I have literally hundreds of primary sources for African folktales that are in the public domain, so my goal right now is to transcribe one story from each book and article.
Then, I will circle back through and transcribe more stories from the most promising sources.
And then, I will create some kind of public-domain-anthology of stories to publish where I will edit the stories as needed, add some notes, and publish as a book, the goal being to share the stories and also to raise awareness of the public domain resources that are out there.
This all feels so exciting: before, when I only had the summertime available to work on my own projects, I had to scope each project and set deadlines, and make sure I could complete all the work in the two months I had available... but now, I can scope out a HUGE project, take it just a little bit at a time, and not worry if it is going to be a long time to complete.
As long as the process is good, I can just let time manage itself now!
And this process is working great.
Power of Google Drive with Unique IDs
I'm using Google Drive for the system, with a unique identifying number that pulls together all the materials for a given source, for example: I just have to paste in the ID number into my Google Drive and up pops the PDF of the source, the Doc that I created for that resource, and then a separate Doc for each story (plus if I decide to rewrite the story in my own version, I can spin that off as a separate Doc also). Here's Bleek's first South African collection for example:
And that Google Drive search is a stable URL:
https://drive.google.com/drive/search?q=title:202103271446
That means as I add additional documents with that unique ID in the title, I will be able to pull them up all together with a single click. Bleek's book is a great example because I can imagine using many of the stories in that book eventually, and that URL will pull them all up together. Other resources are less useful, but my goal right now is just to find one story from each source that I can use to seed the resource in my tracking system, and then we'll just see how it grows.
Diigo RSS to Inoreader to... ANYWHERE
As I complete each Google Doc that has a transcribed story, I add an image and then publish the Doc as a webpage, which means I can bookmark it in Diigo. That gives me an RSS feed, with thumbnail images. I'm using the tag tales:Africa for these stories, so here's what it looks like in Diigo:
Then I subscribe to the Diigo RSS feed with Inoreader. Here's what it looks like in Inoreader:
Then, I can use the Inoreader export feature to send that content out anywhere, as here at the bottom of this blog post, or at my LauraGibbs.net homepage:
And that's AUTOMATIC. Each time I add a new story to the Diigo bookmarks, the feed updates everywhere via RSS and Inoreader.
Yay Diigo! Yay RSS! Yay Inoreader! :-)
Below is the live feed, so this will update as I add new stories:
