I just got back from THATCamp, and man, what a ride! I've never been to a conference with this level of collaboration before -- neither academic nor technical. Literally nobody was "audience" -- I don't think a single person emerged from the conference without having presented in at least one session, and pitched in their ideas in half a dozen more. To my astonishment, I … [Read more...] about THATCamp Takeaways
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Progress Report: De-duping catastrophe and a host change
After a very difficult ten days of coding, I'm almost where I was at the beginning of May. The story: Early in the month, I got a duplicate identifier feature coded. The UI was based on LibraryThing's, which is the best de-duping interface I've ever seen. Mine still falls short, but it's able to pair "Ren Worsham" up with "Wren Worsham", so it'll probably do for now. With … [Read more...] about Progress Report: De-duping catastrophe and a host change
The Trouble with Names
The trouble with people as subjects is that they have names, and that personal names are hard. Names in the text may be illegible or incomplete, so that Reese _____ and Mr ____ Edmonds require special handling. Names need be remembered by the scribe during their transcription. I discovered this the hard way. After doing some research in secondary documents, I was able to … [Read more...] about The Trouble with Names
Who do I build for?
Over at ClioWeb, Jeremy Boggs is starting a promising series of posts on the development process for digital humanites process. He's splitting the process up into five steps, which may happen at the same time, but still follow a rough sort of order. Step one, obviously, is "Figure out what exactly you’re building." But is that really the first step? I'm finding that what I … [Read more...] about Who do I build for?
Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing
FromThePage has been on a production server for about a month now, and the results have been fascinating. The first few days' testing revealed some shocking usability problems. In some places (transcription and login most notoriously) the code was swallowing error messages instead of displaying them to the user. Zoom didn't work in Internet Explorer. And there were no … [Read more...] about Progress Report: One Month of Alpha Testing