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
features
Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags
As anyone reading this blog through the Blogspot website knows, visual design is not one of my strengths. One of the challenges that users have with FromThePage is navigation. It's not apparent from the single-page screen that clicking on a work title will show you a list of pages. It's even less obvious from the multi-page work reading screen that the page images are … [Read more...] about Progress Report: Page Thumbnails and Sensitive Tags
Feature: Editorial Toolkit
I'm pleased to report that my cousin Linda Tucker has finished transcribing the 1919 diary. I've been trying my best to keep up with her speed, but she's able to transcribe two pages in the amount of time it takes me to edit and annotate a single, simple page. If the editing work requires more extensive research, or (worse) reveals the need to re-do several previous pages, … [Read more...] about Feature: Editorial Toolkit
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?
THATCamp Takeaways
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