Speaker: Prof Giovanni Colavizza, University of Copenhagen / University of Bologna
Abstract: Researchers approaching large, heterogeneous archival collections face a familiar bottleneck: knowing what a collection holds and where the relevant material sits. General-purpose chatbots promise a shortcut but introduce a deeper problem — they generate plausible text rather than citing sources, producing fluent answers detached from precise grounding. Relay, a retrieval-augmented tool developed at the Centre for Digital and Computational Humanities (UCPH), takes the opposite stance: every answer is grounded in a curated corpus and linked back to the passages it draws from, so a response is a starting point for verification rather than an endpoint. This talk demonstrates Relay in practice, walking through how a researcher’s question is retrieved against the collection, augmented, and returned with traceable evidence. I argue that the value of such tools for archival discovery lies less in generation than in groundedness — turning a collection into something a scholar can accurately interrogate and trust, thanks to strict verification and actionable provenance.
Bio: Giovanni Colavizza is Professor and Head of the Centre for Digital and Computational Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark (https://cdch.ku.dk). He is also an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bologna, Italy, and the CTO and co-founder of Odoma, a Swiss-based company developing GraphChat (https://graphchat.ai). Colavizza has a background in Computer Science and History and is specialized inAI applications in the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums).