Directory Pipeline”—A Tool for Turning Historical Digital Collections into Structured Data

• 06 May 2026
• directory pipeline,
• LLMs,
• Entity extraction,
• NER,
• OCR,
• digitization,
• CNI

The folks at CNI recently saw a message I wrote on a private email list about the work I'm doing on my "Directory Pipeline," and they very graciously invited me to record a brief presentation on it for the Spring 2026 CNI video briefs series.

It was a great opportunity to lay out some of the underlying ideas I've been thinking about, and show some basic demos of what the Directory Pipeline can output.

The example I focus on in the slides is the Woods Directory Data Explorer.

The post is now live, and the slides are also available.

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