One upside of the pandemic forcing communication between people to be conducted online has been that it fosters an environment of openness that heretofore was thought impossible. Lectures and conferences from Oxbridge schools are now made public to anyone with the Zoom link, research clusters like the Berkman Klein Center are focusing on international cooperation regardless of the time zone, and screen sharing through video conferencing tools allows an over-the-shoulder view of how to use software tools from global developers. This last point was well represented by the team at FairCopy, and inspired in my mind a suitable tool for a project that I had been kicking around in my head.

FairCopy is a transcription tool which pairs up images and text side by side to facilitate the transcription and commenting of scanned images. What I appreciated from the presentation which guided us through downloading a Library of Congress file and ingesting it into the program was the intuitive and the process of starting to get text into the editor was quite seamless.

Below is an image of the UI

I have been playing around with the software and hope to transcribe some Journals of the Cybernetics theorist W. Ross Ashby. His journals have had select summaries and keywords transcribed then linked in the webpage to enable the Search function, but a complete transcription has not been undertaken. 

Below is an image of the Journals online.

I want to take up the idea that screen-sharing has eased us into the ability to witness “thought -in-progress”. It struck me during this presentation during the QA session when the developers fielded questions and worked them out in real-time, that because we are in our respective homes, there is a comfort with working things out in front of others. A comfort that we maybe wouldn’t have if we were in a shared space away from our routine surroundings. The advantage is that the attendees get to bear witness to the kinds of thoughts and step by step working out of problems. We are invited into the mind of someone else. That’s what interests me so much about Journal entries. For me, these are snapshots frozen in time of this “thought-in-progress” that we are luckily privy to, due to our decentralized mode of communication. 

A person comfortable in their own home will allow the full unweaving of a process, when presented with an idea. Historically what has happened in the pages of a Journal, but now a screen-shared view of an expert working with software offers a similar insight.