Community transcriptions with Scripto
By Steve Bennett
A major theme in digital history projects is transcription: turning digitised copies of old manuscripts, public records, diaries, newspapers, film reels or audio tapes into text that can be studied. If the original material is typeset and the digitisation is good quality, then OCR software can work. But what about this:
Scripto is a neat interface that ties a content management system - Omeka, Wordpress or Drupal - to MediaWiki, the software that drives Wikiedia. The CMS manages the digital images, audio or video files, while the wiki handles the task of multiple people simultaneously editing transcriptions and keeping previous versions of each transcription.
It’s a bit fiddly to install and configure (you need to install Apache, MySQL, Omeka, MediaWiki and Scripto…) so I’ve created an automatic deployment formula using SaltStack: salt-scripto
It’s currently being trialled by Dr Nick Thieberger, a linguist and digital humanist at the University of Melbourne. He works on projects such as transcribing and analysing the Daisy Bates Collection, an incredible survey of West Australian indigenous languages from the early 1900s.
If an online transcription tool could be useful to you, please get in touch.
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