Our MemorIA is awarded ANID 2025 Exploration Project funding
Putting data science and artificial intelligence tools at the service of the country and its historical memory: this is the objective of Our MemorIA, the initiative that was born at the IMFD, led by Jocelyn Dunstan Escudero, IMC and DCC UC academic and IMFD and AC3E researcher, which was selected by ANID to receive funds from the Exploration Projects 2025, which recognize projects that contribute to the development and consolidation of disruptive scientific-technological research, novel and with a high transformative potential, through the financing of research projects of excellence.
The initiative is titled "Building a Transdisciplinary Framework for Analyzing Chilean Dictatorship Documents with New Technologies" and will be developed together with IMFD researchers Hugo Rojas Corralprofessor at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado and researcher at Viodemos, Domingo MeryDCC UC academic and UC historian Antonia Fonck, Antonia Fonck.
The objective is to develop an innovative platform that integrates artificial intelligence technologies with the analysis of historical and human rights archives from the Chilean dictatorship.
According to the academics, the collaborative construction of a processing process for the analysis of documentary sources, in partnership with organizations that preserve human rights archives, will allow for a "deeper and much more accessible understanding of historical and archival data on human rights violations, thus significantly improving the post-dictatorial transitional justice process underway in Chile," said Hugo Rojas.
As those responsible for the initiative state, the analysis of historical documents has traditionally relied on manual methods performed by historians and archivists: "Our project is pioneering by integrating computer techniques such as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 technology 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 takes the traditional research process from manual to automated and collaborative, offering a wide range of previously inaccessible methods to extract, structure, and analyze historical information."
According to the research team, thearchives of the Chilean dictatorship have never before been analyzed using a transdisciplinary framework that integrates technological tools and human experience: "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."
Therefore, the initiative aims to "transform the way historical archives are approached, demonstrating that a multidisciplinary and technology-driven framework can reveal hidden information and contribute to efforts for truth, memory, reparation, justice and non-repetition".
Source: IMC UC