Help with using Kallisto

What is Kallisto?

Kallisto is a collaborative tool for cleaning up transcripts of space missions so that they can be used on Spacelog.

How do I use it?

When you clean up a transcript page on Kallisto, you see an image of the original on the left, and the text on the right. The idea is to make the text match the original, by fixing any differences you see.

Each page will be shown to at least two people. If you don't see any problems, save the page without making changes to confirm that it's correct. Kallisto will mark that page as finished, and not show it to anyone else.

The majority of the content on each page will be lines spoken by the astronauts or ground control staff. A typical line looks like this:

02 07 55 20  CMP  I believe we've had a problem here.

The line has three components:

1. 02 07 55 20 is the time that this line was recorded. In this case, it was 2 days, 7 hours, 55 minutes, and 20 seconds into the mission. Shorter missions might not include the number of days.
2. CMP is the person speaking. In this case, CMP is short for Command Module Pilot.
3. I believe we've had a problem here is what was said. It might span several lines.

If possible, it's helpful to leave "- -" at the end of the line as is, rather than "correct" it to a single dash, or "--" or something. The Spacelog Web site will display this nicely, and we prefer not to change the intent of the original transcripts where possible.

The other lines—lines where no one is speaking—are important too. They contain extra information, like telling us when the spacecraft starts a new orbit or starts communicating with a different ground station.

What's the mission wiki page for?

At the top of each page is a link to a mission wiki page, for example here's the mission wiki page for Apollo 8. Editing the wiki page requires a GitHub account, but it's free to sign up.

The wiki page is a useful place to keep notes about things that you notice while transcribing the mission, that might be useful for adding the extra information we'll want to display on the Spacelog Web site.

The following kinds of information are usually very useful:

• Any time a ground crew member is called by name. The ground staff often operated in shifts, so the same speaker identifier in the transcript—CC for the capsule communicator, F for the flight director, etc.—can refer to different people at different times during the mission.
• Log lines that stand out as particularly interesting or amusing. These make good quotations to highlight on the mission's home page.
• Significant mission events. These might mark the end of one phase of a mission and the beginning of the next, like when a spacecraft leaves Earth orbit for the Moon, or they might be a significant moment, like a live TV broadcast or the moment when Apollo 13 sent the famous message “Houston, we've had a problem”.
• Moments that might correspond to photographs we can add to the mission transcript. The crew might, for example, directly report that they've just taken a photo of something specific.
• Terms that should appear in the mission glossary. Space flight is full of technical terms, and if you encounter an unfamiliar term it's good to make a note of it. If you happen to look up the definition, then it's good to make a note of that, too.
• Lines or pages that might cause trouble. The original transcripts sometimes contain strange characters, missing times, footnotes, and other unusual features that might need extra attention when we import the mission into the Spacelog Web site.

Who owns the transcripts produced on Kallisto?

All of the Spacelog transcripts are available under the CC0 license, which means they're dedicated to the public domain and can be freely used by anyone.

If you contribute to a transcript on Kallisto, you agree to your contributions being released under this license.

What happens once the mission is finished?

Once we've cleaned every page in the mission, there's still a lot of work to do before it can be launched on Spacelog. You can keep track of where each mission is up to on our missions Trello board. If you'd like to help out with any of the post-transcription tasks, please get in touch using the contact details below.

Where can I ask get more help?

If you're stuck, and this page doesn't help to answer your questions, the Spacelog team are happy to help. The best ways to get in touch are by sending an email to the Spacelog Google Group at [email protected], or chatting to us in the #spacelog IRC channel on Freenode.