She also took an interest in photography and volunteered to transcribe books to Braille.
For von Ahn, resorting to crowdsourcing seems like a natural answer, given that he was also the founder of reCAPTCHA, which uses CAPTCHAs to transcribe books with scripts that OCR software often fails to recognize.
She also transcribed books into Braille for the visually impaired.
"It's rooted in medieval society where monks were sitting around transcribing books, and in some ways, the culture hasn't changed much," says Cynthia Friend, the only woman professor in Harvard's chemistry department.
He has expressed "deep remorse" for his crimes, has said that he never wishes to be released, and took up transcribing books into Braille for the blind until the Home Office, strangely, called a halt to this work.
There she read to him, helped transcribe his book, and was by his side when he finally died of pneumonia.
Joseph Smith claimed that he was visited by an angel who gave him golden plates from which he transcribed the Book of Mormon, and he had organized a church before he was twenty-five.
Before the printing press no one would have begrudged a monk's right to hand-transcribe the books of the day.
Later, his lecture notes were transcribed into books.
Inmates assigned to a Braille transcription unit, for instance, transcribe some 200 books a year into the Braille format for schoolchildren.
You wouldn't always think so from their many conversations with BBC interviewers, some of which are included on the CDs, others transcribed in the book.
