Transcribe a historical notebook in resumable batches
At a glance
A notebook owner uses Claude Code to turn photographed nineteenth-century handwriting into a reading copy while preserving uncertain passages. This workflow is listed under Personal Archives, Handwriting Transcription, Family History.
- Agents / tools
- Claude Code, Claude Opus
SourceBuilding a tool for these workflows? See weekly rates.
What they did
1) Photograph the handwritten notebook and put the images in a local working folder Claude Code can access. The source project used phone photos of Swedish lecture notes from 1852. 2) Maintain a transcription/CLAUDE.md workflow file: split each two-page photo into sharpened left and right halves, read one half at a time, preserve period spelling, and mark unreadable text as [illegible]. 3) Ask Claude to read that workflow file and transcribe the next ten pages. Have it append each result to disk through a shell heredoc so a context interruption does not lose the batch. 4) Resume with the same workflow file for later batches and keep notable discoveries in a separate file. 5) Once the pages are transcribed, assemble a cleaned reading version as a PDF, including the sketches.
How it went
The author reports turning 137 phone photos into 264 transcription pages and a cleaned PDF reading copy.
