of actually producing texts, I'm curious about the pros and cons of scanning vs typing. My impression is that scanning offers the relatively significant bonus of at least potentially having the scanned images available along with the text for proofreading and/or posterity. Scanning involves the page flipping or cutting and aligning or sheetfeeding plus all the technical wrangling involved in OCR compared to the, well, typing involved in typing. I'm guessing a decent typist is still superior to OCR from the proofreading point of view.
Is my initial preference for typing (partially as an excuse to see how high I can push my typing speed ;) enough of a reason to ignore the "added value" of having scanned pages available?
Ok, so these are largely rhetorical questions I suppose, but I'd love to hear any opinions and feedback (especially on issues I seem to have overlooked and likely haven't even imagined).
Thanks.
--Bill Landis bill.landis@gmail.com _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d