It would be useful if you could hover over/highlight a line of transcription and have the text in the original image highlighted too, so you can trace where Leo is getting something from. Especially when the transcription is less than perfect, it can be hard to tell what it thinks it’s transcribing, and this feature would make it easier to correct.
I second this suggestion; Transkribus has this function and I find it to be very useful
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Thanks Clare and Ben! We’ve received quite a few requests for a tagging feature, to match parts of the transcript and image together and we agree it makes sense.
It’d be quite a big project to get this to work properly so before we plan on doing so it’d be great to hear exactly how you would use the feature. Is it primarily to make it easier and quicker to check/ correct the transcript, by comparing it with the image? Are there any other potential uses that we should be thinking about?
Yes for me it’s to compare transcription and image so I can correct transcription or identify specific features like tenses/word choice in my documents. It would also help me to use those images later in presentations so I can highlight the precise sections I’m discussing - perhaps a way to export a highlighted version would be good too? Almost like being able to ‘mark up’ the images.
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Absolutely second this suggestion. I have marked relevant passages in bold because of the lack of a highlight function.
Thanks Olav—if I understand correctly that is a slightly different suggestion, but it’s something we’re already working on.
Yes, I see now that Clare was referring to something different - a highlighting function which makes it easier to identify which passage in the manuscript that correponds to the relevant passage in the transcription. This is something that Transcribus does quite well, and I do miss this function in Leo. But I also maintain that it would be really helpful to have some sort of tool for highlighting or bookmarking specific passages in the transcribed text (this is not something Transcribus offers, I think). When you tracribe a MS on, say, 40 pages, and there are two-three passages, spread on different pages, that is relevant for your research, it would be really helpful to be able to 1) highlight these passages, and 2) have a way to bookmark the relevant pages, so you can easily find you way back without having to scroll through the entire document. Up until now, I have simply changed the name of the images/pages which contain relevant material, yet I think there can be a more streamlined way of doing it.
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Yes we’ve been discussing this functionality. Our current idea is to have something that appears a little like markup in word, where passages can be quoted and then users can add comments in a collapsible panel that appears on the right of the transcription pane. This would replace the separate “Annotate” tab which we could replace with an “Analyze” tab (TBC).
Excuse my scrawling:
I can see how easy reference to highlighted/ bookmarked passages would be helpful. Two possibilities for doing this:
- There could be a link somewhere, perhaps in a new “Summary” section on the metadata panel, to view all highlighted sections.
- Or, since we are are planning on having a reading mode to view the whole transcript at once, perhaps that could appear as an option there.
Or by bookmarking do you mean something more like a tagging system, for particular items/ images? Interested to hear any ideas you have about the ideal user experience as we begin to think about this. There are lots of different ways to go about it.
This sounds very good! I believe a highlighting feature would be immensely beneficial, particularly if there’s an intuitive way to access and browse through highlighted passages. A good example is the application I use on my Kobo reading tablet, which offers a robust system for both highlighting and bookmarking. You can mark specific sentences or passages in a PDF and choose to highlight them in yellow or attach notes to them. Afterwards, you can easily navigate through your “bookmarks” to review only the passages you’ve highlighted or annotated. It’s a straightforward method for navigating lengthy documents.
Even better is the labelling and bookmarking system used by reMarkable, a “paper” writing pad I use. Each page in a PDF document can here be tagged with custom labels, visible when viewing the entire document in a grid format.
As you browse through, these labels help you quickly identify pages of interest. You can also select individual labels in order to view only the pages that has that label attached to it.
In fact, you can filter pages by specific labels not just within individual PDF files, but across your entire library as well. For instance, you could view all pages tagged with “Manuscript” from dozens of different PDF files simultaneously.
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This is immensely helpful. Thank you Olav!
This functionality isn’t our first priority but when we do get around to it, in the intermediate future, we might ask you a few more questions about it. If anyone else has thoughts on how they use tagging / labelling features, we’d love to hear them.
Just to add to this - the more checking of transcriptions I have done, the more I have found myself checking the transcription not by comparing word for word with the original, but looking for words that seem more unusual or unlikely (a lot of my documents are quite formulaic and I am learning which words Leo consistently gets right). So, when I find a word I do want to check, it is difficult to navigate to it in the image - whereas being able to click on it in the transcription and for that to highlight it in the image would be very helpful.
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Absolutely - it’s a little complicated to execute but we’re working on this function!
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