Human experiences are recorded and communicated mostly as text which are increasingly available as digital corpora. A major challenge for researchers in the social sciences, humanities and computer sciences is how to use these texts in interdisciplinary settings to develop cohesive understandings of the experiences described. Understanding geographies in textual sources has received a significant amount of research interest in recent years across fields as diverse as geographical information science (GISc), corpus linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), human geography, literary studies, and digital humanities. The current state of the art involves using geoparsing to automatically identify the place names in texts and allocate them to a coordinate (Grover et al 2010). Once georeferenced in this way, place names can be read into a geographical information system for mapping and spatial analysis. Analysis can also be conducted using techniques from corpus linguistics and NLP to see what words or themes are associated with the place name such as the place being associated with emotional responses such as being beautiful or inspiring fear. This combination of approaches is known as geographical text analysis (GTA) (Gregory et al 2015). While GTA provides a useful starting point for understanding the geographies within a corpus, it is highly quantitative, is limited to named places for which coordinates can be found, and has little concept of time. Yet, as narratives of journeys make abundantly clear, human experiences of geography are more often subjective and more suited to qualitative representation. In these cases, "geography" is not limited to named places; rather, it incorporates the vague, imprecise, and ambiguous, with references to, for example, "the camp", "the hills in the distance", or "further down the road", and includes the relative locations using terms such as "near to", "on the left", or "a few hours' journey" from. These qualitative representations are necessary contextual referents but cannot be managed within geospatial technologies such as GIS. To understand on a large scale the ways in which humans describe and relate to the world around them, then, we need to be able to visually represent and interpret the geographies authors describe in ways that combine the qualitative nature of described spatial experiences with methods that render them quantitatively analysable. Drawing on a strongly interdisciplinary team, this grant will develop approaches that allow us to identify, extract, visualise, and analyse qualitative and quantitative references to place and time. These methods will be applied to analyses of two large corpora: one a corpus of travel writing about the English Lake District, predominantly written in the 18th and 19th centuries; the other, a corpus of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Although based on very different types of journey - leisure travel and forced migration respectively - both corpora represent a collection of unique voices that coalesce to generate complex cultural and experiential geographies. The project will explore how cutting-edge digital technologies from NLP, corpus linguistics, Qualitative Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (QSTR), GISc, and visual analytics can help us understand how authors themselves represented the geographies that surrounded them and explore the individual and aggregate representation of the sense and experience of place that these texts contain. The resulting applications will have great significance for scholarly and non-academic audiences alike.

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; and 4) 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.

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.