The reason for the Spanish Paleography Tool
Hundreds of thousands of handwritten documents produced in Spanish speaking countries during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries remain either little studied or totally untouched in dozens of archives throughout the world, especially in Spain and the Americas. They contain myriads of records of the experiences, struggles and creations of generation upon generation of ancestors of the more than four hundred million people that speak Spanish as their native tongue in today’s world. It is a vast accumulated human experience worth learning about and disseminating.
Yet the handwriting styles used in the writing of these documents are so different from today’s script that they are almost totally unrecognizable for contemporary readers, except for a very small community of scholars that have been trained in paleography, the study and deciphering of old handwriting systems. So few are those with this training that it would take them forever to read and disseminate to others the huge amount of precious historical (and cultural) information contained in the referred documentation.
The Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool is a resource created to disseminate in a broad manner, via the Internet, the learning of the deciphering of the old Spanish handwriting styles so that larger numbers of scholars in the humanities and members of the public at large may become effective, competent, and even fluent readers of the old Spanish scripts and contribute to the uncovering and sharing of the still greatly unknown historical experience of a large segment of humanity. By offering the opportunity to considerably increase the numbers of those trained in the deciphering and reading of the early-modern Spanish text, the Spanish Paleography Tool hopes to contribute to the opening of a new frontier of cultural knowledge and awareness that we can all benefit from.