Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Harnessing Artificial Intelligence for Indigenous and Spanish American Historical Collections

西班牙帝国在三个多世纪的时间里控制了西半球的大部分土地和人民。它在美洲的大规模管理依赖于皇家公证人、土著艺术家和印刷商的工作。他们制作了数量惊人的文件，无论是书面的还是印刷在纸上的，这些文件如今充斥着档案馆和图书馆。尽管有大量的文献资料，但目前对西班牙殖民事业的了解是零碎的。一旦克服了获取档案的最初障碍，学者和其他公众就必须破译古老的书法、晦涩的书写惯例和不熟悉的土著形象。该项目旨在通过将人工智能（AI）技术引入墨西哥和美国具有代表性的土著和西班牙殖民档案，并训练他们将“不可读”的档案转换为全球可访问的数据，从而降低这些障碍。该项目有可能彻底改变文化机构如何提供对其殖民收藏的访问，以及人文学科研究人员如何开展尖端的数字学术研究。在考古学家、历史学家、网络科学家、设计师和计算机科学家之间的高度跨学科合作中，“解锁殖民档案”项目将在广泛的研究人员和公众参与和使用分布在世界各地的无数早期现代土著和西班牙藏品的方式上创造一个台阶。利用机器学习和LLILAS Benson图书馆（美国）和国家总档案馆（墨西哥）的特殊藏品，该项目将解决相互关联的研究领域的三个挑战：(a)完成16世纪和17世纪历史殖民文献的自动转录，这些文献将西班牙语与纳瓦特尔语、米斯特克语、瓦斯蒂克语和Otomi等土著语言结合起来；(b)开发在大型历史馆藏中进行文本挖掘的方法；(c)发展技术，以便利自动识别土著地图和印刷书籍中的图像特征和其他图像特征。这些方法的发展不仅将促进这些材料的搜索、检索和阅读，而且还将改变对大量文本和图像集合的可访问性和分析。在档案实践和关键技术使用方面，该项目将坚定地致力于非殖民化方法，创建免费提供的、增强的开放数字馆藏。因此，“解锁殖民档案”将与墨西哥、英国、美国、葡萄牙和西班牙的研究人员和机构密切合作，培训学者和感兴趣的公众成员掌握可转移的技能和数字方法，并将产生创新的、可复制的工作流程，拉美学者和世界各地的文化机构可以采用和实施。

The Spanish empire controlled the vast majority of the western hemisphere's lands and peoples for more than three centuries. Its vast administration in the Americas depended on the work of royal notaries, Indigenous artists, and printers. They produced prodigious amounts of documents, written or printed on paper, which fill archives and libraries today. Despite the extensive documentation, present-day understanding of the Spanish colonial enterprise is fragmentary. Once the initial barrier of archival access has been overcome, scholars and other publics then must decipher archaic penmanship, obscure writing conventions, and unfamiliar Indigenous imagery. This project seeks to lower these barriers by introducing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies into representative Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives in Mexico and the U.S., and training them to convert the "unreadable" archive into worldwide accessible data. The project has the potential to revolutionize how cultural institutions provide access to their colonial collections and how humanities researchers can undertake cutting-edge digital scholarship. In a highly interdisciplinary collaboration between archaeologists, historians, web scientists, designers, and computer scientists, the "Unlocking the Colonial Archive" project will create a step-change in the way a broad spectrum of researchers and the public engage with and use countless early modern Indigenous and Spanish collections dispersed throughout the world. Using machine learning and the exceptional collections of the LLILAS Benson library (US) and the General Archive of the Nation (Mexico), the project will tackle three challenges in interconnected research areas to: (a) accomplish the automated transcription of 16th- and 17th-century historical colonial documents that combine Spanish with Indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Mixtec, Huastec, and Otomi, among others; (b) develop methods to carry out text mining in large historical collections; and (c) develop techniques to facilitate the automated identification of iconographic and other pictorial features in Indigenous maps and printed books. The development of such approaches will not only facilitate the searching, retrieval, and reading of these materials, but will also transform the accessibility and analysis of large textual and image collections. With a strong commitment to a decolonial approach, both in terms of archival practices and in the critical use of technologies, the project will create freely available, enhanced open digital collections. As such, "Unlocking the Colonial Archive" will work in close partnership with Mexican, UK, US, Portuguese, and Spanish researchers and institutions, training scholars and interested members of the public on transferable skills and digital methods, and it will produce innovative, reproducible workflows that Latin American scholars and cultural institutions around the world can adopt and implement.