Title: Digging into Early Colonial Mexico (DECM) Historical Gazetteer

What it is:

A searchable digital geographic dictionary of 16^th-17^th-century Mexican toponyms, their present-day place names, and geographical coordinates.

It includes a GIS dataset with shapefiles containing geographic information for early colonial administrative, ecclesiastical, and civic localities–from provinces, to dioceses, to villages–for interactive mapping.

It deploys, for its historical data, the 16th-century Relaciones Geogràficas de Nueva España compiled from 1579-1585 in Madrid, that was based on a 1577 questionnaire sent to civic sites in New Spain, as well as modern editions of the RG, related secondary studies, and similar compilations for the province of Yucatán.

How (well) it works:

I’ve been obsessed with this database and the larger project of which it is a part—“Digging Into Early Colonial Mexico”—since I discovered it in 2021.  https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/digging-ecm/

It applies a range of computational techniques, including Text Mining, Geographic Information Systems, and Corpus Linguistics, to render newly usable an early exemplar of imperial technology, the printed administrative survey, that was compiled in the late 17^th century into a multivolume, multimodal, multilingual work.  Through semi-automated access, applied language technologies, and geospatial analysis, this early modern textual corpus and its several thousand pages become uniquely functional despite their resistance to easy translation into contemporary digital form.  

It also exemplifies the interdisciplinary and inter-institutional possibilities of Digital Humanities, bringing together specialists from a number of research centers, universities, and academic disciplines to share knowledge and professional experience in new ways.  And its acknowledgement of manual disambiguation as a necessary part of the process confirms the need for the slow, careful, historically and contextually aware analog-to-digital transformation foregrounded in current theories of feminist and post-colonial digital praxis.

What you’d need to have, know, or use:

Comprehensive primary sources in print pdf or digital editions.

Present-day cartographic, geographical, or toponymic databases: eg. GeoNames; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) place names database; Getty Thesaurus of Geographical Names. (see Murrieta-Flores 2023 for topographic and toponymic catalogues and databases specific to the colonial New Spain period.)

Adobe Acrobat or Google Drive (OCR conversion from PDF image format to machine-readable text/txt format)

Excel for shapefiles, tables, combined information (xy coordinates, notes, bibliographical references), and metadata.

ArcGIS or equivalent GIS Desktop tool for shapefiles: to join colonial toponyms to current place names for linguistic and spatial disambiguation (may require manual input and review) and to create layers.

Alternatives or additions in extreme cases:

Named Entity Recognition tool in (eg) Recogito (for extracting place names from modern, European, monolingual documents) with Natural Language Processing platform like Tagtog for model training.

ArcMap and Google Earth for advanced spatial disambiguation

Useful links:

For more on the making or potential applications of the DECM Historical Gazetteer:

Murrieta-Flores, P. (2023) The Creation of the Digging into Early Colonial Mexico Historical Gazetteer. Process, Methods, and Lessons Learnt. Figshare. 10.6084/m9.figshare.22310338

https://github.com/patymurrieta/Digging-into-Early-Colonial-Mexico

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yC5-lDeN-piIJaDC2kAVfIqi1YqBeN2A8_Ft-Cskyq4/edit

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/9c6efb33ef2b4afdab3c9c6865dbb4cc

For additional inspiring projects coming out of this database:

https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/digging-ecm/2019/07/pathways-to-understanding-16th-century-mesoamerica/