Grading a Machine That Read 51,008 Pages With No Answer Key
The job
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) derived the rocket equation and described the multistage rocket and the orbital station decades before anyone could build them. His personal papers are held as fond 555 of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. The archive did the essential work years ago: it scanned the fond and put the images online. What it did not provide was a catalogue you can query, full-text search or a dataset. To find anything, you click through page views one file at a time.
Over the summer I built the missing layer: a catalogue of all 2,019 files, a dating for 1,969 of them taken from the archive's own catalogue cards, a classification of every page as handwriting or typescript, and a machine transcription of every page. All of it is public: a full-fond search, the dataset with a permanent DOI (10.5281/zenodo.21705221),...
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