iDigBio Blitz at iConference 2013!

iDigBio Blitz at iConference 2013

February 12-15th, Forth Worth, Texas

 

The iDigBio Augmenting Optical Recognition Working Group (AOCR wg) is headed to iConference 2013 in Fort Worth, Texas. 

What is iConference?

iConference is a yearly conference for the iSchools (Information Science Schools) community. iSchools.org states that,  

 "These schools, colleges, and departments have been newly created or are evolving from programs formerly focused on specific tracks such as information technology, library science, informatics, information science, and more… together they share a fundamental interest in the relationships between information, people, and technology."

iConference2013 Program Schedule

The iDigBio Blitz:

In an ambitious week-long blitz, the AOCR Working Group will be participating in four conference sessions. Our goal is to introduce the Information Science community to the natural history museum digitization initiatives and our technical challenges. The AOCR Working Group would like to collaborate with Information Science community and benefit from their digitization expertise, experience and research knowledge base. 

Our iConference 2013 participation includes:

Poster: Improving the Character of Optical Character Recognition (OCR): iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group Seeks Collaborators and Strategies to Improve OCR Output and Parsing of OCR Output for Faster, More Efficient, Cheaper Natural History Collections Specimen Label Digitization

Notes (short paper): Augmenting Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Improved Digitization -- Strategies to Access Scientific Data in Natural History Collections.

Panel Workshop: Help iDigBio Reveal Hidden Data: iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group Needs You!

Our workshop panelists are eager to introduce the iSchools community to our areas of interest, including image segmentation, autocorrection of typographical errors, semantic autocorrection, autonormalization, automated text segmentation, generating consensus records, and user interfaces for these tasks. We'll be presenting overall digitization issues and scope as well as specific examples of challenges where outside expertise may be key. We anticipate some ideas generated in breakouts for this session may be implemented at the iDigBio Hackathon, which is being held concurrently (February 13 and 14) at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT). 

Alternative Event: Help iDigBio Reveal Hidden Data: iDigBio Augmenting OCR Working Group Needs You! (Part II)

During the iConference, the AOCR Working Group will take time out to participate in the iDigBio Hackathon. After the Hackathon, we will return to the iConference to update the iSchools community with the outcomes from the Hackathon!

For more details, see the iConference AOCR Working Group Wiki at http://tinyurl.com/aocriConference2013 or contact any member of the AOCR working group.

Stay tuned via Twitter, Facebook or theiDigbio blog or please join us at the Hackathon via AdobeConnect at http://idigbio.adobeconnect.com/augmentocr on Wednesday, February 13th at 9a.m.