This is one of those projects I've sat on for years, but with Claude and Mistral helping with the handwriting recognition, and even helping me write a custom scanning app that would auto scan each page and put it into a database as I assembled everything.
As far as I know, this is the only US Forestry Diary that has been fully scanned in and published. I understand that there are other diaries in some collections, but none have been scanned in. I hope this helps somebody. Please let me know if it does.
This is the sort of project Claude and AI can help with - A personal project that sits on the shelf forever, but now a reasonable project that can be published in my spare time. I'm not trying to earn money on this, but just improving our knowledge and history just a little bit.
dogline•1h ago
"mistral-ocr-latest" did really good handwriting transcription, considering how tight and small some of the handwriting is. Then back to Claude API calls to summarize by month and collect people and places from all of the entires.
Claude then created static html pages from what started as a Flask app. Published on Dreamhost.
dogline•8m ago
I've never had one of my sites with this much traffic. With everything as static files, website is still holding. Thank you all.