Welcome to the Postcards Project, a collaborative effort to digitize and organize the collection of over hundred thousand postcards belonging to Dr. Dani Schrire of the Folklore Studies Center at Hebrew University.
In this project, we help in the scanning, tagging, and preprocessing of the data, as well as building a database in the university cluster.
To aid in this process, I have developed a Python script for preprocessing images and Excel tables to match the database API. The script uses: Python, Pandas, OS, PIL and does not use any other external libraries or technologies beyond these four.
Figure: The images above display example of our data: both sides of a postcard from the Perlman Collection. The front side features an image representative of the American Colony series, while the reverse side contains both typed and handwritten text, providing a unique glimpse into the period's correspondence style.
The goal of the Postcards Project is to make this unique and valuable collection of postcards more accessible to researchers and the general public.
By digitizing and organizing the postcards, we hope to facilitate the study of folk traditions and cultural history.
The current stage of the project is that we have completed the proof of concept (POC) with the cluster and are waiting for Dr. Schreier's team to finish the digitization process.
Once they have finished, they will be able to upload the images to the database in the cluster.
We are grateful to Dr. Dani Schrire and the Folklore Studies Center at Hebrew University for entrusting us with this important project.
I also wish to thank Dr. Netzer and Dr. Sober from the Digital Humanities Center for their mentorship in this project.