186 commits to Bow & Bridge from Wed 12 Aug to Sun 16 Aug 2026. This was the week Bow & Bridge became a public website: a WordPress reference on American violin and bow makers where every claim about a maker cites the printed page it was read from. Most of the effort went into the rules that keep it honest: what counts as evidence, what gets refused, and what the machine may publish on its own.
Pipeline figures for the week: 1,062 pages read, 164 volumes unlocked, 62 records published and 16 corrections added.
- Stood up the site: maker records where every claim carries its own citation, an instrument register, source pages, a citation block on each record, and llms.txt and robots.txt so crawlers and AI tools read it correctly.
- Read the complete 1916 American directory of makers from page images (412 entries) and published it as evidence rather than biography, each entry linked to its printed page.
- Ran an adversarial review of the published records (3 critical, 12 major, 21 minor findings) and re-read 79 published claims against their sources; four unsupported claims were corrected and five withdrawn, with the corrections filed on the site.
- Built the OCR intake (OCR is text recognition on scanned book pages) with a batch runner for a local model, a mention miner that finds maker names in the output, and a review gate so the miner cannot invent a surname.
- Added a rights gate: anything marked not-for-publication can never reach the deploy payload, enforced server-side in one place for every write path.
- Set the free half of the pipeline running unattended over the weekend: a keeper loop with a heartbeat, prospecting on a low-water mark, and bulk newspaper pulls from Chronicling America into a quarantine tier. The week ended with 34 more makers published. Firms were held back: a firm never auto-publishes.