An experiment to take the Historic American Engineering Record’s 1978 RHODE ISLAND Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites and make it an interactive website. Map generated with assistance from Google Gemini.
My first vibe-coding experiment. It’s a map, but look closely and it’s also a bit of a mess. Creating structured data from pdfs is really difficult for computers—even though this is a very structured pdf! I spent a good bit of time asking Claude and Gemini to write me programs to extract the text more accurately, but did not fully succeed. And while playing with this is addictive—every few minutes you get a new version of a program to try, and each is mostly better, but with new mistakes—after a while I gave up.
I asked Claude to take the data and plug it into a map format we had created to map Little Compton historic sites. There are fewer sites here—this version had trouble extracting coordinates—but it’s better at dealing with categories.
It has other things one would want for such a map – the ability to edit, add images, etc.
Overall, though, not a success.
Here’s the new map .
Open map in new window →