Digging into Early Colonial Mexico Project

The Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources project uses part of the corpus known as Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España – one of the most important colonial historical sources of America – concerned with the territory of Mexico, to create and develop novel computational approaches for the semi-automated exploration of thousands of pages contained in these 16th century documents.

Tackling important historical and methodological questions, and highly demanding challenges in the study of these written sources, we are extracting, analysing, and visualising information that can improve our understanding of this period, and expedite the process by which we study these documents.

Our highly interdisciplinary team is combining techniques from different disciplines, including Corpus Linguistics, Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Geographic Information Systems, to address questions related to the recording of information about indigenous cultures, the Spanish exploration of indigenous social and religious concepts, the appropriation and ideas about place and space in the indigenous world, and their attitudes towards politics and economy.

Link to the webpage of the project:

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/digging-ecm/

The contents of this repository:

The project has created multiple outputs that you will find in this repository. Not all the outputs has been released yet, but we will do in the course of this and next year. These are organised in the folders you can find here. These are:

1. The DECM Corpus: A digital corpus of the texts of Relaciones Geográficas with different versions, including an annotated version ready for text mining and machine learning experiments.
2. The DECM Ontology: A tailored ontology for the annotation and mining of information for historical texts related to the colonial history of Mexico and Central America.
3. The DECM Gazetteer: A digital gazetteer of historical places in Mexico available in different formats and built from detailed research. This includes a GIS dataset with 71 shapefiles that include geographic information of colonial provinces, alcaldias, corregimientos, diocesis, among many others, as well as thousands of historical cities, towns, villages, and other places.
4. The DECM Sixteenth century Gazetteer: In addition to the general colonial gazetteer, we created a 16th century version with the places mentioned in primary sources including the Relaciones Geográficas (1577-1585) and the Suma de Visitas de los Pueblos de la Nueva España (1548-1550), as well as information on the political, religious and administrative units of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. This is integrated in an interoperable model containing thousands of historical locations with alternative spelling place-name variations. The dataset also includes 40 tables with additional historical information related to toponyms, languages, repositories, maps, etc.
5. The Subaltern Recogito Dataset: A digital annotated version of the maps included in the RGs
6. The Subaltern Recogito Ontology: A tailored ontology for the annotation and mining of information from 16th century Mexican maps.
7. Mesoamerican Pathways: A public engagement online storymap resource.
8. Geographical Text Analysis: developed by the project to carry out spatial queries from annotated texts and an accompanying gazetteer.