Historical Research and Heritage Documentation
16:05 - 17:25 | Meeting Room 2 (Level 0)
Chair: Prof. Reuben Grima
Prof. Charlie Abela
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of 福利在线免费 and Communication Technology
The integration of artificial intelligence into humanities research is not a displacement of human expertise but rather an opportunity to augment and amplify the capabilities of scholars, archivists, and domain specialists. Historical archives exemplify domains where computational methods must work in concert with deep humanistic knowledge rather than attempting to supplant it. The NotaryPedia project, focused on Malta's notarial manuscripts, demonstrates how this integration operates across multiple levels, from supporting individual palaeographers in their transcription and annotation work to enabling large-scale analytical approaches impossible through traditional methods alone.
As the project's architecture has matured over its first year, the critical importance of human-in-the-loop approaches has become increasingly evident.
AI systems can process vast quantities of documents and identify patterns across centuries of records. Yet, they require expert guidance to understand palaeographic conventions, interpret ambiguous handwriting, validate extracted information against domain knowledge, and recognise historically significant relationships that lack obvious surface features. Consequently, the project has identified the need for specialised tools that support rather than replace expert work, including interfaces for efficient validation of automated transcriptions, systems for creating and refining training datasets through expert annotation, and platforms enabling palaeographers to correct and enhance machine-generated outputs.
This human-AI collaboration model acknowledges that historical interpretation requires contextual understanding, linguistic expertise, and domain knowledge that current artificial intelligence cannot replicate, while recognising that computational methods can dramatically accelerate certain tasks and enable analytical approaches at scales beyond human capacity. The resulting synthesis creates new possibilities for historical research that leverage the complementary strengths of human expertise and computational power, fundamentally reshaping how scholars engage with archival materials.
Mr Chukwuma Sidney Anih
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of 福利在线免费 and Communication Technology
Malta's notarial archives contain centuries of handwritten legal records documenting property transactions, inheritances, marriages, and other vital aspects of social and economic history. Making these documents accessible to researchers requires converting handwritten text into machine-readable form, yet historical manuscripts present formidable challenges for automated transcription systems. Complex page layouts, dense handwriting styles that vary across time periods and individual scribes, and document-specific structural conventions combine to make accurate recognition difficult. Traditional approaches decompose document pages into individual text lines before transcription, but this segmentation introduces errors that propagate throughout the recognition pipeline and compromise final output quality.
This research extends recent advances in segmentation-free transcription by developing methods specifically adapted to historical notarial manuscripts. Rather than requiring prior segmentation, our approach processes entire document pages directly while simultaneously identifying structural boundaries within the text. The system recognises not only the handwritten characters but also the logical structure of the page, automatically detecting where individual legal deeds begin and end. This structural awareness is essential because each deed represents a distinct legal transaction that must be preserved as a coherent unit for subsequent semantic processing and historical analysis.
Two new datasets were constructed in collaboration with Notarial Registers Archive staff and expert palaeographers, capturing the distinctive characteristics of Maltese notarial records across different time periods. The resulting deed-level transcriptions will integrate into NotaryPedia’s knowledge infrastructure, enabling researchers to search, analyse, and interpret Malta's notarial heritage at an unprecedented scale while preserving the documentary structures that matter for legal and historical scholarship.
Prof. Vicki Ann Cremona
Department of Theatre Studies, School of Performing Arts
During UMRE25, I presented my project on the rediscovery of the Royal Opera House’s scenery. The building was destroyed in 1942, and only a handful of people today may have a vague memory of it still standing at the entrance to Valletta, and even less, if at all, of its performances. Academic research and publication led me to unravel the history of the opera house through the discoveries about its architecture, staging equipment, stagings, management, and of course, its artists. But how can this research take a step further and reach a wider public that still feels emotionally attached to a building they have never really experienced? How to create attractive ways for providing new insights for a public that is manifestly keen to know more, given the constant posts on social media referencing images or information (sometimes incorrect) of the lost building? This paper shall discuss the methods and approaches developed to raise awareness of the rediscovered opera house scenery. It was also intended to underline the significance of the discovered scenery as historical artefacts which enrich Malta’s theatre and paper heritage. It shall focus on the methodology used to develop a film documentary, and how this led to new directions, such as the building of a physical model and digital reconstruction as tools to popularise academic findings, diffuse information and nurture further interest in the opera house among different generations.
Ms Skye Vassallo
Department of Classics and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts
Corpus Inscriptionum Melitensium (CIM) is an ongoing UM Research Excellence Fund project aimed at reviving Latin inscriptions across Malta and Gozo, making them accessible to the public.
The Maltese islands are rich with inscriptions – messages from the past that tell us about historic events, pivotal commemorations and influential people, all of which left their mark on Malta’s story. They are found in the streets, on the walls and floors of historic buildings and churches, in crypts and cemeteries, and even in private homes. Many of these, however, are in Latin. While this was once a language well-known in educational circles in the Early Modern period, it is significantly less practised today. The CIM team aims to provide accessibility to these inscriptions by translating them into English and Maltese and uploading them to a public database. Additional background information, images, pinned locations and transcriptions are also included to give both visitors and researchers the fullest possible picture of each entry.
This project ultimately aims to benefit the public and increase interest in what Latin inscriptions have to offer in terms of knowledge. In order to simultaneously reach the public and make them aware of CIM and to include the public in the project’s efforts, CIM launched an initiative inviting the public to contribute by sending in information about and images of inscriptions that may be relatively unknown or in private or otherwise difficult-to-reach places. Numerous collaborations with other institutions, as well as social media posts, have also significantly helped to reach new audiences.
Dr Judith Gatt
Department of Classics and Archaeology, Faculty of Arts
The Salina Bay excavation has been carried out over the past five years as a field school for students in UM’s Global Maritime Archaeology programme, in collaboration with Heritage Malta and the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage. The site comprises a harbour deposit with finds spanning from the early Neolithic to the recent past, as well as a Byzantine shipwreck.
This combination provides a rare opportunity to illuminate Malta’s little-known Byzantine period while offering an exceptional training environment for postgraduate students in archaeology and related disciplines from UM and international institutions, working alongside local stakeholders.
Initially focused on developing core underwater excavation and documentation skills, the project has progressively evolved into a multidisciplinary platform that incorporates marine biology, geochemical analysis, and public engagement. Through this collaborative and cross-disciplinary framework, the Salina Bay field school advances maritime archaeological research, strengthens capacity-building among students and local divers, and contributes to the growing corpus of material evidence for Malta’s understudied Byzantine past.
Prof. Arnold Cassola
Department of Maltese, Faculty of Arts
Charles James Napier, Governor of Cephalonia between 1822 and 1830, had decided in 1826 to improve Cephalonian agriculture by importing a colony of Maltese farmers ‘because their well-known industry and skill would inspire the lazy and indifferent Cephalonians’ (Price, 1989) and because there could ‘be no doubt that the best thing for the [Cephalonia] poor was the establishment of the Maltese colony’ (Napier, 1833).
Thus, in 1826, a contingent of around 300 Maltese left Malta for Cephalonia, with the specific intention of setting up a farming community on the Ionian Island, which at that time, was a British protectorate, together with Corfu and five other Ionian islands. This was possibly the first example of organised Maltese migration in the Mediterranean, which the British authorities had undertaken in the 19th century.
This first attempt at organised Maltese migration turned out to be a complete flop. Many of these Maltese were totally unable, and possibly also unwilling, to integrate into the new reality and were reduced to the state of vagrancy, roaming all over the island, begging for food. In fact, following the total failure of the Maltese colony experiment, most of the Maltese were removed from Cephalonia at the end of 1828, since the locals could not tolerate the intrusion of their fellow Mediterranean islanders. In fact, the Cephalonians wrote to the Great Lord Commissioner that their island was ‘full of lazy, ignorant, uneducated, dirty, sick and maladjusted people who seemed like a flock of sheep, abandoned by a foreign country into their own community’ (Gauci, 2007).
This short paper aims to answer the following questions: Who were these Maltese, and where did they end up? What did the British authorities think of them?
Dr Nicole Talmacs
Department of Media and Communications, Faculty of Media and Knowledge Sciences
Drawing on four days spent with the diplomatic papers of Joseph Leonard Forace at the National Library of Australia, I attempt to paint a rudimentary picture of the fascinating character of Malta's High Commissioner to Australia from 1971 to 1978. Forace migrated to Australia in 1956, picking up many odd jobs before finally becoming a real estate agent. He became involved in the Maltese Guild and Maltese Settlers Association; then politically active in Australia’s Labour Party (ALP); only to be catapulted into the position of Maltese High Commissioner to Australia, and immediately thereafter, Ambassador to China for the Mintoff Government. His diplomatic papers reveal his deep integration into the Cold War politics of the time, playing out in Australia’s capital, Canberra; his role in Maltese and Australian politics; and his role in solidifying early diplomatic ties not only between Malta and China, but also China and Australia. Forace eventually received an Order of Australia Award in 1996 for his contribution to the Australian Maltese community – one of the very few Australians to ever be recognised in such high esteem by the Australian government for their contributions to a diaspora community. Forace passed away in Canberra, NSW, in 2005, where his descendants continue to reside. This presentation comes with a caveat: there were many more boxes still to be opened in the national library’s collection. What is for sure, though, is that Forace’s energy and work ethic knew no limits.
Prof. JoAnn Cassar
Department of Conservation and Built Heritage, Faculty for the Built Environment
One of the first Research Clusters approved by Senate (September 2024) was the HERITAGE Research Cluster: Knowledge discovery for HERITAGE materials: multi-scalar approaches to resource mapping, building databases and data mining.
This multidisciplinary research initiative aims to foster collaboration on cutting-edge research, and the sharing of existing and future HERITAGE data, making the best use of interdisciplinary expertise and modern technological tools.
This Cluster is groundbreaking in that it is a collaboration of 18 Departments across the Faculties for the Built Environment (the championing Faculty), Arts, Science, Engineering, ICT, Media and Knowledge Sciences, Faculty for Social Wellbeing and Theology, as well as the Institute of Earth Systems.
The Cluster’s objectives target the promotion of heritage collaboration in a multidisciplinary manner by integrating expertise from the sciences and the humanities, including history, archival science, archaeology, chemistry, materials, environmental and civil engineering, geosciences, and conservation science, as well as Computer 福利在线免费 Systems and Artificial Intelligence.
Collaborative research across the Cluster is studying heritage materials from several interdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from the study of historic records of how traditional building materials were sourced and processed to the creation of centralised, searchable databases of heritage materials that will empower other researchers and the general public to access and study this data. The creation of new knowledge on heritage materials using cutting-edge research tools is also an objective of the Cluster.
The knowledge generated and the digital tools developed will provide a robust foundation for informed decision-making in future preservation initiatives across diverse heritage areas.