lexograph /ˈleksəʊɡɹɑːf/ (n.) A text document generated from digital image data

SO YOU WANT TO MAKE A WORD CAMERA?

You should, because lexography is for everyone.

Feel free to use my code to get yourself started. However, it is licensed under GPL v3, which means you must make your code available under the same terms.

License Information

word.camera image-to-text translator Copyright (C) 2015 Ross Goodwin

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

You can contact Ross Goodwin at ross.goodwin@gmail.com or address physical correspondence and verbal abuse to:

Ross Goodwin c/o ITP
721 Broadway
4th Floor
New York, NY 10003

Cautionary Preamble

I wrote this code as a creative exercise rather than an engineering task. I plan to clean it up and improve its documentation when I have a chance.

Running Your Own Copy

In theory, following these steps should allow you to run your own copy of the word.camera software on a Unix-based operating system (word.camera is running this software on Ubuntu 14.04):

1. Clone this repository.
2. Create a virtualenv and run pip install -r requirements.txt
3. Create new empty directories at static/img/ and static/output/ -- these folders are for processed images and rendered html files, respectively.
4. Download the Clarifai Python API wrapper, change that folder's name to py (or change the import line in __init__.py), create a Clarifai API account, and set environmental variables to match your API key and secret following procedures described in the library's README file.
5. Download a local copy of the ConceptNet5 database, following the recommended procedure, and run an instance of the API server at 127.0.0.1:8084. (If you try to change the endpoint URL to MIT's ConceptNet5 API server rather than downloading your own copy, the rate limit may restrict you.)
6. Change the following global variables in __init__.py to match the filepaths on your machine: SYSPATH, APPPATH, app.config['UPLOAD_FOLDER'] (all directly below the imports at the top of the file)
7. Change the BASEURL global variable in __init__.py to match the IP or domain where you plan to run your server.
8. Add a salty.py file in the main directory with one variable, saline, set equal to a string of your choice (to seed unique URL hash values).
9. Run python __init__.py or set up a WSGI server. (word.camera uses apache2 for the web server and gunicorn for the ConceptNet server on localhost.)

Good luck, and enjoy!

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Polaroid camera icon created by Simon Child (London, GB 2012) for the Noun Project