Ditto is my transcription app. It’s a Python app using FastAPI for the web parts.

Overview

The goal with Ditto is to take scans (usually of journals) and make it easy to transcribe them a page at a time. Same idea as Unbindery, though scaled way, way down: single-user instead of crowdsourced, a simplified workflow, and it only supports one project at a time so I don’t spread my limited transcription time too thin. It looks like this:

And there’s an inverted mode, which initially seemed like a great idea (dark mode, basically) but I never actually use it, I think because it’s harder to read:

The transcriptions are stored as plain text files in the same directory as the corresponding images.

How I use Ditto

I spend a few minutes transcribing journals each morning as part of my daily routine. (As I finish each volume, I pull the transcribed text files off my server, concatenate them, do some minor formatting, and then import them into Vinci.)

The future

When I made Ditto, one of my goals was to make it work well on mobile so I could have a portable transcription station anywhere I went. It has a responsive design that does work on a phone, but the experience is currently slightly awkward (lots of panning), so I tend to only use it on my laptop. At some point I’d like to try to fix that.

Other than that, though, I’m happy with it. It works well. And it’s small — 340 lines of code. (Which makes me inordinately happy. Small tools are the best.)

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Too much overhead. So I started working on Unbindery, a web app to automate almost all of this. This is what it looked like a couple weeks ago (a functional but completely unpolished bare-bones app):

I was kind of disappointed about the project — it was moving incredibly slowly, I didn’t really care about it anymore, etc. — and I had made up my mind to let it quietly fall by the wayside.

Then I was at the temple two weeks ago and got a clear impression that I wasn’t going to get off the hook that easily, and that I needed to keep going with MTP and finish Unbindery. With that impression came some inspiration on how to polish the app, and I’ve been working on it since then. Here’s what it looks like now:

For the past week we’ve been using it for MTP work, and since then our productivity has totally skyrocketed. Here are my educated guesses on why:

1. Smaller chunks. Volunteers proof one page at a time instead of five. It’s easier and, because it’s easier, volunteers proof more than before.

2. Progress bars. Since volunteers can see their progress visually, there’s more of a drive to keep proofing so they can make the black bar go all the way to the end.

3. Scoreboard and leaderboard. Volunteers get points every time they finish proofing a page. With the leaderboard, there’s competition, and already I’ve seen an increase in productivity because of this (at least subconsciously).

4. Convenience. Since Unbindery is a web app, volunteers can proof pages anywhere, instead of having to download/upload text files and all that.

There’s also a new feature I added today, where volunteers can see how much of a given project they proofed:

This way there’s more of a sense of ownership to the work. We’ll see how it goes.

Like I said a few days ago, we went from taking eight months per book to a few days per book. My volunteers have proofed 373 pages in the last week, and I’m now scrambling to get enough books into Unbindery so we don’t run out. That’s a very different problem from the stagnation I had a month or two ago. (Yes, it’s a good problem to have.)

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My friend Rikker and I started Unbindery a few years ago, but it petered out before it got off the ground, and there it languished until a month or two ago. Since then, I’ve gotten the core up and running and it’s now usable enough to start doing actual MTP work with it. (Taking OCRed text and cleaning it up, that is.) I still have a lot of polish left to do, though.

It’s written in PHP and Javascript and I’ll be releasing it on GitHub in the near future, once I clean up the source a bit.

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And I’m not assistant directing anymore, by the way. I’m directing. Yup, I don’t have all that much experience under my belt (assistant directing a single forty-five minute play and writing four of my own plays, plus watching lots of plays and movies over the course of my life), but I’m now the director of James Goldberg’s play Repeating History. It’s a good training-wheel play, since it’s only three pages long. But it’s got its own challenges, too — the bulk of the play is effectively a Powerpoint presentation, for example. There’s only one character (well, there’s sort of a second character, but she only has two lines and she’s not onstage). And the play has a lot of historical allusions that most people probably aren’t going to get, because we’ve all forgotten almost everything we learned in U.S. History.

In other news, I’ve got a few new projects lining up. First, I really want to get back into writing novels, so I’ve decided to aim at 1,000 words a day (which, as I learned from my NaNoWriMo experience, should be a piece of cake) and I’ve started outlining the one I’ll focus on for the next few months.

Second, almost every time I watch a movie I want to start writing screenplays, so I’ve decided to finally start doing it. I’ll probably start out with short films because, well, they’re shorter. And they’re similar to short plays, which I’ve got a decent amount of experience with.

Third, I’m writing some TV scripts for a demo for this new television channel that’ll be starting up soon. I don’t know how much I can talk about it yet — probably more than this, but I’ll play it safe for now — but it’ll be fun. And regardless of the fate of the channel, it’ll be a really good learning experience. Besides, who ever thought I’d be writing for TV? Not me.

And last but not least, I need to start blogging on here more often. Monthly isn’t going to cut it. I’m also itching to redesign the site, but that’ll have to wait for a bit. (I’m currently redesigning the New Play Project site. And have been for a while; hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend.)

Unbindery’s on hold for now.

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