While editing and annotating Julia Brumfield's 1919 diary, I've tried to do research on the people who appear there. Who was Josie Carr's sister? Sites like FindAGrave.com can help, but the results may still be ambiguous: there are two Alice Woodings buried in the area, and either could be a match. These questions could be resolved pretty easily through oral interviews -- … [Read more...] about Connecting With Readers
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Open Source vs. Open Access
I've reached a point in my development project at which I'd like to go ahead and release FromThePage as Open Source. There are now only two things holding me back. I'd really like to find a project willing to work together with me to fix any deployment problems, rather than posting my source code on GitHub and leaving users to fend for themselves. The other problem is a more … [Read more...] about Open Source vs. Open Access
Feature: Full Text Search/Article Link integration
In the last couple of weeks, I've implemented most of the features in the editorial toolkit. Scribes can identify unannotated pages from the table of contents, readers can peruse all pages in a collection linked to a subject, and users can perform a full text search. I'd like to describe the full text search in some detail, since there are some really interesting things you … [Read more...] about Feature: Full Text Search/Article Link integration
Feature: Mechanical Turk Integration
At last week's Austin On Rails SXSW party, my friend and compatriot Steve Odom gave me a really neat feature idea. "Why don't you integrate with Amazon's Mechanical Turk?" he asked. This is an intriguing notion, and while it's not on my own road map, it would be pretty easy to modify FromThePage to support that. Here's what I'd do to use FromThePage on a more traditional … [Read more...] about Feature: Mechanical Turk Integration
Workflow: flags, tags, or ratings?
Over the past couple of months, I've gotten a lot of user feedback relating to workflow. Paraphrased, they include: How do I mark a page "unfinished"? I've typed up half of it and want to return later. How do I see all the pages that need transcription? I don't know where to start! I'm not sure about the names or handwriting in this page. How do I ask someone else to … [Read more...] about Workflow: flags, tags, or ratings?