Last week, I posted a new document to FromThePage and inadvertently conducted a little experiment on how to publicize crowdsourcing. Sometime in the early 1970s, my uncle was on a hunting trip when he was driven into an old, abandoned building by a thunderstorm. While waiting for the weather to moderate, he found a few old documents -- two envelopes bearing Confederate … [Read more...] about Facebook versus Twitter for Crowdsourcing Document Transcription
Feature plan for 2010
Three years ago, I laid out a plan for getting FromThePage to general availability. Since that time, I completed most of the features I thought necessary, gained some dedicated users, and saw the software used to transcribe and annotate over a thousand pages of Julia Brumfield's diaries. However, most of the second half of 2009 was spent using the product in my editorial … [Read more...] about Feature plan for 2010
Feature: Related Pages
I've been thinking a lot about page-to-subject links lately as I edit and annotate Julia Brumfield's 1921 diary. While I've been able to exploit the links data structure in editing, printing, analyzing and displaying the texts, I really haven't viewed it as a way to navigate from one manuscript page to another. In fact, the linkages I've made between pages have been pretty … [Read more...] about Feature: Related Pages
Connecting With Readers
While editing and annotating Julia Brumfield's 1919 diary, I've tried to do research on the people who appear there. Who was Josie Carr's sister? Sites like FindAGrave.com can help, but the results may still be ambiguous: there are two Alice Woodings buried in the area, and either could be a match. These questions could be resolved pretty easily through oral interviews -- … [Read more...] about Connecting With Readers
Interview with Hugh Cayless
One of the neatest things to happen in the world of transcription technology this year was the award of an NEH ODH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to "Image to XML", a project exploring image-based transcription at the line and word level. According to a press release from UNC, this will fund development of "a product that will allow librarians to digitally trace handwriting … [Read more...] about Interview with Hugh Cayless