About
A tool that began in the archive
Archēglyph began with the gaps I met in the archive during my PhD. As I worked through periodicals in India and in Britain, I kept running into larger questions — about the politics of digital preservation, and the stratified nature of digital scholarship.
Repositories such as Nineteenth Century Collections Online and the British Newspaper Archive control access through paywalls, and what they hold varies widely: non-anglophone sources are not included, and English-language newspapers from India are thinly covered. Indian repositories hold millions of digitised files in English and in the regional languages — but vernacular texts remain largely outside the reach of text recognition, which rules out keyword searching and limits what multilingual study can do. Developing a sense of cross-border connections, and a transnational understanding of the key terms in the field, becomes a real struggle.
Archēglyph is my attempt to bridge those gaps with computational methods — without obscuring provenance, and without letting a machine speak in place of the source. I want it to widen access to archival and periodicals research, and to grow into an international community of researchers who use it as a springboard: to forge connections, to do new work, and to share what they find.
What Archēglyph is
A research tool, and a research programme, for scanned archival material — newspapers, periodicals, books, correspondence — starting with the archives of South Asia and the wider Global South, where the digital record is thinnest. It reads pages in any script, sets the original beside a romanisation and a translation, finds themes across languages, and keeps every line tied to the page it came from. How it works sets out the method; research and impact sets out where it is going.
- Provenance first
- Every line of derived text names what produced it and leads back to the page it came from.
- Reading, not plotting
- Themes are shown as passages to read and cite, not as charts to interpret.
- Work that outlives us
- Collections are fixed as editions and download whole, in open formats.
- Honest about limits
- What the tool cannot do yet is said out loud, on every page where it matters.
People
Archēglyph is small on purpose: a scholar and an engineer, building in conversation with the historians, philologists, archivists and librarians who work with this kind of material.
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Maitrayee Roychoudhury
Co-founder · research
A researcher of Victorian and Bengali periodicals whose doctoral work took her into archives in India and Britain, where she met the gaps Archēglyph exists to close. She leads its research direction, and judges what the tools actually reveal — and what automated reading can and cannot claim.
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Dipankar Sarkar
Co-founder · engineering
Builds Archēglyph — the reading of the page, the reader, and everything that keeps a line tied to its source. He has spent his career building software for researchers and developers, and cares about making what machines infer legible to the people who have to judge it.
Contact
Write to hello@archeglyph.com about funding and partnerships, a collection you would like read, access to the pre-release, or anything else. Working on something adjacent? We would like to hear about it.