If I’m going to train an algorithm to read my weird & awful writing, I’m going to need a decent-sized training set to work with. And since one of the main things I want to do with it is to blog “by hand” it makes sense to focus on that type of material for training. In other words, I need to write out a bunch of blog posts on paper, scan them and transcribe them as ground truth.
I wrote the following text on my tablet with a stylus, which was an interesting experience: So, thinking about ways to make writing fun again, what if I were to write some of them by hand? I mean I have a tablet with a pretty nice stylus, so maybe handwriting recognition could work. One major problem, of course, is that my handwriting is AWFUL! I guess I’ll just have to see whether the OCR is good enough to cope…
Introduction As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network. Obviously, the global pandemic has forced a re-think of many plans and this is no exception, so I’m coming back to reflect on it and make sure I’m clear about the core goals so that everything else still moves in the right direction.
Under Construction Grunge Sign by Nicolas Raymond — CC BY 2.0 Every year, around this time of year, I start doing two things. First, I start thinking I could really start to understand monads and write more than toy programs in Haskell. This is unlikely to ever actually happen unless and until I get a day job where I can justify writing useful programs in Haskell, but Advent of Code always gets me thinking otherwise.
I wrote a post on the problems with ISBNs as persistent identifiers (PIDS) for work, so check it out if that sounds interesting.
I’m just back from IDCC20, so here are a few reflections on this year’s conference. You can find all the available slides and links to shared notes on the conference programme. There’s also a list of all the posters and an overview of the Unconference Skills for curation of diverse datasets Here in the UK and elsewhere, you’re unlikely to find many institutions claiming to apply a deep level of curation to every dataset/software package/etc deposited with them.
Iosevka is a nice, slender monospace font with a lot of configurable variations. Check it out: https://typeof.net/Iosevka/
I’m honoured and excited to be named one of this year’s Software Sustainability Institute Fellows. There’s not much to write about yet because it’s only just started, but I’m looking forward to sharing more with you. In the meantime, you can take a look at the 2020 fellowship announcement and get an idea of my plans from my application video:
Just a quickie to say that I’ve replaced the comment section at the bottom of each post with webmentions, which allows you to comment by posting on your own site and linking here. It’s a fundamental part of the IndieWeb, which I’m slowly getting to grips with having been a halfway member of it for years by virtue of having my own site on my own domain. I’d already got rid of Google Analytics to stop forcing that tracking on my visitors, I wanted to get rid of Disqus too because I’m pretty sure the only way that is free for me is if they’re selling my data and yours to third parties.
It looks like I’ve accidentally taken charge of bridging a bunch of The Carpentries Slack channels over to Matrix. Given this, it seems like a good idea to explain what that sentence means and reflect a little on my reasoning. I’m more than happy to discuss the pros and cons of this approach If you just want to try chatting in Matrix, jump to the getting started section What are Slack and Matrix?