Collaborative Manuscript Transcription

In the last couple of weeks, I've implemented most of the features in the editorial toolkit . Scribes can identify unannotated pages fr...

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...

As anyone reading this blog through the Blogspot website knows, visual design is not one of my strengths. One of the challenges that users...

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 wi...

I've spent the last couple of weeks as a FromThePage user working seriously on annotation. This mainly involves identifying the people ...

It's been more than half a year since I've updated this blog. During that period, due to some events in my personal life , I was on...

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 pag...

I just got back from THATCamp , and man, what a ride! I've never been to a conference with this level of collaboration before -- neithe...

After a very difficult ten days of coding, I'm almost where I was at the beginning of May. The story: Early in the month, I got a dupli...

The trouble with people as subjects is that they have names, and that personal names are hard. Names in the text may be illegible or incompl...

With only two collections of documents, fewer than a hundred transcriptions, and only a half-dozen users who could be charitably described a...

Archivalia has kept us informed of lots of manuscript projects going online in Europe last week, offering commentary along the way. Perh...

Over at ClioWeb, Jeremy Boggs is starting a promising series of posts on the development process for digital humanites process. He's ...

FromThePage has been on a production server for about a month now, and the results have been fascinating. The first few days' testing r...

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

At the beginning of the month, I started usability testing for FromThePage. Due to my limited resources, I'm not able to perform usabil...

I'm going to THATCamp at the end of May to talk about From The Page and a few dozen other cool projects that are going on in the digita...

The deprecation tools for Rails 2.0 are grand, but they really don't tell you everything you need to know. The things that have bitten ...

Yesterday morning I saw Derek Powazek present on crowdsourcing -- user-generated content and collaborative communities. While he covered a ...

I'll be at South by Southwest Interactive this weekend. If any of my readers are also attending, please drop me a message or leave a co...

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...