reCAPTCHA: crowdsourcing at its most literary

If you've been anywhere near the internet in the past few years, you've almost certainly encountered your share of CAPTCHAs. They often look like this:
CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, and websites use them to ensure that spammers and the like can't automatically generate zillions of fake email addresses and whatnot. Typing in the correct letters proves you are, well, not a bot.

I was amazed to find out that two word CAPTCHAs like the one above are actually serving a higher purpose. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are, in fact, harnessing the power of internet users to digitize books!

The program, called reCAPTCHA, aims to improve the "literacy" of Optical Character Recognition software used to scan old books and turn the scans into text documents. Turns out ol' ORC isn't so good at reading old fonts. But you know who is? Humans, of course! reCAPTCHA will pair up a word the computer CAN read with one that it can't, and when it gets enough consensus from CAPTCHA-using internet citizens, it "solves the puzzle" of the unknown word. Too great.

Jeff Howe's article about crowdsourcing compares the practice with the exploitative principles of companies who outsource projects to underpaid workers in India or China. reCAPTCHA, however, does not exploit internet users so much as it allows them to unintentionally multitask, contributing to a greater cause as they make their way around the web. It is crowdsourcing at its best.