CVC at the International Archives Congress (ICA)
Every four years, the International Council on Archives (ICA) organizes a Congress, this event brings together professionals, researchers, and institutions committed to the preservation and innovation of archival science.
This year, the Computer Vision Center participated with a stand to showcase our research in the field of Document Intelligence in Historical Heritatge Preservation.
At the Congress, we showcased our work and projects within the Document Intelligence research line and presented three technological demonstrations illustrating how Artificial Intelligence can transform archival practices and cultural heritage research:
Language-Assited Marriage Records
A historical database with over 560,000 marriage records from Barcelona, spanning from the 15th to the 20th century.
Users can interact with the model like as if it were a digital historian. For example: “Give me a random marriage between 1600 and 1650.”
The system provides details like the couple’s social class or the amount paid for the marriage, bringing history to life in a conversational way
In collaboration with Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED)
Arxiu 44
A tool designed to help archives work faster and smarter, a system that turns archival work into a dynamic, visual digital experience.
It operates in two main stages:
- Ingestion: You upload a project with photos or documents (e.g., a ZIP file), and the tool generates automatic annotations.
- Exploitation: Once processed, you can search, compare, and visualize the information.
In collaboration with Departament de Cultura, Xarxa d’Arxius Comarcals and Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya
Automated Transcription of Historcal Military Trials
A project dedicated to historical memory, to ensure that all people persecuted during the dictatorship are registered, recognized, and remembered.
It helps automate the reading and classification of historical documents, a process that would take centuries by hand.
With this tool, data processing becomes much faster and more efficient, supporting researchers, archivists, and families searching for their relatives.
In collaboration with La Foneria
CVC researcher Alicia Fornés, from the Document Reading Group, chaired the session on “Artificial Intelligence for Archival Data”.
She guided the session and discussed how the use of AI for the recognition, indexation, linkage, aggregation, cross-modal interpretation and visualization of the digitized historical cultural sources (documents, photographs, etc.) is fundamental to create a new paradigm for universal access and interpretation of archival data.
Thus, archives will no longer be a static repository of information, but a dynamic container that will enable innovative services with impact in ICT, cultural and media industries, education, tourism, etc.
The session featured insightful presentations from Ian James (FamilySearch), Alan Capellades (Generalitat de Catalunya), Jose Antonio Espin (Yale University), and Gerard Corbella (La Foneria).
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