We are thrilled to announce the award of a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Advanced Grant to our collaborators at University of Texas Libraries and LLILAS Benson Center

This work will fund important enhancements to FromThePage.

Multilingual Support

While FromThePage supports transcribing text in any Unicode-supported script, the application interface itself has only been in English. We have found that this limits contributions from non-native English speakers. For instance, a Mixtec transcription project received many more contextual notes from transcribers once it was emphasized that notes could be left in Spanish. Even the labels on fields and buttons biased the users interactions in ways that privileged English.

The grant provides funds for the translation of the FromThePage user interface to both Spanish and Portuguese, which will allow transcribers in Latin America to use FromThePage in their own languages. The technical work to support this involves extracting all the application text into message catalogs. Once this infrastructure is in place, the open-source community can contribute translations of the interface into other languages.

New Export Formats

Another major part of this grant will fund enhancement to export formats from FromThePage to make crowd contributions more easily usable in scholarly publications and library systems. The FromThePage project owner community will be surveyed to determine export format priorities, but we anticipate that these formats may include:

• Static site export via Jekyll
• PDF with text overlay
• Word document
• Improved TEI-XML

To be part of the surveyed community, please join the FromThePage mailing list.

The grant also includes funding for importing metadata from Islandora to make finding documents in FromThePage easier and other smaller features. Expect updates during 2020 and 2021!