Work on the “Unlocking the Colonial Archive” project – which was funded through the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions program, a collaborative initiative between the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council – has been completed.
Dr. Kelly McDonough, Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and Dr. Albert A. Palacios, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator and lecturer in the School of Information, co-led the three-year initiative. With $149,915.00 in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the project has focused on transcribing digitized Spanish colonial materials in the Benson Latin American Collection and its post-custodial partners, addressing linguistic challenges in Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technologies, and sharing innovative workflows with the scholarly community.
Key activities include the development of HTR models for Spanish calligraphic styles from the 16th through the 18th century, the establishment of a publicly accessible data repository for transcriptions of Benson collection materials, and the organization of paleography and digital humanities institutes that benefitted scholars from over 15 countries and 20 U.S. states.
Project dissemination has been extensive, with presentations and keynote speeches at conferences and institutions across Latin America and the United States, highlighting the use of artificial intelligence in historical research.
You can read more about the program activities here: https://apps.neh.gov/publicquery/AwardDetail.aspx?gn=HC-278116-21 and read the final project white paper here: https://hdl.handle.net/2152/129230.