Beanstalk

Do you have a green thumb? Test your skills as the victor of vines by typing the words shown on the screen, and grow your beanstalk from a tiny tendril to massive cloudscraper in this calming, zen-like typing game. Beanstalk is a quick and easy browser game that asks players to type the word they are shown on the screen. By presenting players with words from books of libraries’ scanned digital collections, Beanstalk collects transcriptions that are sent back to the libraries that the words come from. The more words players type correctly, the faster the beanstalk grows, and the more contributions are made to libraries’ and museums’ collections. Get to the top of the “High Score” leaderboard by correctly transcribing the most words, and declare yourself the victor of vines! Beanstalk tackles a major challenge for digital libraries: full-text searching of digitized material is significantly hampered by poor output from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. When first scanned, the pages of digitized books and journals are merely image files, making the pages unsearchable and virtually unusable. While OCR converts page images to searchable, machine encoded text, historic literature is difficult for OCR to accurately render because of its tendency to have varying fonts, typesetting, and layouts. Beanstalk presents players with phrases from scanned pages from cultural heritage institutions. After much verification, the words players type are sent to the libraries that store the corresponding pages, allowing those pages to be searched and data mined and ultimately making historic literature more usable for institutions, scholars, educators, and the public. Play Beanstalk, save scanned books from digital oblivion. (Source: http://www.tiltfactor.org/game/beanstalk/)