"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.
I've never had one of my sites with this much traffic. With everything as static files, website is still holding. Thank you all.
I'm working on a kinda similar project (documenting bank runs from historical newspapers) and also opted for Claude to build a static website. Crazy that the two sites have a very similar look and feel: https://www.finhist.com/bank-runs/index.html . The only big difference is that mine lacks a map, which I should hopefully fix soon (I already have lat and lon and am linking to google maps).
PS: Do you know if mistral works better at OCRing handwritten text than gemini 3? Was planning on going the gemini3 for another project
These diary pages come largely from Stirling City, just north of Chico, and later from the Hat Creek district, on Hwy 89 north of Mt. Lassen. Nearby, many historical records were lost in the Paradise Camp Fire, and digitizing some of the records in some of the local museums is something this is a test run for.
—Lance (CSU Chico ‘93 Computer Engineering)- I think it would be a very large improvement if the actual diary pages/transcriptions were more accessible. I found the LLM summaries completely uncompelling, and did not particularly appreciate having to scroll through 5+ pages of LLM summary to get to the part where I could actually read the diary entries for a given month.
- The dates of the diary entries for many months are broken. For example, in the final month, all of the entries are labelled 1945-03-19. From a cursory examination, I believe the dating broke 24th July 1941 and was broken for every month from there to the end.
- The page for Nov 1941 seems entirely broken. For some reason, the dates labelling the pages are described in a different format that included the name of the month rather than a numeric representation, the pages are out of order, and then all manner of months are mixed in. The first pages are "November 1941", "April 1941", "October 2 1941", "October 3 1941", "November 4 1941", "November 12 1941", "November 7 1941" ... and so on. The LLM summary notes an "Event", a construction project that took place from 1931 to 1934, despite this being the entry for Nov 1941.
It inspires me to tackle a project I've been holding off on for many years: OCR my grandmother/great-grandmother's cookbook. It's about 100 pages of collected and annotated recipes from the 1930-1980s.
OCR and AI have become sufficiently capable (as you've demonstrated) to properly scan, index, and classify the recipes into something I can share with relatives online or as an ebook.
"Fix up my packs. Load the 2 mules with 225# each. Take the 2 loads to trail camp at Lake Everett, Unload. Have lunch with the Trail cook. Haze mules & ride to 7 1/2 PM."
Horses are mentioned 2586 times. That'd be a whole study on how they're used in the back country. (Edit: horse number is inflated since part of the diary form at one point asks for "Horse Mileage". Will have to refine search).
https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/
https://help.archive.org/help/managing-and-editing-your-item...
Trail Crew Stories and Mountain Gazette might also be interested in this.