During our internship at the Archivio Storico of the Gregoriana, we focused on transcribing letters in the correspondence of the 17th century Jesuit and polymath, Athanasius Kircher. Our transcription work was done on the GATE platform, and we also worked to improve the metadata already present on the platform. This internship gave us the opportunity to engage intensively with a number of different handwriting styles, languages, abbreviations, and problems of textual legibility and condition of the manuscripts. 

Characteristic of a polyglot, Kircher’s correspondence is present in a truly staggering variety of languages, from the standard Latin to the various common tongues like Spanish, Italian, and German, and even letters written in Greek and Arabic! While such a diversity of languages certainly poses archival and transcription challenges, none of Kircher’s professional writings perhaps display his staggering knowledge of languages as well as his letters. The content itself of the letters varied wildly, depending on who was corresponding with Kircher. Some correspondents, presumably patrons or their representatives, discussed donating various objects to the Kircherian Museum, whether they be novel inventions or exotic flora or fauna (e.g. a delivery of a crocodile specimen to Rome); others still were Kircher’s fellow Jesuits, and these letters grant insights into the Society’s worldwide operations at the time—from mundane logistics to discussions of missionary work in far flung corners of the globe. 

Concerning the actual process of transcription, one of the most interesting and rewarding aspects of this work came in the identification of the names of cities, countries, and people in Latin, because often these Latin names are not as well known anymore. For example, in Kircher’s correspondence with Andreas Schaffer S.J., regarding minerals excavated in Hungary, many smaller towns in present-day Hungary and Slovenia were referenced by their Latin names, sometimes making these towns difficult to track down on the internet, and making us doubt whether we had transcribed the word correctly. 

We experienced a number of challenges in our work of transcription, which included difficulties in legibility of a letter due to unfamiliarity with some correspondents’ handwriting, ink bleeding through pages, degradation of manuscripts, abbreviations of words that were unfamiliar, among other problems. Fortunately, due to the breadth of Kircher’s correspondence that is preserved, the more time one spends reading letters, the better one becomes acquainted with the handwriting, abbreviations, etc. Certainly the most difficult cases were those when only one or a few brief letters survived from a particular correspondent, rendering it quite difficult to improve in one’s ability to understand the correspondent’s handwriting or other idiosyncrasies. 

We were also able to engage in AI technology during our internship. Often, if we could identify certain letters of a word, but not others, we would ask ChatGPT to provide similarly spelled words in that language (often Latin). When the AI would provide a word we thought was the correct one, we would, of course, verify this word in a Latin dictionary, and make sure it is the actual word that we can see in the scan of the manuscript. We used this process to determine a word that seemed to be spelled “gusllicerer” was actually “polliceror” in a certain manuscript. Not only were we able to identify this word, but knowing that the letters we thought were “gu” were actually “po” helped us with future words we encountered.

Overall, our internship was both very meaningful, academically and personally, and we are thankful to have had this exceptional opportunity at the Archivio Storico of the PUG!

• Nazwin Palines, Jonah Tran, Jack Young, Christopher Winter