When I started working on this piece of software back in 2005, I referred to it as "the diary project." Realizing that this would almost certainly result in a collision, I settled on "The Julia Project" as a far more elegant name. A quick Google search reveals that most variations of "Julia" with "Project" or "System" are taken, most recently by a film production company. So … [Read more...] about Picking a Name
Susan Kitchens' Letter Project
Susan Kitchens at Family Oral History Using Digital Tools [and I thought "Collaborative Manuscript Transcription" was a mouthful!] has a need that's very similar to my own. She's got a bunch of old letters and she wants to "scan them all and somehow make sense of them digitally". Her post on the subject outlines a plan to embed metadata into the scanned images themselves. … [Read more...] about Susan Kitchens' Letter Project
Paper: Computational Manuscript Indexing
The 2006 Family History Technology Workshop archives are online. One presentation ("Towards Searchable Indexes for Handwritten Documents") dealt with the difficulties of automating OCR. The conclusion: it's not impossible to pragmatically digitize manuscripts for the purpose of searching. Partial matches between search terms and recognized manuscript letters mean that so … [Read more...] about Paper: Computational Manuscript Indexing
Planning for GA
Sara and I had a discussion last night over supper, hashing out the business plan for the project. The most important conclusion was that I need to use the app with a couple of small user communities before any sort of general release. That helps me focus my efforts on some very specific features. Get a start-to-finish set of transcription features and the basics for … [Read more...] about Planning for GA
Feature: Regularization
One of the many editorial decisions that must be made while transcribing a manuscript is whether or not to preserve the document's original spellling and punctuation. Happily, TEI has a mechanism for preserving preserve both versions while typing the transcript, so the choice of which one to display is delegated to the reader/printer. Unhappily, the eierlegende wollmilchsau … [Read more...] about Feature: Regularization