How the Italian newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo used AI to create an unprecedented obituary database

The local newspaper L'Eco di Bergamo, the main daily newspaper in the province of Bergamo, in Northern Italy, has put online an unprecedented portal bringing together more than 320,000 obituaries published since the 1950s.

Founded in 1880, the newspaper, owned by the local church, made a name for itself during the First World War by telling the personal, sometimes intimate, stories of soldiers on the front. Around fifty journalists make up the majority of the fifty or so pages distributed every morning throughout the Lombardy valley.

After several months of work, supported by AI, locals are now able to go back into the obituary newspaper archives – articles, photos, death notices – by using, for example, the names of the person or the location.

The newspaper also makes once-a-week tribute articles to unique personalities of the region. In addition to bringing a human side to its community, the Italian newspaper also strengthened its local connection and loyalty with its readers.

The motivation behind this project was primarily pure passion but also to strengthen their brand image and people's attachment to the newspaper. They have no plans to monetise the project at this time.

The Fix spoke with Daniela Taiocchi, head of the project called “Ogni vita un racconto.”

How did it all begin?

When COVID started, I began to write in the newspaper about death. In Bergamo, 6000 people died in 40 days at the beginning of the pandemic, compared to an annual average of 4000. So there was a huge need to share sadness, but there was no space, no time, and no possibility to say goodbye to people who were dying.

And that's how the project was born?

Yes, I talked to my editor-in-chief and told him that I would like to collect all this history on a website because there were too many deaths. So with a technician, we produced the website “Ogni vita un racconto” (“Every life has a story” in English) where I put all the photos and the names of people who were dying in that period.

I also put a big screen of 6 meters in front of the newspaper office to present every 8 seconds the photo and the name of someone who passed away with particular music, like Ave Maria. So people began to come here as a memorial.

Then, I realised that we have gotten 320,000 obituaries since 1950 and I started to wonder how we could use that on the website. The problem was that we had digital pages of our newspapers, but our system cannot transform pictures or a PDF into a database.

How did you do it? Did AI help you?

For four months I was trying to identify all the obituaries. Then, we trained the AI to do this job with my first research. It is not so easy because the column of TV programs looks very similar too. So we had to teach the AI about this difference.

We also needed to double-check because sometimes some villages had a different name 70 years ago, or you have a different person with the same name because they are relatives. But we need to be sure because you are talking about something too personal. If you don't take care of every single step, you don't have the authority to use the personal stories of the families.

At the end of this process we had a fantastic database where people were able to find someone from their village with the date, period, name of town, or their surname.

You also publish tribute articles to honour these people?

Each week I’m trying to find human stories of mothers or teachers of a small village and mixing this with the archive of L'Eco di Bergamo or making telephone calls with historians or people that I know in a particular village.

I collect the info, and then I write, for example, about soldiers' grandfathers who died in Russia during the Second World War. Or I found the story of a man who was called the doctor of the dolls because he had a shop in which girls brought their dolls to be repaired and I also found a stylist whose passion was to be a stylist also for dolls. So I wrote about these people so we can remember them and their stories.

Did this project strengthen your local roots?

Since the project, we saw a good return for our reputation and loyalty. We can also see that the number of people paying to publish an obituary remains more or less the same, usually we got 17 a day, nowadays we have 15 or 16. But this could have decreased if we had not implemented this project as people pay less and less for this kind of thing in newspapers.

Added to that, every week I receive at least 100 contributions of people with photos and some text asking me to talk about the stories of their loved ones. So there is a real enthusiasm from the community.

The cost for this project was about 50,000 euros. At the end, this project is also to move the human sensibility to the new generation to remember the past and people, but it's not something so easy.

Do you think this project could be replicated elsewhere?

For this, you need a strong database and a strong passion. In Bergamo, there is a particular attention to death because we have a profound religious sense. Since the 16th century we have been talking about death. There is also a particular sensibility in the newspaper from my editor-in-chief.

I think this project could be developed somewhere else with another theme, for example, but to work, it needs to be in a small town with a very deep community story like Bergamo.

Source of the cover photo: Sesaab, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons