Tutorial Video
Watch a 17 minute tutorial on Scripture Forge Community Checking.
Watch on YouTube.
A full transcript of the video is as follows:
Summary
The Scripture Forge Community Checking App enables you to get Scripture drafts in front of native speakers and collect feedback on translation accuracy and naturalness. The Community Checking App can import text from Paratext, facilitate the checking process online, and then export feedback back into Paratext. You create the checking questions and then invite members via email to give feedback. The app provides a variety of features including user profiles, reports, question templates and more.
Tutorial
Hi, I’m Chris Hirt with SIL International, and today I’m going to walk you through setting up a Community Checking Project on Scripture Forge. This video is based on version 1.5 of the app, and future versions may have a different look or add new features not included in this tutorial.
OK, let’s get started! The first step is to login to the scriptureforge.org website. If you don’t yet have an account, click on the “Sign Up” button to register yourself as a new user. If you have a google account, click on “sign in with Google” and we’ll create an account for you faster, and you won’t have to keep track of a new password.
Once logged in, you can edit basic information in your profile. Use the top right menu to access your profile, change your password, or log out. Also, in the lower left corner is a menu to change the interface language for the scripture forge website. If you would like to localize the application into a language we don’t yet support, please contact us. The top menu contains important links to helps and to report a bug.
Now that we’ve logged in, it’s time to create a new Scripture Checking Project. Head over to the projects page and click “Start a New Project”. We’ll be creating a new Scripture checking project, which is distinct from a new translation project, not covered in this tutorial. Choose a unique project name and then click on Create Project.
Great! Our new project has been created, but before we start importing texts, we need go through a few project settings first. Click on the settings icon to see those.
In the settings page you will see several tabs. The first of these is where you can invite collaborators or managers to your project. A manager can add others and change settings. Collaborators are those you invite to answer questions about the Scripture drafts you upload. You can add new people via email or name, if they already have a login.
Depending upon your preferred Scripture checking methodology, you may or may not want to have users be able to read the responses of other users. If you want to allow anyone to answer your checking questions, make sure you check “Invite a Friend” so that anyone can join. If you want to limit the checking to only people you approve, turn this feature off.
Now that we’re finished setting up our project, let’s return to the text list and begin by importing a Scripture portion. Click on Add New Text and enter the title of the text. If you need to use a specific font for this text, perhaps because of a non-Roman font, you can specify the font name here. This assumes the user already has the font installed on their system.
Now it’s time to head on over to Paratext to export the texts we want to import into the Checking App.
Let’s open up Paratext, and select the project from which we want to export. Once the project is loaded, use the “Tools” menu, click on Advanced and click “Export Project to USX…” Click Browse to select where you’ll be saving the exported files. I recommend creating a folder on the desktop called USX and then select that before you click Export. Great. Now the files are ready to import into Scripture Forge. Let’s head back over to our browser and click Browse to select the book of the Scripture portion we want to get in front of users for feedback. Notice how the USX files are named with a number and book code. You should recognize the code that corresponds to the Scripture book you want to import. For example, the book of John is 043JHN.usx Select this file and click Open. Now that we’ve imported the USX, let’s limit the verse and chapter range to only the chapter and verses that we want to show. Click “Save” to finish the import.
Notice how the text shows up in the list in the left-hand column.
You can repeat this process for each text that you want to show your users.
Now let’s add some checking questions to the text. Click on the text link and you’ll see the text portion in the left-column. Click on the add new question button. Enter your question into the space provided. If your question is very long, you may choose to provide a question summary as a Title for the question. If you think you will want to re-use this question with other texts in the future, check the “Also save as template”. Click “Add question” when you’re done.
We will now go ahead and repeat this process by adding a few more questions to the list.
Fantastic! Now we’re on our way. Because I’ve got several chapters ready to check, I’m going to back up and add another text for checking. I can use the breadcrumb links to back up through the app to the project dashboard. This is where you can add new texts or edit existing ones.
OK. I’ve got two texts now. I’ll add a third.
Now I have three texts in my list. I’ll go into the 2nd text and add some questions. As I add questions to this text, I will also make them template questions, making it easier to add to the third text.
OK, now I have three questions added to my text. I’m going to quickly add those to my third text.
I’m pretty much ready to send out invitations to people to review my scripture draft. But wait! Maybe I should add some audio to the text so that people can hear the translation as well? To do this, click on the text link, and then click on the Settings button. Click on the Audio File tab and browse to the audio file of the translation. Perfect. Let’s test it.
Our checking project is now set up and we’re ready to invite others. The easiest way to invite others is via email, using the Invite-A-Friend button. If you’ve chosen not to have the Invite-A-Friend button visible, you can still invite people under the Members tab of the project settings here. Some projects may choose to only invite specific people to give feedback. To limit feedback to only those whom you choose, turn off the Invite-A-friend button in the project settings area.
Let’s go ahead and invite our first two people to review this text and answer questions. I’ll just type their email into the invite a friend box and click Invite.
Let’s now take a few minutes to see what the invite looks like and what it looks like to be a collaborator.
I’ll jump over to the collaborator’s email, open the email invite link, and click on the join link in the email.
This link takes the user to the sign-up page in Scripture Forge and guides them through the process of registering. If they already have a Scripture Forge account, they just get a notification email that they have been added to the project.
Once they have logged in, the user will see the project listed in their project page. If the user only has one project, they will be taken directly to it when they log in.
A collaborator’s project dashboard is simply a list of texts that are available to review. The user clicks on a text link and is taken to the list of questions. The user can click on the question and is taken to the answer/response area.
On the left side the text is presented, and on the right side is a space to provide an answer to the question. If the user wants to select text to go along with their answer, they can select the text on the right, and it will be attached to their answer.
The user can navigate to each text and question and provide feedback.
The Scripture Forge Checking App feedback system is designed to handle many collaborators on a project. Let’s jump over to a second collaborator and see how two collaborators might interact with each other.
If the project is configured to allow users to see each other’s answers, then the second collaborator will see the feedback of others in the response area. If the project is configured to not see other’s answers, then they will view it as if no other collaborators have answered.
In this project we can see other’s answers, and so the user can interact with others, such as replying to someone else’s feedback.
It’s possible to have a have a back and forth conversation in the checking app between user’s, or even between the translation team and a user.
Switching back to the manager role, we can see the feedback coming in and we can ask for clarification from users directly.
When a manager decides it is time to close a question, the question can be marked as closed (but still visible), or it can be archived from view entirely.
Similarly, when a text is no longer needed to be seen by users, the text can be archived and hidden from view.
Both questions and texts can be “re-published” if they were accidentally archived from view or additional feedback is required.
Managers do have the ability to delete responses that they deem to be inappropriate.
Once managers are satisfied with the amount of replies, they can mark the answers and responses for export back into Paratext. To do this, they can “flag” each individual answer or reply. Or they can simply choose to bring all responses back into Paratext. To export responses, go to the text settings and click on the Paratext Export tab. Here, the manager can choose to export answers, answers and comments or only those responses that have been flagged for export.
Click on the export to Paratext 8 button to download the Paratext XML Notes file and save it to the desktop. We’ll take a moment now to minimize the browser and open up File Explorer so we can put the Notes file in the proper place in the Paratext project folder. Make sure Paratext is closed when you do this step. Navigate to the Project directory inside of c:\My Paratext 8 Projects[project code]. More than likely there will be other Notes XML files in the project folder.
Now we’re ready to open up Paratext again to find the notes. The notes will show up at the beginning of the first chapter of the text that was reviewed. At this time the comments do not show up attached to individual verses that they may have referenced. They can be manually moved to the proper context within the Paratext program.
After you have run several Scripture checking campaigns, you may be interested in generating some reports about the users who engaged with your project. You can run reports in the Project Settings section, Reports tab. These reports provide simple usage metrics and can be copy/pasted into a spreadsheet for further processing.
As I said earlier, if you’d like to help localize the UI for the Scripture Forge checking app, please contact us.
Future Road Map
Looking to the future, the Scripture Forge development team is hard at work developing version 2 of the Scripture Checking App. Version 2 will be released with Paratext Send/Receive functionality later in 2019, eliminating the need to manually import and export texts and notes. A future version of the Scripture Checking App will be released with offline capabilities.
Conclusion
There are other features in the checking app that were not mentioned in this tutorial. If you have questions, please ask them on our Community Site.
Thanks for watching this tutorial, and I sincerely hope that you and your translation team find this tool useful as you engage a wider audience through online community Scripture checking.