CIS-A2K/Events/Bangalore/Digitization workshop 18 August 2013

Wikimedia India in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society is organising a workshop on "Digitization of books for Indic language WikiSource" on 18th August 2013, Sunday at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore at 2:30 pm. This workshop is going to be conducted by Malayalam Wikimedian Viswanathan Prabhakaran. Anyone interested in learning about the process of digitising old manuscripts, books and creating text based documents could join this workshop. Please log in and register below to take part in this event.

Time and Venue

2:30 - 5:30 pm, 18th August 2013 (Sunday)
Centre for Internet and Society, 194 2nd C Cros]
Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore 560071, India
(See location on Open Street Map and Google map)

Interested participants

Media coverage

Twitter and Facebook

Twitter: Tweet/Search with hashtag #wikidigitization
RSVP on Facebook event page

Report

(You too can correct and add to this section)
The workshop was meant as a DIY digitization without having to invest in a scanner and to use a simple digital camera for effective digitization of books and documents.

The following were covered during the Workshop by Viswaprabha, who mainly led this workshop, along with Subhashish (who was trained by Viswaprabha beforehand) and Shiju Alex:

Best practices in capturing images using a camera and tripod through demonstration
intro to types of scanners
how to hold books and the need to treat old books with respect; (very critical)
discussion on image formats and some basic comparison (i.e. djvu, PDF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF)
Introduction and practical use of SM Tether (using Nikon dSLR) in capturing images;
Practical demonstration of using Scan Tailor (a Free Software) in post-processing of scanned pages. Splitting, Deskewing, Rearranging borders, De-speckling of scanned pages
some basic discussion on Copyright and introduction to Wiki Source;
importance of online archival resources (DLI, DSAL, Archive.org, etc) and when to do or not to redo scanning of books (i.e. image resolution) that are already available in scanned format;
OCR and Indian languages.

Basically the workshop focused on how an 'ordinary' Wikimedian without access to high tech infrastructure can effectively undertake digitization of old books (especially in Indian languages) in a collaborative manner and use Wiki Source to openly share this knowledge.

This was an impromptu workshop that was suddenly decided because of the availability of Viswaprabha (WMIN EC member), who was in Bangalore for WMIN EC meetings. It was also conceptualized as an Alpha stage presentation and meant to be improved further. All the participants were asked to better the presentation, in true Wiki style, Viswa made all the participants also the authors. Such similar 'small-scale' workshops can potentially empower interested Wikimedians and can create a decentralized, effective, need-based collaborative digitization of books (our cultural heritage), especially in Indian languages. The workshop was collaboratively organized by WMIN and CIS-A2K and no expenditure other than coffee and snacks was incurred.

Action Points

(You too can add to this section)
Going forward it wold be useful to further improve this presentation collaboratively, preferably by practice than by discourse. Also to train atleast 3-4 Wikimedians from each language community across India, who can further impart this knowledge to others.

Photos

Search Commons category for photos and videos. Please add photos you click in this workshop in the same category.

Participants of the workshop
Viswanathan presenting about digitization techniques