Digging into Early Colonial Mexico (DECM Project) is an effort to share and analyze datasets of the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España, 16th and 17th century documents that provide insight into indigenous and colonized groups of the Virreinatos, or regions of the early Americas that were being colonized by Spanish viceroys. The project combines language processing and geospatial analysis to answer questions about how information was collected and preserved, specifically:
How can language technologies and geospatial analysis facilitate answering important questions about the early colonisation of America? How did the Spanish colonial authorities portray and use information about the newly conquered territories and people? Can we identify, map, and analyse the geographies associated with the colonial period of Mexico, and what was said about them in historical sources, through expedite computational means?
The project team comprises interdisciplinary scholars from the UK, Mexico, and Portugal, with expertise in history, archaeology, geography, and computer science. All datasets are linked to the project’s Github accounts, and the results of their methodological explorations and data analysis are shared through regularly updated posts on the DECM website.
dh+lib Review
This post was produced through a cooperation between Elizabeth Parke, Christine Salek, Kayla Abner, Abbie Norris-Davidson, Amy Gay, Olivia Staciwa, and Ruth Carpenter (Editors-at-Large), Hillary Richardson and Linsey Ford (Editors for the week), Claudia Berger, Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, Rachel Starry, and Pamella Lach (dh+lib Review Editors), and John Russell (Editor in Chief).