Open Source OCR

Posted on 2007-04-11 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in Slashdot and Google Code updates:

Google has just announced work on OCRopus, which it says it hopes will ‘advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies.’ OCRopus will be available under the Apache 2.0 License. Obviously, there may be search and image search implications from OCRopus. ‘The goal of the project is to advance the state of the art in optical character recognition and related technologies, and to deliver a high quality OCR system suitable for document conversions, electronic libraries, vision impaired users, historical document analysis, and general desktop use. In addition, we are structuring the system in such a way that it will be easy to reuse by other researchers in the field.’

Interestingly:

The project is expected to run for three years and support three Ph.D. students or postdocs. We are announcing a technology preview release of the software under the Apache license (English-only, combining the Tesseract character recognizer with IUPR layout analysis and language modeling tools), with additional recognizers and functionality in future releases.

It would be interesting to learn how this application compares in accuracy and power with commercial OCR systems (which have apparently gotten much better since the days when I used to get very frustrated with Omnipage and the like).

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Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo support GeoRSS

Posted on 2007-04-06 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in Slashdot:

This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!’s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth’s file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website:

‘As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities.’

Posted in General, Standards | Leave a comment

CFP: Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts 2007

Posted on 2007-04-05 by Gabriel Bodard

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

doing digital: using digital resources in the arts and humanities

DRHA07 : Dartington College of Art : 9-12 September 2007

Bringing together creators, practitioners, users, distributors, and custodians of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities

…

The Programme Committee for DRHA07 is now soliciting imaginative and provocative contributions for the conference addressing such topics as:

  • the benefits and the challenges of using digital resources in creative work, in teaching and learning, and in scholarship;
  • the challenges and opportunities associated with scale and sustainability in the digital arena;
  • new insights and new forms of expression arising from the integration of digital resources in the arts, humanities, and sciences;
  • social and political issues surrounding digital resource provision in the context of global ICT developments;
  • the implications of “born-digital” resources for curators, consumers, and performers;
  • training methods and best practice for digital arts and humanities practitioners.

…

Timetable: Proposals are now invited for academic papers, themed panel sessions and reports of work in progress.Your proposal should be no smaller than 500 words and no longer than 2000; closing date for proposals is May 2nd 2007. All proposals will be reviewed by an independent panel of reviewers, and notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 13th June 2007. All accepted proposals will be included in the Conference preprint volume, and will also be considered for a post-conference publication.

…

Further information: The conference web site at https://www.dartington.ac.uk/drha07/ will be regularly updated, and includes full details of the procedure for submitting proposals, the programme, and registration information.

Posted in Call for papers, Conferences | Leave a comment

ImaNote – Image and Map Annotation Notebook

Posted on 2007-04-04 by smahony

This looks a useful tool. Anyone tried it? Claims to allow annotation and links to be added to images with RSS to keep track of everything.

Following text copied from Humanist:

We are really happy to announce the release of ImaNote 1.0 version.

ImaNote – (Image and Map Annotation Notebook) is a web-based multi-user tool that allows you, and your friends, to display a high-resolution image or a collection of images online and add annotations and links to them. You simply mark an area on an image (e.g. a map) and write an annotation related to the point.

You can keep track of the annotations using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or link to them from your own blog/web site/email. The links lead right to the points in the image.

The user management features include resetting lost passwords and account email verification. Through the group management features you can create communities that share images and publish annotations.

ImaNote is Open Source and Free Software released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).

ImaNote is a Zope product, written in Python, with a javascript-enhanced interface. Zope and ImaNote run on almost all Operating Systems (GNU/Linux, MacOS X, *BSD, etc.) and Microsoft Windows. It currently works with most modern browsers including Mozilla Firefox, IE7 and Opera.

Imanote was developed as a collaboration between the Systems of Representation and the Learning Environments research groups of the Media Lab at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, Finland.

For more information go to https://imanote.uiah.fi

Posted in General, Open Source, Tools | 4 Comments

Why Blogs should use Creative Commons

Posted on 2007-03-29 by Gabriel Bodard

An interesting discussion on the iCommons blog. Excerpt:

If your intention, as a blogger, is to have your content and your thoughts distributed as widely as possible, then reserving all your rights to your content is counterproductive. A more effective way of distributing your content and still retaining some control over how your content is distributed is using Creative Commons licenses.

This does, as the author argues, remove the need to walk the fine “Fair Use” line when another blogger wants to reproduce, quote from, and engage with your text. It’s an argument worth reading. I suppose that if your blog consists in large part of quotations from other sources there is less of an obvious advantage in this, as your quotations are obviously exempt from the (cc) licence. I should speak to my co-editors both here and over at CE about doing this.

Posted in Open Source | 1 Comment

Your data is the next big battle

Posted on 2007-03-28 by Tom Elliott

The trendspotters are saying (rhetorically) “Open Source is dead” and “Open data matters more than Open Source.” What’s clearly meant is: “open data formats matter more …”

Open access — over which critical battles important to readers of this blog continue to rage — is completely overlooked.

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e-Science in the Arts and Humanities

Posted on 2007-03-28 by Gabriel Bodard
A series of lectures organised by the (UK) Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre:
AHeSSC is coordinating a ‘Theme’ entitled ‘e-Science in the Arts and Humanities’ at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh. For more details click here.

The first phase of the theme’s activities will be a lecture series that will run from April to July 2007. A full programme for these is now available on the e-Science Institute wiki. The lectures are free and open to all (although registration will be required), and will be webcast. More details webcasting and registration will be posted here shortly.

This Theme aims to explore the new challenges for research in the Arts and Humanities, and to define the new research agenda that is made possible by e-Science technology. It will encourage innovation and the pushing back of intellectual boundaries, while seeking to be accessible to and inclusive of those researchers who are not currently engaged in this agenda. The Theme will consider the international context of UK research, and will identify the strategic considerations for researchers, students and funding agencies as this agenda is taken forward.

We will run a series of lectures, workshops and training activities that will present several examples of the advanced grid-based research that is being carried out by, for example, historians, linguists, performers, classicists, art historians and archaeologists. In September there will be an International Expert Seminar to examine aspects of funding and strategy.

(Declaration of interest: I’m speaking at one of these events in June, on Open Source Critical Editions.)
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Join the Wikipedia Debate

Posted on 2007-03-28 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen at Academic Commons:

This coming Thursday (29 March 2007), the first Language Lab Unleashed! of the spring will feature Don Wyatt (chair of the Department of History at Middlebury College), Elizabeth Colantoni (Professor of Classics at Oberlin College), Laura Blankenship (Senior Instructional Technologist at Bryn Mawr), and Bryan Alexander (Director of Research at NITLE) for a discussion on the potential uses and abuses of Wikipedia in the educational arena.

The show will begin promptly at 8pm … for details on how to join the  live conversation, please visit:
https://www.languagelabunleashed.com

That time’s 20:00 EST = 01:00 UTC. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it…

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Citizendium debuts

Posted on 2007-03-27 by scaife

from the CHE:

Citizendium Starts With a Little Knowledge

Citizendium, the peer-reviewed “progressive fork” of Wikipedia (The Chronicle, October 18, 2006), has opened for business. The site unveiled its public face on Sunday and as of this afternoon boasts more than 1,100 articles — a far cry from the more than 1.6 million entries in Wikipedia’s English version, but a decent start.

So far the new encyclopedia has a fairly random smattering of material: articles on topics relevant to scholars, like Jacques Derrida and the First Punic War, mingle with puzzling entries on the Bruneian dollar and Don MacLean (the basketball player, not the songwriter responsible for “Vincent.”) And while some pieces — like an essay on autism — seem to be well fleshed out, others — like a write-up on dachshunds — are mere placeholders for more-thorough articles.

None of this is meant as criticism. In fact, it’s fascinating to watch an encyclopedia start from the ground up. It will be worth watching to see whether the encyclopedia’s embrace of soft hierarchy — unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium requires contributors to identify themselves, and it lets a panel of scholars make final decisions on edits — slows its growth. –Brock Read

The entry on the Greek alphabet looks substantial as well.

Posted in General, Open Source, Publications | Leave a comment

The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

Posted on 2007-03-27 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen at Academic Commons:

The folks at the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory aka HASTAC (https://hastac.org) have posted a draft of a paper entitled “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.”  The paper will evolve through online collaboration and conversations, and will be published in its final form as part of the Occasional Paper Series on Digital Media and Learning sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

It is framed by the following proposition:
“We are faced today by a pressing question: How do institutions–social, civic, educational–transform in response to and in order to promote new kinds of learning in the information age?”

This provocative and difficult question–What does a peer-to-peer learning institution look like and how does it differ from what we understand our traditional learning institutions to be?–is only part of what makes this project exciting. It is also notable for its delivery platform, a terrific and soon-to-be-released WordPress blogging plugin (code name Comment Press) that the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book have developed, and that allows for context-specific commenting at multiple levels.

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Conference: Historic Environment Information Resources Network

Posted on 2007-03-26 by Gabriel Bodard

Data Sans Frontières: web portals and the historic environment

25 May 2007: The British Museum, London

Organised by the Historic Environment Information Resources Network (HEIRNET) and supported by the AHRC ICT Methods Network and the British Museum, this one-day conference takes a comprehensive look at exciting new opportunities for disseminating and integrating historic environment data using portal technologies and Web 2.0 approaches. Bringing together speakers from national organisations, national and local government and academia, options for cooperation at both national and international levels will be explored.

The aims of the conference are:

  • To raise awareness of current developments in the online dissemination of Historic Environment Data
  • To set developments in the historic environment sector in a wider national and European information context
  • To raise awareness of current portal and interoperability technologies
  • To create a vision for a way forward for joined up UK historic environment information provision

This conference should be of interest to heritage professionals, researchers and managers from all sectors.

The conference costs £12 and a full programme and online registration facilities are available at https://www.britarch.ac.uk/HEIRNET/ There may be tickets available on the day, but space is limited so please register as soon as possible.

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Wikipedia editing as teaching tool

Posted on 2007-03-25 by Gabriel Bodard

A wonderful suggestion in a comment on Cathy Davidson’s letter (that Tom blogged here a few days ago):

Thanks for your great column. I’ve used the “stubs” feature of Wikipedia to generate a list of 120 topics relating to ancient Roman civilization that need full articles. Then I’m requiring the 120 students in my upcoming Roman Civilization class to each write one article. This will hopefully teach them how to do original research in the library on obscure, narrowly focused topics and then create something of lasting value to others. The students will also be required to each review three of their fellow students’ articles in order to learn about the collaborative editing process. I’m a little nervous about its success, but I’m hoping to be part of the solution to the issues raised by Wikipedia, rather than contributing to the problems.

I’ve heard suggestions of this kind before, but this is one of the coolest implementations of it I’ve come across recently. This makes me wish once again that I was teaching a large class this year so I could do something similar. Kudos to JuliaFelix; please let us know how the experiment works.

Posted in Open Source, Teaching | 3 Comments

Tools and Methods for the Digital Historian

Posted on 2007-03-25 by Gabriel Bodard

Posted by the Methods Network:

The AHRC ICT Methods Network, a UK initiative for the exchange and dissemination of expertise in the use of ICT for arts and humanities research, has just launched an online community forum on ‘digital’ history:

‘Tools and Methods for the Digital Historian’

(https://www.digital-historian.net) is the first of a set of integrated online communities related to Methods Network activities and resources and is a forum for open discussion of all issues relating to digital history. In particular we invite comments on a working paper by Neil Grindley (Methods Network) entitled ‘Tools and Methods for Historical Research’ which we hope will become the basis of a community resource. We are keen on getting more input and would very much like to include your feedback in future versions of the paper.

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Wikis and Blogs in Education

Posted on 2007-03-25 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in the Creative Commons Feed:

“The wiki is the center of my classroom”

That’s a quote from Wikis and Blogs in Education, one of three educational remixes from students of open content pioneer David Wiley.

The other two are Interviewing Basics and the Open Water Project, an excellent disaster preparedness video that probably everyone should watch.

Each project is licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and incorporates CC licensed and public domain audio, images, and video as well as original materials.

Wikis and Blogs in Education, potentially the most interesting site for readers of this forum is a site that combines text and video in an animated Flash and Javascript framework. It seems to run smoothely, but I don’t know if that would have implications for the free reuse of the material.

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MIT Faculty and Libraries Refuse DRM

Posted on 2007-03-21 by Gabriel Bodard

Seen in Slashdot, MIT LIbraries:

The MIT Libraries have canceled access to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ web-based database of technical papers, rejecting the SAE’s requirement that MIT accept the imposition of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology.

SAE’s DRM technology severely limits use of SAE papers and imposes unnecessary burdens on readers. With this technology, users must download a DRM plugin, Adobe’s “FileOpen,” in order to read SAE papers. This plugin limits use to on-screen viewing and making a single printed copy, and does not work on Linux or Unix platforms.

MIT faculty respond

“It’s a step backwards,” says Professor Wai Cheng, SAE fellow and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, who feels strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he has asked to be added to the agenda of the upcoming SAE Publication Board meeting in April, when he will address this topic.

It will be interesting to see how publishers respond as this sort of user-revolt escalates.

Posted in Open Source, Publications | Leave a comment