Subaltern Recogito
Annotating the sixteenth-century maps of the Geographic Reports of New Spain
Our project is using Recogito to explore the benefits of utilising digital annotation for the analysis of historical maps, specifically in relation to a corpus of maps produced in sixteenth-century Mexico for a series of reports known as the Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España (RGs).
The RGs were derived from a questionnaire ordered by the Spanish Crown, which was sent out to all territories that were under Spanish rule, with the ultimate aim of amassing a wealth of information about the state of these territories. These reports, compiled between 1577 and 1586, form the 2.8 million word corpus which is currently being analysed as part of the project: ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of sixteenth-century historical sources’. One of the questions in the RGs requested that the recipient create “a plan in colour of the streets, plazas, and other significant features such as monasteries, as well as can be sketched easily on paper, indicating which part of the town faces south or north.”[1] Whilst some recipients chose to ignore this request, a considerable number ensured the creation of these maps and, as a result, a corpus of 78 maps has survived for the Mexico area.
These maps are a unique reflection on sixteenth-century settlements in Mexico, drawn using a combination of indigenous and European techniques and ideas. This interplay of indigenous and European voices is a key part of these maps’ significance, offering a unique insight into multiple perceptions of space and place during this crucial period in Mexico’s history. The maps of the RGs contain a great variety of information, both textual and pictographic, which offer invaluable insight into the historical and geographical contexts in which these maps were produced. This information includes proper names in the form of both traditions, logographic Mesoamerican toponyms and people’s names and European alphabetic glosses.
Digitally annotating these maps using Recogito gives us a promising opportunity to analyse this corpus, which is not heavily text-based, but features text alongside pictographic depictions of space and place. Annotating both logographic toponyms and alphabetic descriptions and place-names will enable us to better understand the different ways in which Mesoamerican indigenous spatial knowledge and portrayals changed over time, and the processes through which these became ‘subaltern’ to European thinking.
Citizen Science: Workshop and Mappathons
We recently delivered the first stage of our project: a) we created an ontology tailored to the subject to annotate the maps, and b) we carried out a workshop which was attended by 27 scholars from UNAM and ENAH, delivering training on Recogito and presenting an introduction to the Spatial Humanities and the use of these technologies. A second workshop will be also delivered to researchers and students at the University of Texas at Austin next week. From here, this is evolving into a citizen science project, where we meet online every week to take part in ‘mappathons’ with all our participants, completing the annotation of our full corpus of sixteenth-century maps.
Keep an eye on our progress and see our wider work on the Relaciones Geográficas and sixteenth-century Mexico on Twitter and our website.
Our team:
We are working with our colleagues in the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections at The University of Texas at Austin, the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH), The National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), and the University of Lisbon.
Lancaster University: Patricia Murrieta Flores & Katherine Bellamy
University of Texas at Austin: Albert A. Palacios & Kelly McDonough
UNAM: Mariana Favila Vázquez
ENAH: Javier López Camacho
INAH: Diego Jiménez-Badillo
University of Lisbon: Bruno Martins
[1] Howard F. Cline, Handbook of Middle American Indians, Volume 12: Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Part One, (University of Texas Press, 2014).
