Captricity grew out of research begun in Uganda and Tanzania. Here our co-founder Kuang accompanies health workers in Kibiti, Tanzania.

We are thrilled to announce Captricity’s “Data for Communities” program!  We’ll give away up to 5,000 pages of free digitization to inspirational people and organizations working to improve their local and global communities.  Eventually we’d love to offer this program to all such groups, but for now we’re selecting a few who will put this service to the best use. Applications open June 1st and will close on July 15th.

Learn more about the program here.

Could your organization benefit from Captricity? Apply for our Data for Communities program here.

Several customers have asked us whether it’s possible to use Captricity’s auto-magical document redaction feature as a standalone service — you sure can!

Let’s say you want to publish a collection of Section 527 tax forms, which are freely available from the IRS. As a courtesy, you want to redact the EIN number from each form.  Using the core of Captricity’s computer vision technology , which recognizes and crops boxed regions you specify on a page, you can specify a region as “redacted” once, and have Captricity take care of the redaction for all forms of the same type.

Here’s how:

1. Upload a blank version of the form to use as your template.
2. Draw boxes around the fields you want redacted, and click “Black this Out” (see below).
3. Define at least one other non-redacted field on the page (it can be as simple as a page or form number).
4. Submit the job.

Black out the fields of your choice

On the Job results page, you can click each row (on the filename) and download the redacted image.

Define one non-redacted Field

Do you have forms where you want some information redacted? Try Captricity out now for yourself, or get in touch with us to learn more!

Captricity is great for extracting data into spreadsheets, but some forms have a signature or drawing that you’d like to crop out as images. For example, you might want a signature from a consent form or a diagram from a medical record.

Captricity can help! Here’s how it could work if, for example, a dentist wants data from her forms as well as the images of the teeth:

1. She draws a box around each data field and image field on her form
2. For the image fields, she specifies that it is a “select-one” data type, with a single choice, “There are marks on the diagram”.
3. She uploads scans of her completed patient forms and runs the job as usual.
4. When the job is completed, she finds each image fields represented as a column in the results page. To see the original image, she clicks the cell (see picture below).
5. She can then right-click to save that image.

This technique can be used for signatures, images, drawings, or even long passages of free-form text.

Could you use this feature? Try Captricity out now for yourself, or get in touch with us to learn more!

You need data off your paper forms and entered into a spreadsheet or database. You might try to type it in manually, but that’s slow and often expensive (and inaccurate). You may also have tried OCR, but that is notoriously inaccurate and not able to extract data into a spreadsheet format.

Captricity's new Table feature

Captricity has always been good at extracting structured data, but until now, if a form is primarily a table, Captricity’s output format did not match the original table format. For example, the results of a signup sheet with 40 rows and 5 columns (e.g. Firstname, Lastname, Phone, Email, Zipcode) was represented as a single row of 200 (40 x 5) columns in Captricity’s Job results.

You asked us to change the output format to follow the original table format — and we listened!

Now, with Captricity’s Table feature, the output results will have 5 columns, with each signup sheet taking up 40 rows. For example, sheet one would be in rows 1-40, and sheet two in rows 41-80, and so on (see photo below).

The Table feature also makes it super simple mark up a table form:

1. Click the Table tab of the Toolbox.
2. Draw one big box around the whole table
3. Type in the number of columns and rows, and click resize (see image above)
4. Name each column.
5. Run your job and get your results back in table format (see image below)

Fully-entered, digitized data, in the same table format as before

The new Table output form makes it easer to visualize results in Excel or import into a CRM, SQL database, or analytics software.

We think this new feature could be a game-changer for many people who have large tables in forms.  Give it a try to find out!

Photo Courtesy of SDI

Here at Captricity, we think a lot about how data is collected. We’ve recognized for a while that paper is often the cheapest and easiest way to collect data. Recently, we heard about an inspiring network of organizations which has also found that paper is often the best way of including and giving data ownership to even the most underrepresented members of a community.

I first learned about Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) at an ICTD (Information and Communication Technology for Development) Technology Salonand then in a longer interview.  SDI works to empower and give voice to urban poor in almost 3 dozen countries. Their incredible programs are complex and encompasses a number of elements and aspects, but I was particularly struck by their common practice of enumerating every person and dwelling in a given slum area .  The very act of counting themselves gives community members new insights into their own collective needs, and begins to give them the political voice they lacked for so long.

A focus group discussion in Aura, photo courtesy of SDI

Within SDI’s member federations, community members are the ones who collect, double-check and own the data. They thus think very carefully about which mode of collection is used. The most vulnerable and underrepresented members of a community are often the last to gain access to new technologies, so choosing an electronic means of data collection inaccessible to them could further exclude their voices and increase the already-severe social gaps. Mobile phones and some ICTs do reach many people in certain of SDI’s locations, but in many others, only the use of paper can reasonably include all inhabitants. Community members thus use paper to collect data on every household, tabulate the results onto more paper, and sit with other community members to discuss, dispute and verify the data, thus ensuring high accuracy. SDI eventually digitizes the data from those pieces of paper for easier visualization and access by city officials, politicians, donors and other key stakeholders.

Community planning in Cape Town, photo courtesy of SDI

A copy of the community registers are left behind with the community, and shared with the local government office and the support NGO in the form of digital data which is also printed and available on paper.

It is inspiring to see an organization put such effort into choosing appropriate technology for both data collection and ultimate dispersal. We hope that our work digitizing paper data may make it easier for more organizations to follow SDI’s example, making careful and separate decisions about both the data collection technology employed and ultimate output format desired. Regardless, how amazing to see what SDI has done so far, and I am excited to follow their future work. You can read more about their enumeration and mapping, follow their blog, and check out their annual report.