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
features
Feature: Subject Indexes
One of the main goals of the diary digitization project is to create printed versions of Julia Brumfield's diaries to distribute to family with little internet access. The links between manuscript pages and articles described below provide the raw material for a print index. Reading storing page-to-article links in RDBMS record makes indexing almost, but not quite … [Read more...] about Feature: Subject Indexes
Feature: Article Links
Both Wikipedia and Pepys Diary Online allow hyperlinks to be embedded into articles. These links are tracked bi-directionally, so that by viewing an article, you can see all the pages that link to it. This is an easy enough thing to do, once you allow embedded links: UI The text markup to insert a link needs to be simple and quick, yet flexible if the scribe has the need … [Read more...] about Feature: Article Links
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