CAPTCHAs work?for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts
Archivists are trying to digitize many old and distorted texts
and frequently …  Over the course of history, humanity has
suffered some horrifying damage to our collective cultural
legacy in the form of books and other text lost to accident or
neglect. The digitalization of text holds out the promise of
permanently preserving the written word in an archive that can
be distributed widely and kept safe from accidental damage. This
presents archivists with a challenge: the works that are most in
need of preservation are likely to already be damaged or
distorted, making the use of automated scanning and text
processing less likely to succeed. Researchers are now reporting
on a successful way to identify the words that computers can't
handle: turn them into CAPTCHAs, and get people to do the work.
For those who haven't heard the term, CAPTCHA stands for
Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and
Humans Apart. In practical terms, a CA