Come work at the Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab (AMPL) of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Research!
Put your paleography to work. Once you can read colonial Spanish manuscripts in our paleography reading group, you can help catalog documents that have not been described since they were written, and train the machine-learning models that will make whole archives searchable.
Collaborative cataloging. We are reviewing thousands of images of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents from the city of Tunja, in the central highlands of Colombia. They were written by scribes and notaries for people from every part of this very diverse society, who came to them to record everything from contracts and business deals to wedding arrangements and wills. Together they give a fascinating window into everyday life in a colonial Latin American city. We photographed them with colleagues in the Colombian foundation Neogranadina, as part of a broader effort to digitize endangered archives and libraries in that country. Now they need to be described, document by document, before researchers can find and use them. You can see the results of our work so far on Neogranadina’s digital archive, Zasqua.
Handwriting recognition. Computers still struggle to read four-hundred-year-old handwriting. We are training machine-learning models to read colonial Latin American manuscripts, using the pages our team has transcribed over twenty years. You will prepare transcriptions and ground truth: pages matched line by line to what they say, which the models learn from. The aim is to make entire archives searchable by their full text, and not only by their catalog descriptions.
Requires reading knowledge of Spanish. Students who have worked on these projects in the past have gone on to do amazing research on colonial Latin America, even at graduate level.
Research assistants work about 3–6 hours a week, including a weekly lab meeting, and can receive course credit; some projects require a two-quarter commitment. To apply, see this position on UCSB’s Undergraduate Research Directory.