technology ·
How AI is bringing Paraguay's 19th-century press back to life
17, Paraguay's Ministry of Education and Sciences presented Memoria escrita de un gigante, 1845-1904, a free, searchable digital archive of the country's 19th-century newspapers.
The country's president thanked my family for the project and said that, working with the ministry, the archive would reach Paraguay's schools. For me, the occasion closed a circle that opened nearly 20 years ago.
When I served as U.S. ambassador to Paraguay from 2006 to 2008, the National Library held fragile newspapers that recorded the country's wars and political upheavals alongside the daily concerns of ordinary people. Many were printed on decaying paper, and some editions survived in a single known copy.
We devoted about $50,000 in U.S. cultural preservation funds to microfilming 51 of those newspapers. Microfilm saved the pages but did not make them searchable.
Anyone looking for a single name still had to wind through reel after reel, squinting at faded type and columns that ran into one another. Even trained historians could spend days on one query.
