The trouble with people as subjects is that they have names, and that personal names are hard. Names in the text may be illegible or incomplete, so that Reese _____ and Mr ____ Edmonds require special handling. Names need be remembered by the scribe during their transcription. I discovered this the hard way. After doing some research in secondary documents, I was able to … [Read more...] about The Trouble with Names
Archives for April 2008
Feature: Data Maintenance Tools
With only two collections of documents, fewer than a hundred transcriptions, and only a half-dozen users who could be charitably described as "active", FromThePage is starting to strain under the weight of its data. All of this has to do with subjects. These are the indexable words that provide navigation, analysis, and context to readers. They're working out pretty well, … [Read more...] about Feature: Data Maintenance Tools
Collaborative transcription, the hard way
Archivalia has kept us informed of lots of manuscript projects going online in Europe last week, offering commentary along the way. Perhaps my favorite exchange was about the Chronicle of Sweder von Schele on the Internet: Mit dem Projekt wird zunächst bezweckt, die Transkription zu ergänzen und zu verbessern. Hierzu können neue Abschriften per Mail an die am Projekt … [Read more...] about Collaborative transcription, the hard way
Who do I build for?
Over at ClioWeb, Jeremy Boggs is starting a promising series of posts on the development process for digital humanites process. He's splitting the process up into five steps, which may happen at the same time, but still follow a rough sort of order. Step one, obviously, is "Figure out what exactly you’re building." But is that really the first step? I'm finding that what I … [Read more...] about Who do I build for?
Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing
FromThePage has been on a production server for about a month now, and the results have been fascinating. The first few days' testing revealed some shocking usability problems. In some places (transcription and login most notoriously) the code was swallowing error messages instead of displaying them to the user. Zoom didn't work in Internet Explorer. And there were no … [Read more...] about Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing