Handwriting History Project
Introduced by: Dave Kaminski
Depth: Medium thread
Dave's passion project: researching, cataloging, and publishing historical American handwriting samples. It's the reason he started using Claude Code in the first place, and it's the domain where both his best results and worst failures occurred.
What He's Built
- HandwritingHistory.org — a website with archives and visualizations
- Kaminski Archive Map — a heat map of handwriting sources, mostly East Coast, with clickthrough to source images at Internet Archive
- HTML thumbnail viewer — for sorting and classifying eBay acquisitions
- Internet Archive uploads — digitized postcards, letters, and documents
The Research Challenge
The data is deeply nested and full of exceptions:
Dave: "My whole research is based on not just the core, but on the outliers... and then tracking those back and forth."
Example: Palmer Method was an American handwriting style, supposedly ending around the 1930s. But Dave has a 1943 letter from a ship captain written in Spencerian — a style that "ended" in 1897. Tracking these outliers requires classification at multiple levels: style, date, geography, certainty level.
Dave wants to classify items as: certain early, possible early, possible late, certain late.
Claude's Role
Claude built the website, the map, and the thumbnail viewer. The structured data work went well. The unstructured research work — trying to get Claude to manage nested classifications, track outliers, and maintain a coherent taxonomy — is where things fell apart.
Dave: "One of the tricks is to really have your stuff originally in a structured data that's actually correct. And if you can do that, then this thing will just do anything for you."
Pete's Suggestion
Use a project-based vault structure in Obsidian, with sub-projects for specific tasks. Pete created a Palmer vault live during the call, demonstrating how to break the research into manageable pieces. See Putting Claude on Rails.
Related
- Dave's Claude Struggles — the failures happened while working on this project
- Palmer Method — the handwriting style at the center of the research
- Internet Archive — where Dave uploads his digitized materials
- HandwritingHistory.org — the public-facing website
- Taxonomy — what Dave needs to build for his classification system