Illegible tags allow a scribe to mark a piece of text as illegible with a tag, linking that tag to a cropped image from the text. The application does the cropping itself, allowing the user to draw a rectangle around the illegible chunk on their web-browser and then presenting that as a link for insertion into their transcription as mark-up. The open questions I have regard … [Read more...] about Feature: Illegible Tags
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Questions on Access to Sensitive Text
Alice Armintor Walker responded offline to my post on sensitive tags, asking: Do you think you might want to allow sensitive text access to some viewers, but not unregistered users? An archivist might feel better about limiting access to a specific group of people. That's an interesting point, and thanks for the question! My thought on that had been something like this: There … [Read more...] about Questions on Access to Sensitive Text
Principles
I haven't spent much time on this blog talking about vision or theory. Perhaps that's because blogger theorizing reminds me too much of corporate vision statements, or maybe because I've found it less than helpful in other people's writing. However, once you start talking about money and control, you need to figure out what you're not willing to do. There a few principles … [Read more...] about Principles
Conversations about Transcription
Gavin Robinson has been exchanging emails with the UK National Archives this week. He's trying to convince the archivists to revise their usage restrictions to allow quotation and reuse of user-contributed content. Gavin recognizes that the NA is doing a difficult dance with their user community: [S]ome people who have valuable knowledge would be put off from contributing if … [Read more...] about Conversations about Transcription
Feature: Zoom
Scanners and modern digital cameras can take photos at mind-bogglingly high resolutions. The 5 megapixel Canon SD400 I've used to capture the diary pages results in enormous files. Displaying them at screen resolution, the images are several times the size of the average monitor. This kind of resolution is fantastic for resolving illegible words — from my testing, it seems … [Read more...] about Feature: Zoom