given all of the recent topic-shattering,
it's only natural to feel a little scattered.

so let's take stock, and regroup.

first of all, it's _cool_ that people feel free
to share our individual e-book workflows.

other individuals here might learn from it.

and more importantly, we might come to
learn something that could be of use to us
in building a system for collaborative work.

it seems to me that a collaborative system
is more in tune with aims of this listserve...

and if your workflow depends in a vital way
on your own individual experience or talent,
it's not gonna be of use to that, not really...

likewise, if it depends on a software program
(such as ms-word or open-office) which has
grown to be a gnarly complex monster, then
odds are people aren't gonna want to use it.
fine for your use, sure, just not for our use...

also, hand-in-glove here, if the app requires
a good deal of hand-holding, that's not good.

what we want, then, is simple software that
takes care of a simple workflow, and which
can run either offline or online, invoking a
system for collaborative e-book digitization.

in this vein, we find distributed proofreaders.
they have such a system, and such software...
and, for the most part, although they will say
that they are not completely satisfied with it
and have lots of features they'd like to add,
they often turn down coders who volunteer...
(when those coders will not be subservient.)
so my impression is d.p. is happy with itself.
and the same can be said of the p.g. machine.
i don't get a feeling they want any help either.
they don't want you to meddle with their stuff.

in a way, that's pretty liberating, since it means
we don't have to support any lingering baggage.
we are free to design a system any way we like...

i've built the engine of such a system.  if people
would like me to put it up again, for evaluation,
i could do that.  (it was the old "sitka" project.)

roger frank also coded the engine for a system.
he has also taken his project down, but i bet if
enough people expressed interest in seeing it,
he'd also remount it, so you could evaluate it...

***

all these systems are pretty "standard", in that
the interface has a text-field and shows a scan.
if a review of the scan reveals the text is wrong,
you edit the text.  it's all very straightforward...

other interfaces have been suggested as well.

i made one where each text-line is displayed
next to a checkbox that should be checked if
the line contains any errors, so that that line
will later be corrected by the administrators.

i made another one where questionable lines
get shown in various forms, and the person
is asked to indicate the one which is correct.
(that's for when multiple files get compared.)

we also saw an interface from edward betts
on this list recently, where lines are shown
under the relevant slice from the scan, and
the person clicks any incorrect word to fix it.

so the interface can vary as well as the tool...

***

it's easy to code an e-book digitization system.

since the d.p. code has grown into a monster,
people familiar with that code might laugh at
such an assertion.  but i make it with certainty:

it's easy to code an e-book digitization system.

i've already done my autumn project this year,
so my plan was to wait until spring to do this,
but if people want to go to work on it _now_,
just let me know, and we can start a project to
collaboratively code such a digitization system
as an open-source project.  since, as i just said,
i've already done this, i could serve as a guide.

but i'm not going to just hand over my code, so
if you want it to be open-source, you'll have to
do the vast majority of the coding of it yourself.

and that's good, because it means that you can
make the choice of the language by yourselves.

let me know.

if nobody's interested in tackling such a project,
i'll do another how-to series, on digitizing tools.
in fact, i might do that either way.  yes, yes i will.

so, by all means, if you want to share aspects of
your personal e-book digitization workflow, do!
most _especially_ if they might have relevance to
a _collaborative_system_ for digitizing e-books...

but if your individual workflow is unique to you,
you must recognize that it's not of any use to us.

-bowerbird