It's often hard to explain what it is that I do, so perhaps a list of what I did will help. Inspired by Tim Sherratt's "talking" and "making" posts at the end of 2012, here's my 2013. Code I work on a number of software projects, whether as contract developer, pro bono "code fairy", or product owner. FromThePage It's been a big year for FromThePage, my … [Read more...] about Code and Conversations in 2013
"The Landscape of Crowdsourcing and Transcription" at Duke University
I spent part of this week at Duke University with the Duke Collaboratory for Classics Computing -- Josh Sosin, Hugh Cayless, and Ryan Baumann. We discussed ideas for mobile epigraphy applications, argued about text encoding, and did some hacking. We loaded an instance of FromThePage onto the DC3's development machine, seeded it with the 1859 journal of Viscontess Emily Anne … [Read more...] about "The Landscape of Crowdsourcing and Transcription" at Duke University
Feature: TEI-XML Export
How do you get the data out? This is a question I hear pretty often, particularly from professional archivists. If an institution and its users have put the effort into creating digital editions on FromThePage, how can they pull the transcripts out of FromThePage to back it up, repurpose it, or import it into other systems? This spring, I created an XHTML exporter that … [Read more...] about Feature: TEI-XML Export
A Gresham's Law for Crowdsourcing and Scholarship?
This is a comment I wanted to make at Neil Fraistat's "Participatory DH" session (proposal, notes) at THATCamp Leadership, but ended up having on twitter instead. Much of the discussion in the first half of the session focused on the qualitative difference between the activities we ask amateurs to do and the activities performed by scholars. One concern voiced was that … [Read more...] about A Gresham's Law for Crowdsourcing and Scholarship?
University of Delaware and Cecil County Historical Society on FromThePage
Over the last few months, the University of Delaware and the Cecil County Historical Society have been using FromThePage to transcribe the diary of a minister serving in the American Civil War. They're using the project to expose undergraduates to primary sources while also improving access to an important local history document. The county has documented the process … [Read more...] about University of Delaware and Cecil County Historical Society on FromThePage