Replies

jacobward, 10 months ago

@dancarkner @histodons thanks, Abby FineReader came up on my radar after posting but yes, looks like a corporate solution for an individual problem (or that's probably how my university library would see it...)

jacobward, 10 months ago

@polarbear @histodons it might only be marginal, but the scanner app introduces a couple extra points of friction in the archive. First is the time for image processing and second is the time for file management (e.g. creating a new file for each document you scan). The folders I'm looking at might have dozens of individual documents inside. If I can do these parts later, then I have more time for photographing documents while in the archive.

But yeah, this might be splitting hairs over very marginal gains! And there might also be very obvious solutions to the above friction points that I just haven't realised.

jacobward, 10 months ago

@benjamingeer @histodons good to know, thanks! I'm especially interested in software that can do the automatic image processing that smartphone scanner apps do (centering, sharpening, brightening, etc.) but Acrobat is a candidate if I can't find something to do that.

jacobward, 10 months ago

@zed @histodons alas I'm on windows but have boosted in case it helps any fellow archival photographers who are Mac users, and thanks so much for whipping this up - very kind of you

jacobward, 10 months ago

@dta_cthomas @polarbear @histodons this looks really interesting, thank you, and I can imagine some colleagues in my faculty who'd also be very interested in Transkribus. Unfortunately I think the UK National Archives would probably block the Tent but I love it!!

jacobward, 10 months ago

@tillgrallert @dancarkner @histodons good to know, thanks. Unfortunately on Windows but had a few Mac-specific recommendations that are making me want to flip-flop back to Mac after switching away about 10 years ago!

jacobward, 11 months ago

@brian_gettler @histodons I recently read and very much enjoyed Sewell's Logics of History. I think the introduction does a good job of explaining how historians deal with social time, but that means it does focus less on the specifics of source analysis, collection, etc. and more on questions like "what is an historical event?"

For more practical purposes, I really the last three chapters on historical methods (especially the last chapter, ‘Analyzing and Interpreting Historical Sources: A Basic
Methodology') in Bucheli and Wadhwani's edited collection Organizations in Time. While ostensibly focussed on organizational history, I think the chapter's actually incredibly versatile and transferable, and articulates very succinctly the historical process of triangulating and reading sources and context against each other.