Many thanks for this, and you are quite right about the importance of being able to rotate the image – finding a solution to this is certainly on the ‘to do’ list. Transcribing Bentham is often painful enough without us causing everyone cricks in the neck!

best wishes and many thanks,

Tim

The suggestions from Lea and Peter are excellent. One more suggestion occurs to me, although it only applies in a few cases. If it would be possible to rotate the text, it would make the occasional sideways text easier to decipher, not to mention the few cases where a part of the text appears upside down. I can manage lying on my side, but I’m not so good standing on my head!

Thanks very much for your suggestions too – always good to hear what users are finding to be the most troublesome issues with the transcription interface.

The XML is clearly something we are going to have to look at. I know what you mean – when I’ve transcribed something with a few additions it can be extremely complicated (not to mention time-consuming) to find any errors I may have made in the markup, and to distinguish between the XML and the transcript text itself.

You’re quite right about charts and tables too: JB uses them fairly often, so we could do with some standardised form of notation for these. Ditto on placing of marginal notes.

Thanks again for these ideas – the project team will be meeting soon, and these suggestions will be discussed when we talk about changes to be made to the interface. Anything we can do to make the process more straightforward will be looked at! And we will indeed be coming to you and other regular transcribers when it comes to test-driving the new interface, to see what works (and what doesn’t!). We’ll keep you all informed in the meantime.

best wishes and many thanks,

Tim

Peter

I like the idea of having markup hidden in the background, so long as it would be able to cope with the many complex additions within additions within deletions plus underlinings etc etc. These are the bits where so much care is needed to get it exactly right, and even then it can look a mess.

The pages where there are charts, tables, flow diagrams etc are virtually impossible to transcribe coherently so any method that can cope with that would be valuable. Similarly, it can be very difficult to discern whereabouts in the text to insert marginal notes, sometimes the order of paragraphs and sections is not clear, and deciding whether a chunk of text in the margin is really a new section or paragraph. So a format which enabled the transcription to at least roughly mimic the layout of the page could help.

I hope this is of some use. I’m sure some of us would be happy to test out new software before you go live with it.

Best wishes,
Peter

Thanks very much for these suggestions – just the sort of thing we’re after. The autosave is an excellent idea, as is the disabling of certain keystrokes (I’ve lost the number of times I’ve messed up the focus of my manuscript by accidentally flicking the mouse wheel).

I’ll look into de-cluttering the front page, and good points too about the discussion forum – that could probably do with a revamp.

Your experience of the XML certainly mirrors many of the responses we had to the user survey, in that the XML is more than annoyance. While some have taken to it well (or perhaps just put up with it), we’re pretty sure that it’s put a lot of people off participating in TB. The easier we make it – and we hope the WYSIWYG interface will remove the need for transcribers to have to deal with visible XML, the more straightforward participation should be (we hope).

thanks again, and we look forward to further discussions over this in the coming months!

all the best,

Tim

The improvements you mention all sound worthwhile. A couple that I’d find very helpful as well: (1) automatically save transcriptions as they are created (every X seconds, as Word does). That way, when you’re knocked out of the system, as I have been, not much work is lost. (2) Locking the keyboard while transcribing so that accidental keystrokes don’t knock you out of the system (see 1).

As for the Transcription Desk, the initial screen seems a bit crowded. I suppose the names of sponsoring organizations need to be up front with all the disclaimers etc., but all that is information that doesn’t serve to lead one to keep reading. And what a shame the Discussion Forum is so little used. I’d find it more inviting if the year of the previous responses were shown; more relevant than time of day, or even day of the week, I think. I’m also not sure why the Forum is broken into subject areas. That might make it easier to find earlier posts, but figuring out what belongs where is just an extra nuisance, and the divisions take up more room on the screen as it is.

Finally, the XML system is truly irritating, but I don’t imagine much can be done about it. It’s Incomplete (no way to show position on the page, as in JB’s charts), it’s Sloppy (those extra s showing up when there are two additions above the line), and it’s Inflexible (handling some of JB’s weirder bottom-line effusions). Otherwise it’s fine.

Thanks for your patience with all this. I appreciate your asking, and I look forward to hearing/seeing what others think and what changes are made.
Best, Lea