Collaborative Manuscript Transcription

Yesterday, German blogger Archivalia reported that the quality of Fraktur OCR at Google Books has improved. There are still some problems...

I've completed one of the four steps I outlined below: my Rails app is now living in a SubVersion repository hosted somewhere further th...

I've finally picked a name. Despite its attractiveness, "Renan" proved unpronounceable. No wonder my ancestors said "RE...

Here are the things I need to do to deploy the 0.5 app on my shared hosting provider: Install Capistrano and get it working Upgrade my appl...

Now that I'm done with development driven only by my sense of what would be a good feature, it's time to move to step #2 in my year-...

This is the first of two reviews of similar transcription projects I wrote in correspondence with Brian Cafferelli , an undergraduate workin...

I've been using this blog to brainstorm features since its inception. Partly this is to share my designs with people who may find them ...

I've just finished coding review requests, the last feature slated for release 1.0. I figure I've completed 90% of the work to get t...

Matt Mullenweg is an incredible speaker -- I've started going through the audio of every talk of his I can find online. His presentati...

As predicted earlier, real life has consumed 100% of my energy for the last month or so, so I haven't made any progress on RefineScript ...

Papa's Diary Project got a nice write up in today's New York Times. I especially like that it's filed under "Urban Studies...

I've been referring to the software as the "Renan System" for the past few months. The connection to Julia Brumfield's co...

I just spent about two weeks doing what's known in software engineering as a "spike investigation." This is somewhat unusual,...

What are the costs involved making FromThePage a going concern? I see these five classes of costs: DNS Initial hosting bills Marginal hosti...

It's been several days since I updated this blog, but that doesn't mean I've been sitting idle. I finished a basic implementatio...

Now that I've settled on the types of comments to support , where do they appear? What is commentable? I've given a lot of thought ...

Back in June, Gavin Robinson and I had a conversation about comments . The problem with comments is figuring out whom they're directed...

I've gotten a lot done on FromThePage over the last month: I finished a navigation redesign that unites the different kind of actions yo...

Let's return to the subject of money. If I thought the market for collaborative manuscript transcription software were a lucrative one,...

Inspired by Bill Turkel's bibliography clusters , I spent the last week playing with GraphViz . Here is a relatedness graph generated b...

Page/Subject Article Versions Last week I added versioning to articles and pages. The goal was to allow access to previous edits via a vers...

Sara and I spent about an hour yesterday talking about the Renan System's UI on our drive to Houston. For someone who is frightened and...

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 ...