Posted on 02/18/2006 9:38:16 AM PST by JerseyHighlander
History buffs can search George Washington's manuscripts online today for terms such as 'revolution', but only thanks to the tireless workers who transcribed the hand-written documents into digital form.
Soon, many other hand-written historical documents could be made available for the public to search - and through considerably less effort - if a research project funded by Google and being executed by three universities works out as planned.
The project, announced by DCU (Dublin City University) yesterday, started on a whim. DCU professor Alan Smeaton has been working on technology that can recognise objects that appear in videos. His technology can detect an object, such as a car or an airplane, in the frame of a video, then extract the image to compare it to a database of images to identify it or enable it to be searched.
Smeaton and his colleagues decided to find out if their shape-matching technology could be used to identify words, so they tried it out on the archive of former US President George Washington, which consists of 304,000 digital images and is available on the Library of Congress website. It worked well, Smeaton said.
Smeaton decided to use George Washington's archive because it includes hand written documents that have been transcribed. That meant that he could compare the results from his technology with the results from the current search system.
He had been talking to people he knows who work at Google in Dublin about the video-matching technology, and happened to mention the George Washington manuscript trial. "They were interested so we did some more experiments and showed them the results and they decided to fund a project," he said.
Smeaton wouldn't say how much funding Google has committed but said it will cover a year's worth of work by three or four researchers at DCU, as well as the same number of researchers each at the University of Buffalo and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The goal of the project is to demonstrate that the technique is workable and scalable, Smeaton said. If so, Google can decide to employ the technology. The researchers are not locked into making the technology available only to Google, however, Smeaton said. They plan to publish their findings as scientific research.
Ironically, it's easier to apply the technology to some manuscripts that are much older than Washington's. DCU is also involved in a project with the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies which is digitising manuscripts, the oldest of which dates back to the twelfth century, written in Irish. Those documents, beautifully and ornately designed by monks, are actually much easier to develop a search mechanism for, Smeaton said. "The monks were laboriously toiling over this and using great consistency across entire manuscripts," he said. "George Washington wouldn't be."
Google has also been at work scanning books from large libraries in an effort to make the contents searchable. The project, Google Book Search, has come under fire from some authors who are unhappy that Google is including books still protected by copyright without expressly gaining permission from the authors. Using the new shape-matching technology to make hand written manuscripts searchable is unlikely to meet with similar criticism, since the documents are historical and wouldn’t be protected by copyright.
Thought this might be good for GGG.
I wonder if they will exclude the Federalist Papers and other documents that don't match their liberal/socialist agenda?
I'm waiting for sandy berger to open up his web site of interesting documents.
Doogle
When I first read this and saw DCU it scared me , I thought they were referring to the University of the District of Columbia. Nobody ever learned anything there .
Their new "France in America" site is awesome.
Dogpile searches Google, so you're still giving them a hit.
To avoid giving google any tracking information use scroogle:
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
I wonder if they have thought to apply this technology to in situ recording, pattern recognition and translation of glyphs.
This might have some interesting military applications in remote sensing and robotics.
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Thanks for the condiseration. Ping me when they get 'prehistory.'
At last. Maybe now Dan Rather can find that elusive TANG memo.
Thanks for the ping, SunkenCiv. Will just add this one as a reference.
BTW, I used Google's book seach last week. Great stuff....could do with some improvements in functionality though.
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