Building an App to Search a Newspaper Archive (Trove)
Update 12/01/2025: As Trove moved to V3 this broke my code. After 2 weeks of effort AI eventually agreed the problem was Trove’s not mine.
Trove is probably the best newspaper archive on the planet. It is Australian and covers a wide range of topics. Volunteers have fixed some transcriptions but only when the subject was relevant to them.
I wanted to make it easier to find information on people I had researched in connection with the Somerton Man and then to keep that information.
So I built this with AI:
I used Perplexity and also 01 Preview and Claude Sonnet (via You.com) to get this far. My next step is to get AI to fix the text it gets so that when it is downloaded words like ‘natu-ral’ below are not hyphenated. It was likely the printer had hyphenated the text to fit in a newspaper column.
Using this method the research for a story can be compiled.
Trove lets you do this but the output is often so messy you can’t use it unless you download a pdf.
This link will let you access it but it is a 2 step process:
- Search Trove.
2. Decrypt the enc file downloaded on your computer/mobile files. You will need to use the password “carlwebb”.
3. You can now search Trove newspapers with AI Insights:
Search results (for example):
4. You can then download the summary created by AI (for example):
