The rich culture of the Yucatán Peninsula should be preserved with utmost care. How can AI technology help? What are the possibilities, pitfalls, and presidents? We take a quick look.
Preserving Tradition Through Innovation: AI’s Role in Documenting Yucatán’s Culture
The Yucatán Peninsula is a treasure trove of traditions and historic sites vital to the global culture. Current generations must find ways to preserve Yucatán’s heritage for the generations to come. One type of technology to ease this journey is artificial intelligence. AI tools have become capable of nuance like detecting plagiarism (see https://academichelp.net/plagiarism-checkers/scribbr-review.html). But what are their concrete applications for Yucatán’s future?
AI and the Digital Preservation of History
AI can aid in archiving Yucatán’s cultural gems. Advanced algorithms are now employed to digitalize ancient manuscripts like maps. AI-assisted digitalization of historical documents is necessary because as this article advises, “merely digitizing manuscripts and codexes is not enough.” The verbatim transcription of scanned texts is needed for the “accurate preservation of textual content, easier information search, and further analyses.”
We’ve seen digitalization succeed before. In the Bovary Project, the manuscript digitization of the French writer Gustave Flaubert’s work performed at the University of Rouen, AI helped perform automatic handwriting recognition, decoding the author’s drafts and surrounding materials, such as its Arabic translations or the author’s correspondence.
AI-powered scanning tools can create a searchable dataset to analyze fragile Mayan codices without risking damage. The goal isn’t just to store information but to make it understandable for people everywhere. Some ethical concerns, of course, arise. AI tools often reflect the priorities of wealthier regions, overlooking endangered languages and creating digital inequality. This poses questions about ownership — are local communities being empowered or sidelined? Additionally, while AI can assist, it can’t replace the authenticity of a Mayan elder’s storytelling. The focus should be on balancing technology with human connection.
The Role of AI in Language Preservation
The Yucatán Peninsula is home to over 30 surviving languages of the Mayan family, as well as artifacts in Proto-Mayan and Classic Maya. Many of these languages face the risk of extinction. They carry centuries of identity, but modern pressures often push them aside. And, as this article states, “Language death entails significant cultural, personal, and ecological loss.”
AI offers solutions. For example, language models and voice recognition software can document and analyze spoken words, capturing everything from pronunciation to cultural nuances. Alongside digitalized documents, the resulting data would form archives that preserve vocabulary and maintain a snapshot of the culture itself. AI-powered systems efficiently collect and organize large amounts of such data, aiding the creation and analysis of text corpora.
In linguistics, a text corpus is a dataset of natively digital and digitalized language resources. It is necessary for building natural language processing tools that use machine learning to help computers understand and communicate with human language. Real-time translation relies on it, and real-time translation is just one powerful avenue for making endangered languages more accessible. It can introduce them to a broader audience and help native speakers keep using them in everyday life.
Enriching Tourism Through AI
Imagine planning your visit to a cenote or a Mayan ruin with an AI-generated itinerary that educates you on the historical significance of each site as it guides you.
AI excels in the visual realm of virtual and augmented reality experiences. Through machine learning, it’s now possible to reconstruct historical sites and explore an ancient temple without leaving your room. Companies like Ubisoft are leading this charge with virtual tours of ancient civilizations. Looping back into language preservation, Ubisoft also launched the Hieroglyphics Initiative, a machine-learning project developed with Google and Psycle, to simplify hieroglyph translation. Using Google’s TensorFlow, the program trains on 40,000+ crowd-sourced images to recognize nearly 1,000 symbols.
Tourists could explore Chichén Itzá with interactivity that guided tours can’t achieve. AI algorithms can tailor experiences to individual interests, catering to history buffs or people just looking for Instagram-worthy photos. It would also be a big help for non-Spanish speakers: AI-driven translators erase language barriers so they don’t get in the way of enjoying the local vibe.
The post Modernizing Cultural Reporting: The Role of AI in Documenting Yucatán’s Art and Culture Scene first appeared on The Yucatan Times.