Implementing Artificial Intelligence to unlock the Library of Congress Spanish American historical collections (1500-1699)

从涉及美洲早期探索的文件到对理解埃尔南多·科尔特斯的事务至关重要的众多来源，早期殖民墨西哥的历史，以及宗教裁判所的活动，美国国会图书馆（LoC）在其曼尼托邦分部收藏了各种各样但重要的西班牙美洲殖民文献。虽然图书馆已经完成了将其收藏中的数百份电子书数字化并在线提供的艰巨任务，但该部门的文件仍然构成了重大挑战。这些都是用近代早期的西班牙语写的，只有高度专业的学者才能破译，因此，可以访问书法。此外，如果没有可用的数字传输，学者和专家可能需要数年的时间来查询，查找和连接这些文件中的大规模或不同集合之间的信息。这些文件包含重要信息，有助于了解西班牙帝国如何治理美洲，教会在总督辖区的作用和建立，生活条件，殖民行为，社会结构和土著文化知识。然而，这些信息仍然是“锁定的”，只有少数人可以访问。人工智能（AI）的新发展现在允许我们训练计算机来执行这些文件的自动化传输。它们还通过对具体词语和知识类别进行注释，促进以新的方式确定、查询、提取、绘制和分析信息。使用语言学手段，这些方法现在使我们能够自动识别地名，人名，日期，机构和其他具有历史意义的复杂概念。该研究计划以位于伦敦图书馆曼尼普尔分部的汉斯·克劳斯藏品为主要案例研究，将：1）实施手写文本识别模型，以实现对16世纪和17世纪藏品中可用的数字材料的自动转录; 2）使用自然语言处理技术创建集合的注释版本，3）介绍这些方法，培训工作人员，并在LoC建立一个管道，以便与其他西班牙裔美国人的收藏一起实施这些方法;和4）进行可行性研究，使用人工智能方法与LoC，LC实验室和西班牙裔阅读室的用户和成员一起创建历史收藏的公民科学计划。

From documents dealing with the early exploration of the Americas to numerous sources crucial to understanding the affairs of Hernando Cortés, the history of early colonial Mexico, and the activities of the inquisition, the Library of Congress (LoC) holds a varied but significant collection of Spanish American colonial documents in its Manuscript Division. While the library has carried out the enormous task of digitising hundreds of folios in their collections and making these available online, the documents in this division still pose a significant challenge. These are written in Early Modern Spanish, with calligraphies that only highly specialised scholars can decipher and, therefore, access. Furthermore, without available digital transcriptions, it can take scholars and specialists years to query, find, and connect the information in these documents on a large scale or between different collections. These documents contain vital information to understand how the Spanish Empire governed the Americas, the role and establishment of the church in the viceroyalties, living conditions, acts of contestation, social structures and knowledge of the indigenous cultures. However, this information remains "locked" and accessible only to a few. New developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) now allow us to train computers to carry out the automated transcriptions of these documents. They also facilitate new ways of identifying, querying, extracting, mapping and analysing information through annotating specific words and knowledge categories. Using linguistic means, these approaches now enable us to automatically identify place names, people names, dates, institutions, and other complex concepts of historical interest. Using the Hans P. Kraus collection in the Manuscript Division of the LoC as the main case study, the proposed fellowship will: 1) Implement Handwritten Text Recognition models to accomplish the automated transcription of the digital material available in the collection from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; 2) Create an annotated version of the collection using Natural Language Processing techniques, enabling the identification and analysis of information in a text mining style; 3) Present these approaches, train staff, and establish a pipeline at the LoC for implementing these methods with the other Spanish American collections; and4) Carry out a feasibility study for creating citizen science programs using AI approaches to historical collections with users and members of the LoC, the LC Labs, and the Hispanic Reading Room.