Domestic Worker Organizing

This morning I had a conversation with a very cool domestic worker organizer from CASA de Maryland.

You can hear her talking about her work and the formation of a National Domestic Worker Alliance here:



(Thanks to the Internet Archive!)

Brewster Kahle 1, FBI 0

Rock on, Brewster Kahle:

Online librarian from S.F. wins his fight with the FBI

"Brewster Kahle, who runs an online library in San Francisco, was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications with one of his patrons as part of an investigation of 'international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.' ...

"He was allowed to speak publicly Wednesday under a rare settlement in which the FBI agreed to withdraw its letter and lift the gag order."

stop spam. read books.

I just discovered something so cool I had to put off homework a little while longer and blog about it. I was reading the excellent blog learning.now ("At the crossroads of Internet culture & education with host Andy Carvin"), and I noticed at the bottom of the entry in the space for comments, it required the commenter to type two obscured words, to make sure only real people could comment.

The first thing that struck me was that it asked for two words, instead of the standard one. The second thing I noticed was that there is an audio alternative for people who are visually impaired. This is fantastic. Then I noticed "stop spam. read books," and I was very intrigued. I went to the reCAPTCHA website and learned more.

It turns out they work with book digitization projects like the Internet Archive, and when you type in the distorted word, you are reading a word that a computer could not recognize with OCR (I guess the computer knows when it's not reading a word right). They put one word they already know and one they don't, so if you get one right they know you probably got the other one right. They give the same word image to multiple people to get a higher accuracy rate.

So, for example, in the image above, they might already know that the first word is "Germantown," but their OCR software couldn't read the second word, "were." When I type in "Germantown were," I am helping the Internet Archive turn scanned images of a book page into digital text. Awesome. It looks like you can add it to your WordPress blog, among others, but I didn't see a way to attach it to Blogger.

Brewster Kahle at USF

Brewster Kahle gave an excellent talk at USF last Thursday as part of the Davies Forum. His mission is universal access to all knowledge: he wants to create a library like the (former) library of Alexandria, but digitized and online. He showed us, medium by medium, that this it is doable and not crazy to think we can digitize all texts (in the broad sense). The Internet Archive is that library, which stores hundreds of thousands of digitized books (and other written texts), audio files, moving images, web pages, and software. He successfully convinced me that it is possible, but I still don't know if open content (which the Internet Archive promotes) can beat Google (which uses proprietary formats).

I am excited about all the Old Time Radio files they have. I love OTR. It's engaging on an entertainment level and fascinating on a historical level. Lots of cigarettes and war and blatant sexism. The mysteries are the best.

But back to the talk, he answered the question I posed in an earlier blog post (about how easily digital media can be erased) without me even having to ask it. They back up all their stuff on servers far far away (in Alexandria!), so when a giant earthquake puts San Francisco underwater, the Internet Archive will still exist. Excellent.