How It Works

From scan to searchable
in five steps

Upload a document. Incipit reads it, extracts the metadata, and asks you to verify. Your archive grows smarter with every document.

1
Upload

Drop in a scan

Upload a photograph, a PDF, a microfiche scan. Whatever you brought back from the archive. No special formatting needed. Incipit works with documents exactly as they are.

Uploading a batch? Set the provenance once ("Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, scanned March 2023") and it carries across all files.

+
Drop a scan or click to upload
PDF, JPG, PNG
IMG_0183.pdf
2.4 MB · Uploaded
2
Extract

AI reads the image directly

Incipit reads the actual photograph of the page, not a broken OCR text layer. Degraded microfiche, century-old typography, handwritten marginalia, multi-column layouts in Spanish, Portuguese, or French. It reads what traditional OCR cannot.

Every extracted field gets a confidence score so you always know how certain the AI is.

Extracted metadata
Publication
AmautaHigh
Date
septiembre 1928Medium
Title
El problema indígena y la tierraHigh
Author
J.C. MariáteguiHigh
Language
SpanishHigh
3
Verify

You confirm the facts

Before anything is committed to your archive, you review every field. Confirm what's right. Correct what's wrong. Flag what's uncertain.

This is non-negotiable in academic research. A wrong date or misattribution in your archive can cascade through footnotes, citations, and arguments. Incipit never guesses silently.

Verified fields become T1 (safe for citations). Unconfirmed high-confidence fields stay at T2. Uncertain fields are flagged T3 and excluded from generated citations.

Review extracted metadata
Confirm, correct, or flag each field
Publication
Amauta
✓ Verified · T1
Date
septiembre 1928
Author
J.C. Mariátegui
✓ Verified · T1
4
Connect

Your archive gets smarter

Every new document is compared against everything already in your archive: entities, dates, themes, your research context. Incipit surfaces meaningful connections, not just keyword matches.

A Peruvian letter that mentions the same diplomat as a Puerto Rican newspaper from a different decade? Incipit catches it and tells you why it matters to your research.

Your research notes (hunches recorded at upload time) act as standing queries that activate when a matching document arrives later.

New document
Letter from Mariátegui to Pedreira
Connection found
El Nacionalista, 14 marzo 1926
Uploaded 3 weeks ago · Puerto Rico
Why this matters: Both documents reference the Liga Anti-Imperialista and overlap with your research on pan-American intellectual networks, 1920 to 1930.
5
Search

Search across everything

Query your entire archive in plain language. "Show me everything mentioning Vasconcelos" works regardless of which collection, country, or language the document came from.

Your archive is no longer a folder of files. It's a research brain: searchable, connected, and growing with every document you add.

Vasconcelos · 3 results
El ideal de Vasconcelos y la raza cósmica
El Nacionalista · Ponce, PR · 1927
Carta de Mariátegui re: visita de Vasconcelos
Correspondence · Lima, Peru · 1926
Conferencia del Sr. Vasconcelos en La Paz
La Razón · La Paz, Bolivia · 1929

Your research archive, finally intelligent

Stop losing connections between sources. Start building an archive that compounds with every document.

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