Our MemorIA is awarded funding from ANID's 2025 Exploration Projects
Putting data science and artificial intelligence tools at the service of the country and historical memory: this is the goal of Nuestra MemorIA, the initiative that was born under the auspices of the IMFD, led by Jocelyn Dunstan Escudero, IMC and DCC UC academic and IMFD and AC3E researcher , which was selected by ANID to receive funding from the 2025 Exploration Projects, which recognize projects that contribute to the development and consolidation of scientific-technological research that is disruptive, innovative, and has high transformative potential, by funding research projects of excellence.
The initiative is entitled "Building a Transdisciplinary Framework for Analyzing Chilean Dictatorship Documents with New Technologies" and will be developed in collaboration with fellow IMFD researchers Hugo Rojas Corral, professor at Alberto Hurtado University and researcher at Viodemos, Domingo Mery, a DCC UC academic, and UC historian Antonia Fonck.
The goal is to develop an innovative platform that integrates artificial intelligence technologies with the analysis of historical and human rights files originating during the Chilean dictatorship.
According to academics, the collaborative development of a processing procedure for analyzing documentary sources, in partnership with organizations that preserve human rights archives, will enable a "deeper and much more accessible understanding of historical and archival data on human rights violations, thereby significantly improving the post-dictatorial transitional justice process currently underway in Chile," said Hugo Rojas.
As the initiative's leaders point out, the analysis of historical documents has traditionally been based on manual methods carried out by historians and archivists: "Our project is pioneering in integrating computer techniques such as optical character recognition (OCR), named entity recognition (NER), knowledge graphs, and chatbot interfaces, which have rarely been applied intensively in historical archives of this nature," explains Dunstan. This technological integration, they add, offers a new paradigm for "processing and interpreting large amounts of historical data faster and more accurately than ever before. The disruptive impact of the project is driving the traditional manual research process toward automation and collaboration, offering a wide range of previously inaccessible methods for extracting, structuring, and analyzing historical information."
According to the research team, thearchives of the Chilean dictatorship had never been analyzed using a transdisciplinary framework that integrates technological tools and human expertise: "This project creates a new model for exploring historical human rights violations by combining computational efficiency with contextual analysis. The project involves historians, archivists, computer scientists, sociologists, and human rights organizations, ensuring that multiple perspectives contribute to the final results."
For this reason, the initiative aims to "transform the way historical archives are approached, demonstrating that a multidisciplinary, technology-driven framework can reveal hidden information and contribute to efforts for truth, memory, reparation, justice, and non-repetition."
Source: IMC UC