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

美国国会图书馆（LoC）的手稿部收藏了各种各样但意义重大的西班牙裔美洲殖民地文件，从早期美洲探险的文件，到对了解埃尔南多·科特萨姆斯（Hernando cort<s:1>）事件、早期墨西哥殖民地历史和宗教裁判所活动至关重要的大量资料。虽然图书馆已经完成了将其馆藏中的数百个对开本数字化并将其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。这些都是用早期现代西班牙语写的，只有高度专业的学者才能破译，因此也就无从查阅。此外，如果没有可用的数字转录，学者和专家可能需要数年时间才能大规模地查询、查找和连接这些文档中的信息或在不同的集合之间进行连接。这些文件包含了了解西班牙帝国如何统治美洲、教会在总督辖区的作用和建立、生活条件、争论行为、社会结构和土著文化知识的重要信息。然而，这些信息仍然是“锁定的”，只有少数人可以访问。现在，人工智能（AI）的新发展使我们能够训练计算机对这些文件进行自动转录。它们还通过注释特定的单词和知识类别，促进了识别、查询、提取、映射和分析信息的新方法。利用语言学手段，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。以LoC手稿部的汉斯·p·克劳斯（Hans P. Kraus）藏品为主要案例研究，提议的奖学金将：1)实现手写文本识别模型，以完成16世纪和17世纪馆藏中可用数字材料的自动转录；2)使用自然语言处理技术创建该集合的注释版本，从而能够以文本挖掘风格识别和分析信息；3)介绍这些方法，培训员工，并在LoC建立一个管道，以便在其他西班牙美洲收藏品中实施这些方法；4)与LoC、LC实验室和西班牙裔阅览室的用户和成员一起开展可行性研究，利用人工智能方法创建公民科学计划。

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.