Screenshot of app’s chatbot:
FRAMINGHAM – Interested in the history of Saxonville? Thanks to newly posted archives of Friends of Saxonville newsletter PDFs, I was able to write an app that lets you search and query more than 80 issues. The newsletter archives go back to 1998, but there are a number of articles in them about early village history.
The app has two options: One for conventional text searching; the other for asking natural language questions via a generative AI chatbot. While there’s always a risk of “hallucinations” with AI – that is, the AI making things up – as well as missing correct answers, the chatbot includes links to relevant newsletters so you can read the original sources yourself.
Important: This is a hobby project and not an official project of the Friends of Saxonville!
You can check it out at https://apps.machlis.com/shiny/Saxonville/. If you decide to give it a try, I’d love to hear your feedback. Note: The app can take a few seconds to load, thanks in advance for your patience!
The opening screen lets you search for an exact text match, such as Brazilian Family Bakery. It also supports simple Boolean searching with ” AND ” or ” OR ” (but you can’t mix AND and OR in a single search, sorry!), such as “bakery AND ice cream”. And, if you’re familiar with regular expression searching, you can search with a regex.
Search results include links to the original newsletter PDF and a view of the plain-text version with search terms highlighted. I used a service called LlamaParse to convert the PDF issues into text.
The Chatbot tab lets you ask natural-language questions like “Tell me about the history of Saxonville Mills.” This returns results by meaning, not necessarily exact match. So, if you search for info about rail trails, an article about “nature trails” would likely show up too.
I put a fair amount of work into improving results for time-related queries, but you still may want to check the source links to make sure they’re not outside the time frame you were expecting.
Thanks to Friends of Saxonville for putting this local historical treasure trove online!
Screenshot of app’s full-text search:
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