Beyond Archives: A Three-Stage Workflow for Relational Digital Libraries of Written and Oral Memory Sources

Abstract of the poster “Beyond Archives: A Three-Stage Workflow for Relational Digital Libraries of Written and Oral Memory Sources”, presented at the XV Annual Conference of the Association for Humanities Computing and Digital Culture (AIUCD) "Digital Technologies and Public Engagement: Practices and Perspectives in the Digital Humanities", in Cagliari, Italy, 3–5 June 2026.Poster ID: 28. The Beyond Archives project aims to develop a relational digital library for written and oral memory sources in contested historical settings, using the post-war Julian–Dalmatian exodus to Naples as a case study. Conceived as an environment for bringing institutional records and oral testimonies into relation while keeping provenance, access conditions, and narrative contexts legible, the project is structured around a three-stage workflow of digitization, formalization, and publication, applied in parallel to written and oral streams. The poster presents this overall workflow, with particular attention to the current state of the written branch, where semantic layout segmentation and Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) are being developed and evaluated in eScriptorium/Kraken on mid-twentieth-century Italian typescripts from the Prefecture of Naples records. It shows how PAGE/ALTO outputs, controlled correction, paradata documentation, and TEI-oriented modelling can support inspectable and reusable transformations from facsimiles into structured textual representations. At the same time, the poster situates these results within a broader infrastructural perspective. TEI is treated as a shared computational language supporting the convergence of written and oral materials within a shared space of consultation, while Named Entity Recognition (NER) is framed as a means of establishing transversal access points across heterogeneous memory sources. In parallel, repository-based preservation and IIIF delivery define the long-term layer through which master images and key derivatives remain stably accessible, distinct from the evolving publication environment. Overall, the poster presents Beyond Archives as an ongoing methodological and infrastructural project that seeks to support relational, inspectable, and reusable access to memory sources while keeping documentary stratification, provenance, and access constraints legible.