Kestrell

Book scanning: it's not piracy, it's transformational

2012-10-11T20:05:01Z

Wow! I feel like I'm coming out of the transmedia closet. This is one more for the technopeasants (I have a t-shirt for that). Too bad Googlebooks is all inaccessible, but you can find many of the scanned texts from the university project at archive.org .
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121011/01250620675/court-book-scanning-is-obviously-fair-use.shtml

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Scanning a braille issue of Playboy

2011-08-18T15:21:41Z

Kes: Actually, this is more useful as a detailed description of the archive.org scanning process (1,000 pages an hour? I can't decide if I'm more envious or turned on--probably equal parts of both). Also, not only do braille Playboys not include a centerfold, they don't include advice columns, Playboy bunny interviews, or anything else that talks about sex. I know this because I used to read Playboy when I was learning braille in my mid-twenties.

http://blog.archive.org/2011/08/17/scanning-a-braille-playboy/

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How captcha helps to decipher old texts

2011-03-30T12:12:40Z

Of course, the irony of this is that, in my experience, both captcha and Googlebooks are inaccessible, but it's still a cool project
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Font alphabet video

2011-01-12T15:19:39Z

Daily Bits had a link to this video which shows off a different font style for each letter of the alphabet
http://www.dailybits.com/a-is-for-arial-b-is-for-baskerville
and as someone who does a lot of scanning of print material, I'm interested in which fonts are most likely to scan well versus the ones which will be a pain to scan and recognize.
WebAim has this article on font accessibility
http://webaim.org/techniques/fonts/
but I'm also interested in which fonts folks think have the cleanest lines. I've been saving scanned materials in Times New Roman, but would Verdana be a better choice?

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