Illegible tags allow a scribe to mark a piece of text as illegible with a tag, linking that tag to a cropped image from the text. The application does the cropping itself, allowing the user to draw a rectangle around the illegible chunk on their web-browser and then presenting that as a link for insertion into their transcription as mark-up. The open questions I have regard … [Read more...] about Feature: Illegible Tags
Matt Unger's Papa's Diary Project
Of all the online transcriptions I've seen so far, Papa's Diary Project does the most with the least. Matt Unger is transcribing and annotating his grandfather's 1924 diary, then posting one entry per day. So far as I'm able to tell, he's not using any technology more complicated than a scanner, some basic image processing software, and Blogger. Matt's annotations are really … [Read more...] about Matt Unger's Papa's Diary Project
Progress Report: Transcription Access Controls
I've just checked in transcription authorization, completing the security tasks a work owner may perform. I decided that owners should be able to mark work as unrestricted -- any logged-in user may transcribe that work. Otherwise, owners specify which users may transcribe or modify transcriptions. These administrative features have been some of the quickest to implement, … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Transcription Access Controls
Rails: A Short Introduction to before_filter
I just tried out some simple filters in Rails, and am blown away. Up until now, I'd only embraced those features of Rails (like ActiveRecord) that allowed me to omit steps in the application without actually adding any code on my part. Filters are a bit different — you have to identify patterns in your data flow and abstract them out into steps that will be called before (or … [Read more...] about Rails: A Short Introduction to before_filter
Questions on Access to Sensitive Text
Alice Armintor Walker responded offline to my post on sensitive tags, asking: Do you think you might want to allow sensitive text access to some viewers, but not unregistered users? An archivist might feel better about limiting access to a specific group of people. That's an interesting point, and thanks for the question! My thought on that had been something like this: There … [Read more...] about Questions on Access to Sensitive Text