Week 2

So this week I focused on gathering research. I will need to update tours and provide new information that will get previous guests wanting to come back to learn more. In order to do this, I had to grind out hours of taking pictures of the records of the newspapers from the 1800s. I didn’t bother to stop to read them, just took a picture and flipped the page and repeated. At the end of all that I managed to get through about 6 folders worth of newspapers.

Fortunately for me I most of the newspapers after 1900 are available online so i can reference them without having to physically be anywhere. The more we can digitize historical documents, the better history we will get. I can’t recall the number of times I almost fell asleep reading in a library cubicle in my undergraduate days back in the early 2000s.

Once I finished for the day, I took the pictures home where I organized them into folders and then made smaller zip files of each that I fed into Anthropic’s Claude AI. It was able to transcribe them in small batches and make a master document that I can keep on my phone and easily search in the future. I can also have Claude pull articles on a subject or person and create another document of just those articles to keep the research neat. The downside is obviously the question of accuracy but I have found that in doing clerical things like this Claude is exceptional and rarely makes mistakes. The only issues I have seen are when the ink from other pages bleeds into the document and it gets some words incorrect, but if you ask it to proof read and flag stuff like that, it is always apparent what the word should have been and it is easily corrected.

The people at the history center that I showed my prototype app to were enthusiastic. I am going to take the next 2 weeks or so to build up a research base so I have all the things I need to craft a good tour without having to stop and change much because I have discovered more. We discussed having some of the former judges who worked in those courtrooms talk or at least someone who knew them well give some oral history about it that we can incorporate. That kind of first person perspective about a site while you are there experiencing it is the level of connection I want guests to have via my app.

We also discussed the idea of having an experience where guests can hear real testimony from the most contentious murder trial in the county’s history. Obviously we would have to be very careful with how its portrayed since there are still open wounds but allowing the guests to stand in the very spot the trial took place that many decades ago and hear for themselves the evidence and see the pictures from the trial and how packed the courtroom was, that will really connect the guests to what happened there.