Collaborative Manuscript Transcription

Well, that was fast! Four days after announcing that this blog would take a speculative turn (read "stall") while I spent months ...

Matt Unger has been kind enough to send his ideas on article links within transcription software. I've posted my plans here before, b...

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 appl...

Of all the online transcriptions I've seen so far, Papa's Diary Project does the most with the least. Matt Unger is transcribing a...

I've just checked in transcription authorization, completing the security tasks a work owner may perform. I decided that owners should ...

I just tried out some simple filters in Rails, and am blown away. Up until now, I'd only embraced those features of Rails (like ActiveR...

Alice Armintor Walker responded offline to m y post on sensitive tags , asking: Do you think you might want to allow sensitive text access...

I haven't spent much time on this blog talking about vision or theory. Perhaps that's because blogger theorizing reminds me too muc...

Sensitive tags allow passsages within a transcription to be removed from public view — visible to scribes and work owners, but suppressed i...

For now, FromThePage has followed the classic funding model of the basement inventor: The lone developer — me — holds a day job and works o...

I've moved into what is probably the least glamorous phase of development: security, permissions, and user management. There are four (o...

As I said earlier, I've been making really good progress writing the kinds of administrative features that Rails excels at. Despite my ...

In my experience, really great software is so consistent that when you're trying to do something you've never done before, you can g...

Gavin Robinson has been exchanging emails with the UK National Archives this week. He's trying to convince the archivists to revise th...

I've downloaded and played around with FamilySearch Indexer , and I must report that it's really impressive. Initially I was dismay...

Zoom is done! It took me about a week of intense development, which translates to perhaps 8-10 hours of full-time work. Most of that was ...

Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter enthuses over the news that FamilySearch.com, the website of the Utah Genealogy Society of which D...

Both my friends Prentiss Riddle and Coulter George have suggested that I resolve my software name quandry by looking for placenames in Juli...

Scanners and modern digital cameras can take photos at mind-bogglingly high resolutions. The 5 megapixel Canon SD400 I've used to captu...

One of the main goals of the diary digitization project is to create printed versions of Julia Brumfield's diaries to distribute to fami...

Both Wikipedia and Pepys Diary Online allow hyperlinks to be embedded into articles. These links are tracked bi-directionally, so that by v...

Why should someone trust me with their data? Why should someone trust me with the fruits of their effort? By "trust", I'm no...

One of the first things I discovered when I started work on this project is that it's a lot of effort just to get the page images ready ...

On his indispensable Investigations of a Dog , Gavin Robinson describes digitizing his grandfather's letters from a German POW camp i...

When I started working on this piece of software back in 2005, I referred to it as "the diary project." Realizing that this would...

Susan Kitchens at Family Oral History Using Digital Tools [and I thought "Collaborative Manuscript Transcription" was a mouthful...

The 2006 Family History Technology Workshop archives are online . One presentation ("Towards Searchable Indexes for Handwritten Docu...

Sara and I had a discussion last night over supper, hashing out the business plan for the project. The most important conclusion was that ...

One of the many editorial decisions that must be made while transcribing a manuscript is whether or not to preserve the document's origi...

I'm working on a piece of software for collaborative manuscript transcription and annotation . That's a bit of a mouthful, but what...

The blog version of Pepys Diary shows the shows the power of an online community to provide context for a historical document. To take a pa...

Wikipedia has been my inspiration for simplifying the problem of indexing and annotation through wiki-style markup. The double-brace synta...