Currently having a blast with LLMs and books. The low-hanging fruit is saving scanned pages in a folder and asking the LLM to look at each page and rename the files according to the page numbers, i.e. p.35.jpeg, p.36.jpeg and so forth.

My plan was to get full books into my archival/retrieval app Rhizome. Turns out current LLMs are superb at transcribing full pages, but apparently there are copyright barriers in place, for obvious reasons. So for the basic transcription, even if imperfect, I do OCR with tesseract, which does a perfectly fine job. I want to query and summarise over the books to get basic questions answered, not accurate source citations out of the box. For scanning, I use the vFlat app to straighten and scan pages quickly with my phone.

What really thrilled, though, me was the following: I asked the LLM to identify underlinings it thought I’d made because I was unsure about translations of certain words (as a non-native English speaker). I then asked it to pull those out into a list, in the following format (example if from the book The Prize):

PAGE: p.34
WORD: penurious
SENTENCE: Such care in small things might seem penurious to some people, yet to him it was the working out of a life principle.
IN CONTEXT: Appearing excessively frugal or miserly, describing how Rockefeller’s extreme attention to small expenses looked to others.
IN GENERAL: Extremely poor or poverty-stricken; or excessively unwilling to spend money; miserly.
GERMAN TRANSLATION: Solche Sparsamkeit bei Kleinigkeiten mochte manchen knauserig erscheinen, doch für ihn war es die Umsetzung eines Lebensprinzips.

What a word means varies with context, so I thought it important to ‘corner’ a word from multiple angles. Seems to me a much more promising way to learn new vocabulary, and to retroactively make full sense of sentences I’ve come across.