Capabilities

What we do.

Amble turns complex archives into interactive tools for research, learning and data exploration.

The most powerful OCR system on the market

Scanned documents become text you can work with—even the hard ones: non-standard typefonts, skewed scans, warped pages, archaic handwriting.

We combine the best of classical ML models and bleeding-edge AI to offer a system which is fast, affordable, and finally works on the messiest of texts.

The top of a scanned 1851 advertisement page for A. Bartlett, dealer in oils and candles, with coloured outlines around every recognised word and line, including ornamental, shadowed and italic typefaces.

The top of a scanned 1851 advertisement page: A. Bartlett, Oils, Candles, &c., New Bedford Manufacture, 132 Water, corner Pine-Street, New-York, offering sperm, sea elephant, whale, lard, olive, machinery and tanner's oils and sperm, solar sperm, adamantine and mould candles; coloured outlines mark each recognised word and line, through ornamental, shadowed and italic typefaces, while the printed page stays visible.

Trustworthy by design: “smart” highlighting and editing

Search your text for specific addresses, people, or any other entity of interest - with AI-powered findings anchored directly on the source via editable highlights.

That means that you can visually verify every result yourself - it’s right there on the page.

The lower part of a scanned page of dentists' advertisements, with each street address highlighted on the print, among them 42 West Washington Place, No. 5 Warren Street and 222½ Canal Street.

A whole scanned page of advertisements for New York dentists and physicians, every street address highlighted on the print, from No. 5 Henry Street at the top to 476 Broadway at the foot.

A worn scan is read into clean text, and every line stays anchored to the place on the page it came from.

Interfaces built for researchers, by researchers

Get back to working with the primary sources you love - and get more out of them.

Skim full books in gallery view, dual-scroll highlighted documents with machine text, automatically extract images, and so much more.

The gallery view of an 1851 city directory: its 202 pages in a grid, the overlay toggle on, so each page shows its found entities highlighted in colour.

The gallery view at full size: the Great Metropolis of 1851, 202 pages, with tabs for pages, embedded images, artifacts, catalog, quotes, entities, signals and events; the Overlay toggle is on, and the first twelve pages, from the cover to a Sands’ Sarsaparilla advertisement, show their recognised names and addresses highlighted.

The reading interface: the machine text of a history of New York on the left, the scanned pages on the right with the matching passages highlighted, the two scrolling together.

The reading interface at full size: on the left the machine text of a passage on the Commons and the Fresh Water Pond, on the right the two scanned pages it was read from, with the place names highlighted on the print, and a toolbar for adding, removing and submitting highlights.

A living experience of discovery

Connect your data at scale - from interactive maps with clickable buildings linked to primary documents, to knowledge graphs which unearth conflicts in your sources.

The BLOCKS interface maps Manhattan, with a story about 350 Fifth Avenue beside postcards and a source list.

Static screenshot of BLOCKS showing a Manhattan map, a narrative about 350 Fifth Avenue, historic postcards and a bibliography alongside the selected location.

The BLOCKS chronology view: a year slider set to 1938 above a map of Manhattan, with the extracts about 881 Seventh Avenue from that year beside it.

Static screenshot of BLOCKS with Chronology chosen: a histogram of the archive by year from 1600 to 2023 over a slider set to 1938, 148 extracts in that year, and beside the map of Manhattan the five extracts for 881 Seventh Avenue, among them Benny Goodman’s first Carnegie Hall jazz concert of January 16, 1938.

The BLOCKS map with a 1930 fire-insurance atlas plate laid over today’s West Village, beside Washington Square.

Static screenshot of BLOCKS: a plate from the 1930 Bromley atlas, its lots coloured pink, placed over the modern map of the West Village with Washington Square at the right, under the search field and the map, chronology and explore controls.

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