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I spent years as a volunteer editor for Distributed Proofreaders, the proofreading/editing arm of Project Gutenberg. It's a lot of fun - you can pick your favorite type of stuff to edit like old scifi magazines (the ones from the turn of last century were my favorites), old technical journals, farmer's almanacs, elementary school primers, old cookbooks, just all sorts of neat stuff. You don't get the whole project, just a section, and you are not the only eyes that will be looking at it (I think we had 3 proofreading and 3 editing cycles). And you don't go in blind with "scifi 1920's" - in most cases the name of the writer and a more detailed description of the project are given.
Now that I think about it, it's time to install it on my new machine and get back at it!
If you want to help digitize books for Project Gutenberg, you can volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders, their partner site. Volunteers at DP have done a lot of the books in PG's catalog.
If you like Gutenberg and the books they provide, think about volunteering with distributed proofreaders. They're the heroes that transcribe, spellcheck and proofread all those books before they're released. There's always a backlog of books just waiting to be public domain.
You know how if you buy an amazon e-book, you often find sloppily ‘converted’ text like ‘sanne’ for ‘same'?
This is because OCRs (the software for scanning images and turning it into text for e-books) are not very intelligent, and often make mistakes.
Distributed Proofreaders shows you these converted texts alongside the original image, and asks volunteers to help proofread them for any mistakes in spelling, formatting, etc.
The end result of these proofread mistake-free e-books goes on Project Gutenberg (which should be familiar to most people), and is shared with the world! Trust me, you’re definitely doing future university students a favour.
The website is a bit difficult to navigate, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very fun and is a good way to read some books you normally wouldn’t touch.
If you don’t want to register but want to help out anyway, try smooth reading! This is a lot more straight forward, where you basically choose a text, read it like how you normally would, and note any mistakes that jump out. Super easy, and a good option if you’re just wanting to read without learning all the rules for proofreading.
tl;dr it’s a cool website and you should help out.
It all seems a bit complicated (trust me, it’s actually not that bad), so feel free to ask any questions you have!
I don't think that it's that unusual to not being able to read scripts that are older than 50 or 100 years.
For example I have books from my grandparents(austria, german) which basically nobody of the younger generation would be able to read, as it requires some time for getting used to it. Those letters were standard until about 1940.
http://www.pgdp.net/c/quiz/generic/images/Fraktur_alphabet.png
heh, you've got to be a member of distributed proofreaders, rite?
if not then you should sign up, you'd love it! it's the project which makes the ebooks for Gutenberg by going over the OCR scans page by page and fixing all the mistakes then formatting it properly - they've got a brilliant system for doing it which breaks it down page by page and an even better community full of fascinating people and great conversations. It's such an interesting insight into literature and the history of publishing but of course the best thing about it of course is that every page you do is a page of a book that's added to the digital archives and will remain their for the rest of history, that means for the entire rest of human history (minus and resets) every scholar, student or interested person will be able to read, search and share the ebook you helped create - and that really is a great feeling, knowing you're actually helping such a monumental project.
(you'll hear a lot about em dashes and similar semi-antiquated forms of grammar too...)
> Preservation.
If this is something any of you are interested in, see Project Gutenberg, its affiliate Distributed Proofreaders International and/or Distributed Proofreaders Canada, which last has more reasonable copyright restrictions than DPInternational.
EDIT: Oops, replied to the wrong comment. Oh, well.
yeah mundane tasks that require concentration are actually really good stress relief, i like proof reading for that calming sedative like effect it has on my brain - i really find i cen sleep better after a bit of proof reading.
Anyone interested should check out http://www.pgdp.net/c/ they're responsible for making most the ebooks on Gutenberg and without those two we'd never have all the great audio books at librivox... It's super easy to get involved and the work is portioned into single pages so that you can do as much or as little as you want.
This is great work, I used to do a little on Distributed Proofreaders, these do look very difficult to ocr but it would be very cool to have them search-and-ebook-able. Perhaps we could make a group for zines or something?
and now you can help give the gift of literature to everyone on the planet simply by spending a bit of time proof-reading OCR documents for project guttenberg, http://www.pgdp.net/c/
it's actually a lot of fun, if you like reading then you'll probably enjoy being involved in this.
>Site Concept
>Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.
>During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. This allows the text to be easily compared to the image, proofread, and sent back to the site. A second volunteer is then presented with the first volunteer's work and the same page image, verifies and corrects the work as necessary, and submits it back to the site. The book then similarly progresses through two formatting rounds using the same web interface.
>Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for 'smooth reading', and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.
Don't think of it as 'charity' work, think of it as doing an interesting job for a worthy organization, for zero salary. The key point is interesting -- you must have some interests now, build on them. Like the suggestion you foster animals from a shelter: ok, great, but it's a major commitment and you wouldn't want to start it if you didn't already like animals and enjoy keeping and training them. (Foster parenting is an even bigger commitment and harder job.) But there are literally thousands of good local museums and aid societies that need volunteer hours. Just a day a week at the local food bank, or regional history museum, or whatever, gets you out of the house, gives you new people to talk to, and a feeling of accomplishment.
If you'd rather work alone and online, you can do useful stuff for any of dozens of Citizen Science projects; my favorite is the collection of projects at Zooniverse. If you like books, consider Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
wiki and archive.org are really important charities, they're enabling literally billions of people to get access to educational, informational and cultural resources they'd otherwise never have been able to access - it's helping rich academics and uneducated peasants alike.
For those that don't know Archive,org is more than just the waybackwhen machine it's a huge repository of scanned texts, digitised images, videos and audio and it's all in the public domain. Most of the books on Gutenberg are created from books scanned and OCRed on Archive,org [then proofread and collated by the awesome people at distributed proofreaders, and you can be one - these groups need more than just money they need active participants...]
Internet Archive EIN: 943242767
Distributed Proofreaders Foundation EIN: 204682326
yes it does and it's brilliant!
And if anyone wants to help Gutenberg add more wonderful ebooks to their repository then they should sign up to http://www.pgdp.net/c/ and get involved in the proofreading project, it's easy to get started and can be really fascinating to be involved in -plus you're helping all the poor people in the world get access to literature! what could be better?!