Special Issue 5: OuNuPo, Ouvroir de Numérisation Potentielle

Project Description

Main partner: WORM (WORM's Pirate Bay to be precise)

Special guests: Manetta Berends and Cristina Cochior (Algolit group)

The outcome of the special issue will be the following things:

2 book scanners (one to stay at XPUB, one to stay at WORM)
one unique (as in unique copy) reader in the form of an artist's book.

The reader will be a collection of texts curated by students and staff on the topic of book scanner, text mobility, constraint writing, algorithmic literature, and I also hope the culture and politics of OCR, text analysis, AI in the context of text processing and generation.

a collection of different software back-ends for the book scanner, so

as to reconfigure its functionality, ie you might scan a book, and get a pdf, the content of which has been manipulated in poetical or critical way, or you could also get something else entirely, a sound file, an collection of images, etc.

a gigantic collection of files produced by combining the reader as

input source into the scanner making use of the plethora of different back-ends. IMPORTANT: the reader will never exist as a typical digital alter-ego of the analog original but only through a multitude of different digital interpretations.

an evening launch at WORM with presentation of the reader, back-ends,

results, etc.

Sessions

09.01.2018 Intro to the 'Feminist Reader' pad
10.01.2018 The Alphabet as Software - R&W
15.01.2018 Optical character recognition - pad
17.01.2018 Python and N+7 - pad
18.01.2018 OuLi/NuPo, natural language processing - pad

Independent Research

week 2

Look into your assigned topic, try, test, and on a wiki page write a recipe/report/tutorial based on your experiments and research. Andre Castro (talk) 20:01, 15 January 2018 (CET)

Zalan: page segmentation; image detection
Alex: Web ocr implementation
Angeliki + Alice: training Tesseract to detect new font; Alice image training (incomplete)
Tash: retraining Tesseract to misinterpret text (hidding messages in plain-sight - Steganography )
Joca: image manipulation to optimize OCR

Links/References/Reading List

Archivist Quill Book Scanner (Base Kit)

Klijn, Edwin. 2008. ‘The Current State-of-Art in Newspaper Digitization: A Market Perspective’. D-Lib Magazine 14 (1/2). https://doi.org/10.1045/january2008-klijn.

DIY Book Scanner forum: Hardware & building

Planning Overview

weeks 2,3,4, 5: January

@Steve and Delphine: develop the reader = select texts in Jan and edit and work on form in Feb. documentation on the wiki steve writing and notation
@Andre: OCR
@Michael
@ Aymeric
@ Cristina&Manetta

weeks 6,7,8,9: February

week 6: delivery of the scanner parts
weeks 7, 8: @Aymeric + Frederic/ Worm: scanner assemblage

Weeks 10,11,12,13: March

week 11,12: 2nd and 3rd week of March
- testing scanner in
9-17 March barcode Dj at Worm http://kubriel.servus.at/index.php?s=barcodedjsfrom Hungarian artists group that produce bar code DJ sets ... could they be invited to perform with the bookscanner.
15-16 March Algoliterary Encounters at VARIA with WS on the 16th (could be a good moment to beta the platform / test present in public)

week 13: 4th week of March

28 March (wed) - Launch
29 March (thu) - Assessment