Personal search begins
After his father passed away, Ricardo began tracing the Haitian stories he grew up hearing. Verified sources were scattered across books, radio, and archives.
— About rasin · est. 2024
Haitian history, close to its sources.
rasin.ai is a research environment for Haitian history and its Atlantic contexts. It brings scattered archives, multilingual search, and source perspective into one workspace so readers can see where each result comes from.
— 01 · Why
The history people most need is the history that is hardest to hold.
Haitian historical sources are scattered across colonial archives, diaspora libraries, government gazettes, family papers, and collections that remain difficult to search together. They speak in French, Kreyòl, English, Spanish, and the administrative languages of empire.
Researchers who can read the archive spend years assembling fragments by hand. Students, teachers, descendants, and curious readers often meet the same record as a closed door: untranslated, uncatalogued, or separated from the documents that answer it.
rasin.ai exists to make the assembly visible so readers can move through a growing corpus with disagreements, absences, and source perspectives shown plainly instead of hidden behind a single summary.
— 02 · How we got here
From family memory to public archive.
From a personal search in 2014 to 100+ source collections and a public research system.
First corpus assembled
Downloaders, metadata checks, and source categories turn scattered collections into a reproducible research pipeline.
Retrieval takes shape
OCR, chunking, embeddings, and source perspective labels become the foundation for cited search across languages.
Public interface expands
The web app brings sources, methodology, multilingual navigation, and an editorial About page into the same design system.
— 03 · The people
Who is responsible for what you read.
Rasin is built by studio1804 and governed with an advisory bench that separates editorial authority, cultural stewardship, operations, data, and open scholarly seats.
RL
Ricardo Ledan
Founder, studio1804 · New York
AI systems engineer and founder of studio1804. Leads platform architecture, multilingual retrieval, and the knowledge graph.
JLF
Jean Ledan fils
Historical Editor (Chair) · Bèljwèt Publications, Port-au-Prince
One of Haiti's most prolific living public historians. Reviews historical claims and sets the archive's editorial standards.
RL
Roxane Ledan "Taino-L"
Visual Editor & Cultural Stewardship (Chair) · Founder & CEO, FONDATION AYITI BÈL · Montréal & Les Cayes
Photographer and documentarist born in Les Cayes. Oversees visual standards and the consent protocol for sacred material.
AM
Allen Menelas "Dennery Alain"
Operations & Partnerships · Founder, C.Paribus Management · Greater Boston & Les Cayes
Operations and project-management leader. Advises on operational governance, partnerships, and in-country relationships.
BA
Billy Andre
Data, Metrics & Impact Reporting · Business Intelligence Specialist, Penn State ORIS · Co-founder, DCC Inc.
Humanitarian data and BI specialist. Advises on metrics, dashboards, and donor-grade reporting infrastructure.
— 04 · Partners
The institutions and communities that make this possible.
Rasin is sustained through studio infrastructure, compute support, open-source tools, and collaboration with the institutions and readers who care for the source record.
NVIDIA Inception
GPU access and technical mentorship for AI infrastructure.
studio1804
Independent research and development studio maintaining the platform.
Libraries and archives
Originating institutions remain credited for every collection and document.
Haitian cultural institutions
Long-term stewardship conversations are an active priority.
Scholars and descendants
Corrections, source leads, and family records improve the corpus.
Public methodology
Pipelines, citation practice, and evaluation notes stay documented.
— 05 · Contact
Working in this corner of history? We want to hear from you.
Whether you are a scholar with a correction, an institution with an archive, a descendant with a family record, or a teacher building a syllabus, write. We read everything.