I'm working on a piece of software for collaborative manuscript transcription and annotation. That's a bit of a mouthful, but what it boils down is this: I've got temporary access to several family documents which I am trying to transcribe and distribute. Being a software engineer by trade, it seems to me that the easiest way to do this is to write a system that allows me and … [Read more...] about What I'm Building
Inspiration from PepysDiary.com
The blog version of Pepys Diary shows the shows the power of an online community to provide context for a historical document. To take a page at random, Saturday, 26 March 1664 has explanations for legislative references and 17th century English usage provided by end-users through unstructured annotations.. … [Read more...] about Inspiration from PepysDiary.com
Inspiration from Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been my inspiration for simplifying the problem of indexing and annotation through wiki-style markup. The double-brace syntax for creating hyperlinks is incredibly easy to use — put braces around a phrase and it becomes a hyperlink. Add a pipe in the middle and you can differentiate the link target from the hyperlinked text. The "what links here" feature is an … [Read more...] about Inspiration from Wikipedia