Audit et conseil en stratégieTrue Life in God: an AI-enhanced heritage project
MEMORIST, in partnership with its subsidiary Arkhênum, recently undertook a project for the Swiss foundation True Life in God. From analysing the foundation’s requirements to digitising its collections for hosting online, this large-scale project required end-to-end support, tailored to integrate proven heritage digitisation technology with cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence (AI). Digitisation took place in situ on MEMORIST’s premises in Geneva.
With a solid understanding of the foundation’s needs and having assessed the project’s challenges in detail, our team proposed an AI solution to enhance the data available and make collections easier to access and explore online.
With this project – and similar initiatives carried out for other clients – MEMORIST and Arkhênum joined the 18% of companies using AI in production environments.
HTR-enhanced heritage digitisation
Initially, the team focused on digitising a selection of heritage assets, including handwritten notebooks, press reviews and artefacts. Using the latest breakthroughs in AI, Arkhênum’s experts employed automatic handwritten text recognition (HTR) to “read” 125 manuscript notebooks authored by the founder of the True Life in God Foundation – Vassula Rydén, an ordinary woman with an extraordinary destiny.
This was no mean feat: Rydén’s handwriting is characterised by a distinctly vertical style, with prominent ascenders and deep descenders. Graphologists describe her script as hieratic and inspired.
As part of the feasibility analysis, the Arkhênum R&D team compared various AI solutions to identify the best fit for processing this type of contemporary document.
After finalising the selection, our experts optimised the software processing in several phases, fine-tuning the parameters to obtain maximum output quality, and ultimately achieving an optimal character recognition accuracy rate of 98%.
AI optimises HTML data retrieval services
However, analysis confirmed that conventional algorithms could not recover the data accurately, so the team turned to AI once more, writing a custom script to scrape the data from the HTML pages and convert it to a standardised ISO format using an Excel table.
They also used AI to standardise event times, display country flags in ISO format, and translate the town and country names to English.
Thanks to this approach, the resulting content was 99% reliable. The three errors detected were attributable to the website itself and not the AI-driven processing. The content was subsequently imported into the Limb Gallery digital library.
Building open archives for True Life in God
Arkhênum deployed its Limb Gallery digital library solution to showcase the foundation’s archives online.
This platform, which aggregates the archives available from different online sources, will be regularly updated with new resources, including inventories.
With its keyword search capability, the platform is an invaluable tool for researchers and writers keen to explore the manuscripts, 2,228 press clippings and talks.
In addition, AI technology is evolving so quickly that it will soon be possible to optimise how search results of handwritten texts are displayed, with key words and phrases automatically highlighted – functionality that, for now, remains out of reach.
Physical museum dedicated to perpetuating Rydén’s message
Contact us today to discover how MEMORIST and Arkhênum’s expert digitisation services and AI solutions can bring your archives to life.
Every page turned is an archived story
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