Who knew you could track climate change through crowdsourced transcription? The smart folks at the U. S. Geological Survey, that's who! The USGS North American Bird Phenology program encouraged volunteers to submit bird sightings across North America from the 1880s through the 1970s. These cards are now being transcribed into a database for analysis of migratory pattern … [Read more...] about Review: USGS North American Bird Phenology Program
Open Source vs. Open Access
I've reached a point in my development project at which I'd like to go ahead and release FromThePage as Open Source. There are now only two things holding me back. I'd really like to find a project willing to work together with me to fix any deployment problems, rather than posting my source code on GitHub and leaving users to fend for themselves. The other problem is a more … [Read more...] about Open Source vs. Open Access
Feature: Full Text Search/Article Link integration
In the last couple of weeks, I've implemented most of the features in the editorial toolkit. Scribes can identify unannotated pages from the table of contents, readers can peruse all pages in a collection linked to a subject, and users can perform a full text search. I'd like to describe the full text search in some detail, since there are some really interesting things you … [Read more...] about Feature: Full Text Search/Article Link integration
Feature: Mechanical Turk Integration
At last week's Austin On Rails SXSW party, my friend and compatriot Steve Odom gave me a really neat feature idea. "Why don't you integrate with Amazon's Mechanical Turk?" he asked. This is an intriguing notion, and while it's not on my own road map, it would be pretty easy to modify FromThePage to support that. Here's what I'd do to use FromThePage on a more traditional … [Read more...] about Feature: Mechanical Turk Integration
Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags
As anyone reading this blog through the Blogspot website knows, visual design is not one of my strengths. One of the challenges that users have with FromThePage is navigation. It's not apparent from the single-page screen that clicking on a work title will show you a list of pages. It's even less obvious from the multi-page work reading screen that the page images are … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags