Folium: Crowdsourcing Could Help Deaf People Subtitle Their Everyday Life via Gizmodo
Folium: Crowdsourcing Could Help Deaf People Subtitle Their Everyday Life via Gizmodo
Image by Flickr User dno1967b under Creative Commons.
Folium: Crowdsourcing Could Help Deaf People Subtitle Their Everyday Life via Gizmodo
First of all, shout out to the University of Rochester! It’s good to see local research reach the global stage. It’s also a reminder that big things can happen anywhere. The University of Rochester is a great school, and it’s reasonably accessible to many students. World-changing research doesn’t need to come from the ivy-league in order to be important.
Second, we’re using a few new (almost infant) technologies in order to make this work. So, bravo to those who are taking these new ideas and are pushing them as far as they possibly can go! I have a quote in my office regarding the fact that what you create may not be as important as what you can do with it.
When TV shows are captioned, either scripts or audio are fed to professional stenographers who type things out to the best of their ability (hence why science and sci-fi shows will often have glaring errors in transcription).
However, researchers at the U of R wanted more. It’s easy to caption broadcast media, but what would it take to caption real life?
Captioning
Through the marriage of smart phones, live data streaming, crowdsourcing servers, and software powerful enough to make it all work, they’ve been able to create an “app” for real live conversation captioning. Real life can now be transcribed in real time!
This time I’ll skip the technological breakdown and instead focus on the conditions needed to bring this work to pass.
The question “what if?” is a powerful thing, and drives every aspect of the creative process. We need to make sure to balance all aspects of learning in order to make innovation possible for anyone, studying any field. This is again a post about the awareness of challenges in all interests and all fields of study. The symbiosis of languages and technology needs the best of both worlds in order to make innovation happen!
Crowdsourcing represents the best of all worlds, technology uniting with raw people-power in order to make things work. And we need those people to be literate in all forms of communication in order to keep this movement progressing.
Have you ever participated in “crowdsourcing” before? What did you do? Let us know in the comments below!
