Traveling

The City of Twinsburg, Ohio by Dinara Mirtalipova

Last week, my sister and I drove from New Mexico to Vermont. During our long days in the car, we used a combination of guide books, maps, road signs and our smart phones to find out about the towns we were going through. One town in Ohio is called “Twinsburg” and described in our AAA guide as

Settled in 1817, Twinsburg was originally called Millsville. In 1819 two identical twin merchants from Connecticut gave land for a public square and funded a school in exchange for the town naming rights… Today Twinsburg is the site of the area’s largest annual gathering of twins.

This description led to a search for other twin gatherings and I stumbled across a website called They Travel and Draw, with mappish paeans to places all over the world. The one above is Dinara Mirtalopova’s rendition of Twinsburg.

L Letterpress Reviewed

lmachine.jpgTwo years ago, I wrote about L, “the Letterpress combo kit [that] contains everything you need to begin letterpress printing right away.” The machine hadn’t been released yet to craft stores so it wasn’t clear how it measured up to “real” letterpress. Now it’s out, and there’s review by a non-letterpress printer and another by a professional letterpress printer. The subtitle for the later review is “The L Letterpress can produce nice printing. No, really, it’s possible. Note: I didn’t say easy.” He’s got lots of advice and tips for using the machine and making it print well. There are lots of comments on both reviews from people with experience using the new machine. (There’s a third review here with a video showing how the machine works.)

Folded in Place

Folded in Place, John MannFolded in Place is a series of photographs by John Mann, who says

The images … provide precise photographic and mapped information while at the same time offering an abstraction of the landscape itself. The viewer is shown a landscape that is simultaneously understood and unknown, a landscape in which the map obtains a new geography of its own.

See more photos here.

Digitizing Old Books

reCaptchaMore and more, I’m having to type in extra info when filling out a form online. Most are a string of digits. But one project, reCAPTCHA, uses words. And not just any words — they use words that a computer has trouble recognizing (using Optical Character Recognition, or OCR) in old print editions of the New York Time and from Google Books. They say

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Another project, Transcribe Bentham is using the public to do a similar task, although with much less automation. They use “volunteer (who) transcribe previously unstudied and unpublished manuscripts from the Bentham Papers collection.”

I’ve added reCAPTCHA to several websites I maintain. You can find out about transcribing for the Transcribe Bentham here or read more about the project here.