Subaltern Recogito
Citizen Science Mappathons | Annotating 16th century maps of New Spain
Since our last update, we have completed a series of six ‘mappathons’ where participants annotated a series of historic maps. These maps offer us a unique insight into sixteenth-century Mexico, drawn in a combination of indigenous and European techniques and ideas. If you missed our first post, click here to read more about these maps and their significance.
In June earlier this year, we held an introductory workshop at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México where 30 scholars were trained in the use of Recogito for annotating our corpus of Relaciones Geográficas maps. This involved introducing participants to the theory behind Spatial Humanities, Linked Data, and distant reading approaches, as well as the practical use of Recogito for the annotation of these particular maps. Following this workshop, we organised six ‘mappathons’ over the course of two months, where the scholars continued to meet in collective annotation sessions, continuing their training in Recogito and creating an annotated dataset of the maps.
The variety of material contained on each of the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas meant that we needed to develop an ontology for the annotation process, to ensure consistency across all the annotations. We ultimately decided on a list of 21 entity types, with further sub-‘labels’ where relevant.
For example, the entities and labels for the above map excerpts would be as follows:
A [Entity: Activity] | [Tag: Warfare]
B [Entity: Glosses] | [Tag: Rubric]
C [Entity: Location] | [Tag: Toponym]
D [Entity: Uncertain]
The documents were distributed between the scholars, who, using the ontology we developed, meticulously annotated the maps, resulting in an invaluable dataset of metadata about the array of information featured on the maps.
The following example shows the annotated map for the ‘Pueblo de de Chimalhuacán-Atoyac’:
The central highlighted toponym glyph is a logographic depiction of the place-name Chimalhuacán, a Nahuatl word meaning ‘place of the shields’. This meaning is conveyed through the glyph, which is drawn with the typical glyph for a hill (often synonymous with a settlement unit known as the ‘āltepētl’), with a shield depicted at the towards the summit.
With this initial series of six mappathons now complete, we have twenty fully annotated maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, which will be made available at the end of the project. The annotated material on the maps will allow 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.
There are still some maps of the Relaciones left to annotate and, beyond this, there are hundreds of sixteenth-century maps of Mexico held by the Archivo General de la Nación. We will be organising another series of workshops and mappathons aiming to annotate even more of these maps in collaboration with our colleagues at the University of Texas, Austin, in the coming months.
We will also be creating an online dictionary of sixteenth-century Mexican logographic and alphabetic toponyms and proper names, using the information derived from these datasets. This resource will continue to be updated with the results of future workshops and our wider work with the Relaciones Geográficas. To keep up to date with our progress, see our Twitter and website.
Our team:
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
