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Show HN: Scanned 1927-1945 Daily USFS Work Diary

69 points

5 hours ago

| 6 comments

My great-grandfather Reuben P. Box was a US Forest Ranger in Northern California, and I've got his daily work diary from 1927-1945, through the depression, WWII, Conservation Corps, and lots of forest fires. I've scanned the entire thing, had Claude help with transcription, indexing, and web site building, and put the whole thing here:

https://forestrydiary.com/

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.

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dogline

5 hours ago

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Also, just to clarify, I scanned all 7488 pages in personally (Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500). With Claude's help, I found some undocumented SANE features to auto crop and fix the scans, then had a Python script in Linux auto scan them and put them into a Postgres database as I went. Other scripts would add transcription, summaries, and auto index everything.

"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.

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dogline

4 hours ago

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Oh boy. #3 on front page, 19k page hits in the first hour. 8243 static html pages, 15728 webp images (10k-50k each).

I've never had one of my sites with this much traffic. With everything as static files, website is still holding. Thank you all.

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pstuart

59 seconds ago

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A fresh training dataset ;-)

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jlpk

3 hours ago

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Nice work! For others with journals in the U.S., but not feeling up to all the scanning and transcription work, I volunteer with the American Diary Project (https://americandiaryproject.com/) based in Cleveland Ohio. You can donate journals to be archived and shared. It's only been established in the past few years, and all scanning/transcription is done by volunteers, but are currently evaluating more automated pipelines like OPs. So great to see it in practice!

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canada_dry

40 minutes ago

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Nicely done.

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.

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ricksunny

3 hours ago

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Imagine how much unanticipated historical perspectives might become uncovered if everyone uploaded paraphenelia of long deceased ancestors like this; after indexing, and searched as one hyper-amalgamated crowdsourced knowledge graph, can show who was where doing what in say the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s in a way that mainstream history might fall short of capturing.

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reaperducer

4 hours ago

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Fun fact: "Government mule" isn't just an expression, it's a real thing. And the U.S. government, including the Forest Service, still employs teams of mules to carry things to places that can't be reached any other way.

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dogline

3 hours ago

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I did a quick search, mules are mentioned 75 different times. Like this one at random from Sept 1942: https://forestrydiary.com/page/019bd90a-f176-713f-9999-b14b6...

"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).

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toomuchtodo

4 hours ago

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Well done! Have you uploaded these scans to the Internet Archive? If not, please consider doing so.

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.

https://www.trailcrewstories.com/

https://mountaingazette.com/

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dogline

3 hours ago

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Hadn't thought about it, but will take a look. Also, the two Forestry type links look very interesting. I figure there must be interest in this sort of thing - this is one resource, and the Stirling City Historical Society (Lassen NF) has a bunch of other documents I'd love to digitize soon.