Data Dash Makes a Game of Saving Scientific Works

Posted in From the Library on December 4 2015, by Esther Jackson

Just when you thought purposeful gaming couldn’t get more exciting, the Biodiversity Heritage Library is swooping in with an event called Data Dash! (To learn more about the Purposeful Gaming project, check out this Plant Talk post from October.)

The BHL Data Dash seeks to amp up the competition of online gaming while providing valuable data correction for works shared through BHL. The BHL Blog says, “We’re enlisting the help of you, the BHL community, to help us correct one million words from BHL’s OCR output that we can then use as a training set to apply to the remaining BHL corpus of 320 million incorrect words.” OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows for the conversion of scanned documents (including PDFs) to readable data, or searchable text.

What does this mean for you, and how can you be involved? On Monday, December 7, the day will begin with a Beanstalk Sprint. Starting at 9 a.m. EST, users can work together to meet the Data Dash goal of one million words by playing the game Beanstalk and correcting as many words as possible within two days. Users must register in order to be eligible for prizes.

Join the Mertz Library staff on Monday, December 7, from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. for an hour of gaming in the Library. Can you type faster than your favorite librarian? Come on by to show off your skills, socialize, and give something back to BHL, the resource that gives us all so much.

Players will be updated via social media about their progress throughout the two days of competition. Besides the crowning glory of being a Beanstalk champion, winning players will see their names on the weekly leaderboard. The top three players when the Data Dash ends at midnight (11:59 p.m.) EST on Tuesday, December 8, will receive their choice of BHL swag—including a selection of notecards featuring beautiful illustrations from BHL books, bookmarks about both of BHL’s games (Beanstalk and Smorball), and Smorball trucker hats featuring the beloved home team, the Eugene Melonballers.

The IMLS-funded project, Purposeful gaming and BHL, will be coming to a close after the gaming keyboard reviews are done later this year. While the games will continue to be available online beyond 2015, the project’s objectives—to demonstrate whether or not digital games are a successful tool for analyzing and improving digital outputs from OCR—need to be met. This includes the collection of a substantial number of text corrections via gaming.

Let’s help BHL to dash to the finish line to meet the number of data corrections needed to help improve the discoverability of historic biodiversity literature.

Play a Game Grow a Beanstalk. Save a Book.