Built by a historian,
for historians

The research problem nobody solved

Academic historical research depends on primary source documents: newspaper scans, handwritten letters, government records, photographs of archival pages. These documents are the evidence. Everything else (the articles, the dissertations, the books) is built on top of them.

The workflow for handling these sources hasn't meaningfully changed in decades. You visit an archive. You scan or photograph as many documents as your time allows. You fly home with hundreds of images named IMG_0047 through IMG_0312. The metadata (what each document is, where it came from, why it matters) lives in your head and maybe a paper notebook.

Connections between documents from different archives, different countries, different decades: these are tracked on sticky notes or not at all. And those connections are often the entire point of the research. A Bolivian newspaper article that mentions the same diplomat as a Puerto Rican letter from a different year. A Peruvian intellectual's magazine that shares contributors with a nationalist movement 3,000 miles away. You'd only notice if you happened to remember both.

You could technically piece together parts of this workflow using general-purpose AI tools. Upload a few documents to a chat project, ask questions, get answers. But that's a workaround, not a workflow. It doesn't give you structured metadata, confidence scores, provenance tracking, or an archive that scales past 40 files. Your research deserves infrastructure, not improvisation.

Why we built this

Incipit was built by someone who spent years doing firsthand archival research across Latin America. Not reading about archives. Not theorizing about workflows. Sitting in reading rooms, scanning documents, flying home with hundreds of unnamed files, and trying to make sense of it all.

That experience is why every feature in Incipit works the way it does. Trust tiers exist because a wrong date can sink a dissertation defense. Provenance tracking exists because we once spent two days trying to trace a document back to an archive after renaming the file. Standing queries exist because the best research connections happen in your head, weeks after visiting an archive, and there was never a way to preserve them.

We didn't build Incipit because we saw a market opportunity. We built it because we needed it and it didn't exist. The tool that should have been there for every historian who's ever walked out of an archive knowing they'd forget something important. That's what Incipit is.