Historical Ink: 19th Century Latin American Spanish Newspaper Corpus with LLM OCR Correction

Abstract: This paper presents two significant contributions: First, it introduces a novel dataset of 19th-century Latin American newspaper texts, addressing a critical gap in specialized corpora for historical and linguistic analysis in this region. Second, it develops a flexible framework that utilizes a LLM for OCR error correction and linguistic surface form detection in digitized corpora. This semi-automated framework is adaptable to various contexts and datasets and is applied to the newly created dataset.