Inspired by Bill Turkel's bibliography clusters, I spent the last week playing with GraphViz. Here is a relatedness graph generated by the subject page for my great grandfather: One big problem with this graph is that it shows too many subjects. Once I add subject categorization, a filtered graph becomes a way of answering interesting questions. Viewing the graph for … [Read more...] about Feature: Subect Graphs
Feature: Transcription Versions
Page/Subject Article Versions Last week I added versioning to articles and pages. The goal was to allow access to previous edits via a version page akin to the MediaWiki history tab. Gavin Robinson suggested a system of review and approval before transcription changes go live, but I really think that this doesn't fit well with my user model. For one thing, I don't expect the … [Read more...] about Feature: Transcription Versions
UI and Other Fun Stuff
Sara and I spent about an hour yesterday talking about the Renan System's UI on our drive to Houston. For someone who is frightened and confused by user interface design, this turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. She's recommended a two-column design, since the transcription page is necessarily broken into one column for the transcription form and one column for the … [Read more...] about UI and Other Fun Stuff
Progress Report: Article Links
Well, that was fast! Four days after announcing that this blog would take a speculative turn (read "stall") while I spent months on article links, linking pages to articles works! It only took me about ten hours of coding and research to learn to use the XML parser, write the article and link schema, process typed transcriptions into a canonical XML form with appropriate … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Article Links
Matt Unger on Article Links
Matt Unger has been kind enough to send his ideas on article links within transcription software. I've posted my plans here before, but Matt's ideas are borne of his experience after six months of work on Papa's Diary. Some of his ideas are already included by my link feature, others may inform FromThePage, but I think his specification is worth posting in its entirety. If … [Read more...] about Matt Unger on Article Links