Transc&Anno: A Graphical Tool for the Transcription and On-the-Fly Annotation of Handwritten Documents

Abstract

We present Transc&Anno, a web-based collaboration tool allowing the transcription of text images and their shallow on-the-fly annotation. Transc&Anno was originally developed in order to address the needs of learner corpora research so as to facilitate digitisation of handwritten learner essays. However, the tool can be used for the creation of any type of corpora requiring transcription and shallow on-the-fly annotation resulting in inline XML. Transc&Anno provides an intuitive environment that is explicitly designed to facilitate the transcription and annotation process for linguists. Transc&Anno ensures a high transcription output quality by validating the XML and only allowing predefined tags. It was created on top of the FromThePage transcription tool developed entirely with standard web technologies – Ruby on Rails, Javascript, HTML, and CSS. We adapted this open-source web-based tool to linguistic research purposes by adding linguistic annotation functionalities to it. Thereby we united the convenience of a collaborative transcription tool with its advanced image visualisation, centralised data storage, version control and inter-collaborator communication facilities with the precision of a linguistic annotation tool with its well-developed tag definition possibilities, easy tagging process and tagged-text visualisation. Transc&Anno is easily customisable, open source, and available on Github.

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