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
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2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription
2010 was the year that collaborative manuscript transcription finally caught on. Back when I started work on FromThePage in 2005, I got the same response from most people I told about the project: "Why don't you just use OCR software?" To say that the challenges of digitizing handwritten material were poorly understood might be inaccurate—after all the TEI standard included … [Read more...] about 2010: The Year of Crowdsourcing Transcription
Progress Report: GitHub, Archive.org Integration, and General Availability
2010 saw big changes in FromThePage. The Balboa Park Online Collaborative started using FromThePage to transcribe the field notes of herpetologist Laurence Klauber. Perian Sully, Rich Cherry, and all the other folks there have been fantastic to work with: full of enthusiasm and new ideas for the system while patient with the bugs that we've discovered. This is the first … [Read more...] about Progress Report: GitHub, Archive.org Integration, and General Availability
Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags
As anyone reading this blog through the Blogspot website knows, visual design is not one of my strengths. One of the challenges that users have with FromThePage is navigation. It's not apparent from the single-page screen that clicking on a work title will show you a list of pages. It's even less obvious from the multi-page work reading screen that the page images are … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags
Progress Report: Eight Months after THATCamp
It's been more than half a year since I've updated this blog. During that period, due to some events in my personal life, I was only able to spend a month or so on sustained development, but nevertheless made some real progress. The big news is that I announced the project to some interested family members and have acquired one serious user. My cousin-in-law, Linda Tucker, … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Eight Months after THATCamp