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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

>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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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

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

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.

Awesome thank you!

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

You may be surprised (or not?) at how many important scientific and historical works are done by armchair practitioners.

No problem at all, if you have some databases or catalogs I’d be interested in learning more

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.

Hit me up, if you can. I’m focused on neolatin texts from the renaissance. Less than 30% of known book editions have been scanned and less than 5% translated. And that’s before even getting to the manuscripts.

https://Ancientwisdomtrust.org

Also working on kids handwriting recognition for https://smartpaperapp.com

Sounds actually perfect. I’ll send you an email. Thank you!

This is a different person from who you originally asked lol

Right yes I do know :)

Please do!

Do you have six fingers, per chance ?

I don’t know if the six-fingered man was a Spaniard, but Inigo Montoya was…

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