Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project
On September 18, 2013, CIS-A2K opened the registrations for Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Project. As a part of the registration process interested candidates were required to fill out a form detailing their name, motivation to be a part of the program, comfort level with Devanagari typing, etc. The form can be viewed here. CIS-A2K also prepared a brochure, for the program which was used as an invitation to call out for registrations. The invite was sent through various channels; such as:
- Konkani Wikipedia Facebook page
- Konkani Facebook page
- Konkani Rocks Facebook page
- Konkani mailing lists
- Goa University mailing list
- Goa University bulletin board
- Prints of the registration form were circulated
- Word of mouth
Registrations
By 5th October (in about 2.5 weeks) CIS-A2K received:
- Total Registrations = 40
- No. of people who already knew typing = 33
- No. of people who didn't know typing = 5
- No. of people who knew a bit of typing but were not comfortable = 2
- No. of people from Goa University = 18 students
- No. of people who are Goa University alum = 4
Scheduling initial orientation workshop
CIS-A2K wanted to organise the initial orientation workshop on October 12 and 13. However, due to Dussehra festivities the date had to be postponed and finally the workshops were organised the following weekend on October 19 and 20. Forty participants were broken down into 2 different groups of 20 each; while the first group attended the workshop on October 19, the second group attended on October 20 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on both the days. Details of the participants can be found on meta-wiki.
Scanning of Vishwakosh
CIS-A2K got the Vishwakosh book scanned in a PDF document. It is an 861 MB file constituting of all 4 volumes.
Organising initial orientation workshop
Out of 40; 37 participants attended the workshop over 2 days. Several aspects were covered during the workshop including introduction to Wikipedia, Konkani Vishwakosh, digitization process, typing in Devanagari for those who were not comfortable; allocation of pages from Vishwakosh to the participants etc. Each participant has been allocated approx 100 pages to be digitized over a period of next 2 months. List of participants usernames and pages allotted for them to digitize can be found on program page.
Plans ahead (for Nov)
CIS-A2K will organise open house Skype/Google hangout to help resolve any problems that the participants might face during digitization. One month after; on 20th November CIS-A2K will organise a follow up session to clarify any doubts that the participants may have. This will also serve an opportunity for CIS-A2K to schedule a mid-program review of all the work done by participants. CIS-A2K will produce a mid-program report in Nov that can be shared with all.
Challenges
- Quality check: Participants are currently digitizing Vishwakosh but there are ought to be spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. CIS-A2K wants to make sure that the digitized product is of best quality and would want involve few resource persons to proof-read the final product. Finding resource people has been a challenge so far.
- Compiling work: Vishwakosh is a huge book with about 3600 pages. All 37 participants are doing their bit to digitize 100 pages each. Compiling all these efforts to finally produce 1 book seems to be a challenge. However details of this could be spelt only once the process starts.
- Adding tables and equations: Participants have been facing trouble to add tables and equations. They have been asked to park these issues and make a note so that we could discuss it in the follow up session in Nov.
Successes
- CIS-A2K received high number of registrations (40) in just about two and a half weeks.
- Out of 40 registrations; 37 of them attended the orientation workshop; with only a 7.5% drop out.
- The orientation workshops were organised successfully.
- Scanning of Vishwakosh was done efficiently and in high quality.
- Division of work amongst the participants was done methodologically and fairly.
