A Meeting of Interests

Despite our expectations, the Holy Spirit Research Center has few handwritten manuscripts in its possession. Much of its material is comprised of old articles, magazines, and typeset research/publications. Though these do not need to be transcribed from being handwritten to searchable, digital text—which was our original intent in developing this technology—the nonetheless expressed an interest in the idea of converting the texts they do possess to being both digital and searchable. The Head of the research center expressed a desire to begin digitizing the texts they possess en masse via a device released by Snapster. This device uses two digital cameras to photograph the pages of an open-resting book—such that the binding will not be broken—and then uses the Snapster technology we intend to use to make organized PDF files of the book. This, however, does not convert the digitized texts to being searchable, which has become an information-age necessity to facilitate and hasten research. Here Dr. Lang and I intercepted interests with the Holy Spirit Research Center: we can use crowdsourcing technology to take digitized texts—and still if necessary handwritten texts—and convert them to searchable texts. This will begin with some texts that are largely unreadable by standard OCR technology: a compilation of some of the original Azusa Street movement articles. This will be the first step in our progress to producing a nonprofit transcription method to local and eventually national libraries.