Some help with OCR radio transcripts?

[Day Quinn]

Hello everyone at Apollo in Real Time!

I am a new member here, and I want to say what an amazing website and resource this is.

I run a brand-new facebook & instagram project called Daily Quindar (https://www.facebook.com/dailyquindar + https://www.instagram.com/daily_quindar), and its mission is to post a single spacecraft-ground radio snippet every day from the Apollo missions. It is a non-profit endeavor, designed to generate curiosity that comes with reading random transmissions out-of-context.

So far I have the complete transcripts for Apollo 11 & Apollo 13 thanks to the the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, and I am working on using OCR software in order to convert the raw pdf scans of the remaining missions. However, this is difficult, as the character recognition software isn't always up to task.

My question to you: Would it be possible to obtain from you copies of txt or pdf-files that you have made for Apollo 16/17 or any other mission you have? I would be most appreciative, and would love to link to your site from my project.

Take care

[bfeist]

Thanks very much for your kind words, I'm glad you're enjoying Apollo in Real Time!

It sounds like you're starting from scratch if you're contemplating using the scans of the typewritten transcripts. Digitizing these into something useable has been a big part of our project, and the OCR problem was a big one https://benfeist.com/digitizing-apollo-17-new-ocr-techniques/

I recommend you pull our copies of Apollo 11, 13, and 17 directly. You can download them here:
https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/indexes/utteranceData.csv
https://apolloinrealtime.org/13/indexes/utteranceData.csv
https://apolloinrealtime.org/17/indexes/utteranceData.csv

For other missions, there has been an effort to crowdsource digitizing those transcripts through a project called "spacelog" that was born out of a hackathon actually. You can read about it here https://www.hannahdonovan.com/spacelog
There are quite a few mission transcripts in the "mission" folder of their github: https://github.com/Spacelog/Spacelog in their own text format.

I hope you find this helpful!

Ben

[Day Quinn]

Thank you so much for this! In the CSV files, I presume lines ending in T & C represent the main radio traffic? And O is onboard, P PAO etc? This is really great stuff. My plan is to host all Apollo missions for my project, and you are all welcome to follow. I'll link to this site as well.

Yeah, I'm doing some of it from scratch, and as you know it can be a lot of work, this is so helpful, thanks again!

[Day Quinn]

Now I have 4 missions up and running, thanks to you! A8, A11, A13 & A17 

Thanks again for all your help. I will be focusing on A12 and A14 transcripts next, at least the main Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcripts. When I'm finished, I'll post them here for you all

Thanks again & take care

[MadDogBV]

This is good stuff. If you want help editing any of the transcripts (such as to account for some of the astronaut-specific jargon that the CAPCOMs or crew use), let me know. I've been a pretty big contributor to the Apollo 13 lore and have listened to a lot of the MOCR tapes for various different positions. There's some great snippets and transmissions in those as well.