Obtaining high-definition photographs of papers in archives is difficult. Text blurring lowers the accuracy of any transcribing system powered by artificial intelligence. Most people could benefit from upgraded equipment and simple tweaks to camera settings. We provide free advice and can provide affordable archival photography kits. Southampton University used our kit to photograph the Port Books archive (E190) at the National Archives in Kew, London. 60k high-quality images were taken here – and we lived to tell the tale!

In 2021, the London School of Economics provided our first significant data collection challenge. Our objective was to create AI models to extract text from 35k photos of papers detailing historical British trade and format it in Excel. No small feat!

Cust-3 (TNA) is an astonishing dataset that comprehensively captures England's global trade from 1697 to 1780. The list also includes government taxation, which is an important resource for understanding the rise of the British Empire amongst and other significant events.

On the right we see our models identifying and linking tabulated data. Jamaican imports included 'Elephants Teeth’, Tortoise Shells, and Snuff.

We are glad to work with a variety of organisations to improving our understanding of archives dating back before the digital age.

The NIC asked us to create new statistics that would show the development and timing of the UK's communications infrastructure.

Our data, shown on the right, shows telegrams transmitted since the beginning, encompassing a period when the world was first connected by electric cables to quickly transmit messages across cities and continents in seconds, rather than days, weeks, or months.

We can process much more than early handwritten manuscripts. Historical newspapers offer a wealth of information for scholars. El Debate was a Spanish Catholic-leaning journal with millions of typeset words offering a unique perspective on European modern history from 1911 to 1936.

Charles III University Madrid commissioned us to conduct advanced keyword searches across a quarter of a century of printed material and to deliver results in a comprehensible format. One difficulty was to pick up thousands of line breaks accurately. Many OCR tools do not detect column breakers and so the text jumps across columns.

We worked with researchers to extract and match all the individuals listed in over 31000 pages of wounded and deceased German soldiers.

We built segmentation models to capture the layout of these documents and matched the output of the OCR’ed text to exisiting data captured by genealogists from the Genwiki project.

We can extract almost flawless content from challenging sources spanning millennia, in any language, and with any typeface.

Such as handwritten Vatican reports of discussions about important theological issues dating from the fifteenth century. We transformed idiosyncratic Latin into digestible, fluid prose.

On challenge was to eliminate background watermarks to enhance machine reading accuracy. Identifying archaic abbreviations in the text was another.

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