Quid est VERITAS? A Modular Framework for Archival Document Analysis

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28108v1
• Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:14:51 GMT
• Title: Quid est VERITAS? A Modular Framework for Archival Document Analysis
• Abstract summary: We present VERITAS, a framework that reconceptualises digitisation as an integrated workflow encompassing transcription, layout analysis, and semantic enrichment.<n>We evaluate VERITAS on the critical edition of Bernardino Corio's Storia di Milano, a Renaissance chronicle of over 1,600 pages.
• Score: 2.4937400423177762
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: The digitisation of historical documents has traditionally been conceived as a process limited to character-level transcription, producing flat text that lacks the structural and semantic information necessary for substantive computational analysis. We present VERITAS (Vision-Enhanced Reading, Interpretation, and Transcription of Archival Sources), a modular, model-agnostic framework that reconceptualises digitisation as an integrated workflow encompassing transcription, layout analysis, and semantic enrichment. The pipeline is organised into four stages - Preprocessing, Extraction, Refinement, and Enrichment - and employs a schema-driven architecture that allows researchers to declaratively specify their extraction objectives. We evaluate VERITAS on the critical edition of Bernardino Corio's Storia di Milano, a Renaissance chronicle of over 1,600 pages. Results demonstrate that the pipeline achieves a 67.6% relative reduction in word error rate compared to a commercial OCR baseline, with a threefold reduction in end-to-end processing time when accounting for manual correction. We further illustrate the downstream utility of the pipeline's output by querying the transcribed corpus through a retrieval-augmented generation system, demonstrating its capacity to support historical inquiry.

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