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Comment by kace91

1 day ago

>I’m interested in the Conquistadors and their extensive accounts of their expeditions, but holy cow reading 16th century handwritten Spanish and translating it at the same time is a nightmare, requiring a ton of expertise and inside field knowledge

Completely off topic, but out of curiosity, where are you reading these documents? As a Spaniard I’m kinda interested.

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kace91

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throwup238  1 day ago

I use the Portal de Archivos Españoles [1] for Spanish colonial documents. Each country has their own archive but the Spanish one has the most content (35 million digitized pages)

The hard part is knowing where to look since most of the images haven’t gone through HRT/OCR or indexing so you have to understand Spanish colonial administration and go through the collections to find stuff.

[1] https://pares.cultura.gob.es/pares/en/inicio.html

  • throwout4110  1 day ago

    Want to collab on a database and some clustering and analysis? I’m a data scientist at FAIR with an interest in antiquarian docs and books

    • throwup238  1 day ago

      Sadly I'm just an amateur armchair historian (at best) so I doubt I'd be of much help. I'm mostly only doing the translation for my own edification

      1 reply →

    • vintermann  20 hours ago

      You should maybe reach out to the author of this blog post, professor Mark Humphries. Or to the genealogy communities, we struggle with handwritten historical texts no public AI model can make a dent in, regularly.

    • rmonvfer  1 day ago

      Spaniard here. Let me know if I can somehow help navigate all of that. I’m very interested in history and everything related to the 1400-1500 period (although I’m not an expert by any definition) and I’d love to see what modern technology could do here, specially OCRs and VLMs.

      1 reply →