Indexing idea: handwriting samples per writer

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rmrichesjr
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#11

Post by rmrichesjr »

Using CAPTCHA would fail to gain much/most of the purpose for which I proposed the idea.

The idea was to identify representative samples of each letter for a given writer by examining at least one full page written by that writer. The context provided by a full page (or multiple pages) is often needed to correctly identify how the writer made letters.

For example, on a page I recently saw of 1850 census, about 90% of the entries in the race column looked like they might have been 'M' or 'W'. It was only after very careful comparison with the rest of the page that it was clear that all the mystery characters in the race column were unmistakenly identical to all the 'M' characters in the gender column and unmistakenly very different from the 'W' characters in the name column.

My original idea was to distill the context-derived information about how a given writer makes the letters so that indexers could look at a block of sample characters instead of having to hunt around the page. I think it would save much more time than it would cost.
fraserredmond
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#12

Post by fraserredmond »

mkmurray wrote:Cool idea. Yet how does the CAPTCHA know you entered the correct answer? Usually there is a correct answer to the CAPTCHA in order to prevent automated bots from being able to login and/or register.
It uses a process of verification similar to the indexing - show the word to more than one person.

This is actually called a reCaptcha, read more here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/ ... _stop.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
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mkmurray
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#13

Post by mkmurray »

redzarf wrote:It uses a process of verification similar to the indexing - show the word to more than one person.

This is actually called a reCaptcha, read more here:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/ ... _stop.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
Oh, cool...that's what I was wondering about...you just have to show two words, one that's been thorougly tested before.
russellhltn
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#14

Post by russellhltn »

I can see this working for typewritten text, but I don't think it would work very well for handwritten as you frequently need to see a bigger sample to understand it.

The second problem is what would you use this on? What would attract enough visits to be productive and that the users would tolerate the work load? If this was put on a church website, the loss in traffic may be more damaging then what's gained.
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thedqs
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#15

Post by thedqs »

RussellHltn wrote:The second problem is what would you use this on? What would attract enough visits to be productive and that the users would tolerate the work load? If this was put on a church website, the loss in traffic may be more damaging then what's gained.

Most people are getting used to the CAPTCHAs btu I have to agree that putting two sometimes very difficult CAPTCHAs onto a page would be a site killer, I would think that just getting people to sign up for extraction and then having them contribute to a database of writing samples would be more effective and most likely more productive. It was a cool and interesting idea though.
- David
russellhltn
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#16

Post by russellhltn »

thedqs wrote:It was a cool and interesting idea though.
True. In some situations it would work, I just can't think of any church ones.
cannona-p40
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#17

Post by cannona-p40 »

I don't mean to highjack this thread, but speaking of captchas, I posted an article on http://www.northtemple.com today about captchas and accessibility. I am interested in any feedback or ideas folks might have.

This article came about because I wrote a proof of concept application to generate audio captchas, and I learned a lot in the process, so thought I'd share. However, I believe there is a lot more improvement that can be made, and probably even a much better way to create an accessible captcha.

Since there is no comment facilities on the blog yet, you might reply to me on this site, though you should probably start a new thread.

Thanks.

Aaron
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