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
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Paper: Computational Manuscript Indexing
The 2006 Family History Technology Workshop archives are online. One presentation ("Towards Searchable Indexes for Handwritten Documents") dealt with the difficulties of automating OCR. The conclusion: it's not impossible to pragmatically digitize manuscripts for the purpose of searching. Partial matches between search terms and recognized manuscript letters mean that so … [Read more...] about Paper: Computational Manuscript Indexing
Feature: Regularization
One of the many editorial decisions that must be made while transcribing a manuscript is whether or not to preserve the document's original spellling and punctuation. Happily, TEI has a mechanism for preserving preserve both versions while typing the transcript, so the choice of which one to display is delegated to the reader/printer. Unhappily, the eierlegende wollmilchsau … [Read more...] about Feature: Regularization
What I'm Building
I'm working on a piece of software for collaborative manuscript transcription and annotation. That's a bit of a mouthful, but what it boils down is this: I've got temporary access to several family documents which I am trying to transcribe and distribute. Being a software engineer by trade, it seems to me that the easiest way to do this is to write a system that allows me and … [Read more...] about What I'm Building