Over the last two decades or so, scholars and enthusiasts have found several ways to preserve historical documents, taking advantage of the evolution of the Internet and an expansive audience interested in such material. Digital Peruvian historical sources reflect this global trend, with primary sources being especially rich. In Peru, the digitization process or technique has not been confined to archivists, librarians, and historians. Rather, the digital format has brought a revolution itself that has blurred the distance between experts and amateurs and has posed new challenges for preservation and access to historical collections. Images, photographs, paintings, interviews, testimonies, TV commercials, and much more have been digitized and stored in multiple online platforms, such as various different social media, YouTube, and SoundCloud among others, by professionals and amateurs alike. The result may be mixed, but historians with a focus on the Peruvian experience will find a bounty of material among which to pick and choose.
Article
Pedro Telles da Silveira and Thiago Lima Nicodemo
Digital resources are an encompassing category that frames distinct digital projects, from the digitization of collections to the presentation and increased accessibility of already-digitized documents. In Brazil, digitization projects have gained momentum from 2006, spurred by the debates related to digital sovereignty, and have peaked around the interval between 2014 and 2016. Since then, the intensity of these debates and the rate of digitization of collections have dwindled. Nonetheless, large projects, such as Biblioteca Brasiliana Digital and the numerous projects led by the Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, have become increasingly relevant in the current landscape of Brazilian historical research. Besides these developments, the scenario of digitization in Brazil has opened up space for different initiatives, among them personal archives. Although personal archives evoke numerous theoretical dilemmas, such as the distinction between private and public spheres and the deliberative agency of their forms of organization, they have been among the many roads to digitization of collections in Brazil. To understand the place that personal archives occupy among the digitization projects in Brazil, it is therefore necessary to understand how the more general category of digital resources has developed in Brazil.
Article
Ian Kisil Marino and Thiago Lima Nicodemo
Historians devoted to telling the story of the COVID-19 pandemic should question the archival conditions involved. In this article, we approach the archival landscape in Latin America in view of the COVID-19 pandemic, which particularly unfolded in the digital environment. First, we suggest a review of archival digitization in Latin America, providing context for the conditions observed during the pandemic. Second, we discuss the emergence of digital memory initiatives that focused on COVID-19, showing typological relations that may arise from transnational analyses. Accordingly, we dive into some Brazilian archival initiatives with major ethnographic rigor since, in addition to closely representing the reality of the region, they provide us with a more accurate immersion into the agents, platforms, and challenges of this pandemic digital undertaking. Lastly, we point out the complex situation of public archives amidst the mass of documents resulting from the pandemic. This way, we pose questions about the increasingly important interface between history, archives, and a policy for transparency of data.
Article
Ian Kisil Marino, Pedro Telles da Silveira, and Thiago Lima Nicodemo
The category of “informal archives” was initially proposed by Adam Auerbach in a case study on the role of informal archives held by social leaders of peripheral communities in India. “Informal archives” imply forms of historical documentation beyond state authority, and preserved in a rough, poor, and ephemeral manner (in the digital realm). They typically involve connections to the past articulated by different social demands, whether regarding the dispute for a national memory in the digital-public realm, or the nostalgic nature of certain connections to the past, or even the social/political activism of civil society organizations. For this reason, informal archives are in unmapped locations, and in order to be accessed they need to be ethnographically reached. An empirical research based on data raised in early 2020 shows that, even with the creation of a theoretical basis for this kind of digital resource, constant updates will remain necessary due to the unstable nature of the subject.
Article
Victoria Lyall
Launched in 1997, FAMSI.org established itself as the leading digital platform for the promotion and dissemination of Mesoamerican scholarship to the widest possible audience. The online arm of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., a nonprofit pledged to foster increased understanding of ancient Mesoamerican cultures, FAMSI.org crosscut disciplinary divisions and facilitated communication between scholars in the United States and those in Latin America. The eight-member Board of Directors and its advisory committee ensured that the foundation would harness the spirit of generosity and creativity that characterized the early days of the Internet for the benefit of a likewise emergent discipline. As the Website developed, FAMSI sought partnerships with and contributions from institutions around the world in order to make educational resources publicly available. The Website hosts a remarkable amount of primary research material, including image databases, contemporary and historical indigenous-language dictionaries, ethnographic videos, maps, and an up-to-date, searchable subject-specific bibliography, all of which are available in both English and Spanish and accessible at no cost to visitors.
Between 1997 and 2006, the Website grew exponentially, but like many of its early counterparts, the site’s utility and navigability ultimately suffered as a result of the rapid development of new software and the obsolescence of existing digital platforms; searches became sluggish and unwieldy. While visitorship remained high for an academic site—over a million unique visitors a year—a 2012 survey indicated that scholars frequented only known parts of the site while novice users spent as little as a few minutes on the site. The global economic crisis of 2008 destabilized FAMSI’s funding, and in 2010 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) assumed stewardship of the foundation as well as the Website. The museum began to maintain and review FAMSI.org, ultimately deciding to update and transform the Website into a new platform, AncientAmericas.org, which broadens the scope beyond that of Mesoamerica. FAMSI, with its dedication to research and online collaboration, became the principal resource for the research of ancient American cultures for both a scholarly and general audience beginning in the mid-1990s. Its enduring legacy is the spirit of interdisciplinary and international cooperation and generosity that it fostered.
Article
Jorge Felipe-Gonzalez
The expansion of the Internet and computing technologies has transformed, heuristically, methodologically, and epistemologically, the scholarship on modern Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. An increasing number of primary and secondary sources are now available online. Archives, universities, libraries, research centers, and other institutions have digitized partially or entirely historical collections and archival records and made them public through digital portals in a variety of formats. Users can instantly access, analyze, search, share, transfer, visualize, and interact with a vast amount of historical data on slavery and the slave trade, which, in the late 20th century, was scattered across archives and libraries. The increasing Web presence of digital repositories on Latin American historical slavery and the slave trade is changing previous scholarly perceptions about broader demographic, historical, and social issues, as well as about the everyday life of enslaved Africans. Digital databases on the slave trade, for instance, are answering long-term historiographical concerns regarding the number of captives carried to the Americas, their African embarkation regions, or the nationality of the carriers. Digital repositories and databases help to better understand the African geographical origins of the slaves and their ethnicities, a key component in the formation of the Afro-Latin American culture. Digitized repositories such as baptismal, marriage, and burial archival records and databases on runaway or self-liberated slaves, plantation lists, or court cases are filling gaps in scholars’ understanding of the internal dynamics of the institution of slavery, which characterized most of Latin American history for about three centuries.
Article
Silvia E. Gutiérrez De la Torre and Miguel D. Cuadros-Sánchez
The Digital Library of Ibero-American Heritage: Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano (BDPI) is a metasearch engine that provides access to the digital resources of fifteen countries in Iberian-America. This tool is provided with a simple search, an advanced search, and an Application Programming Interface (API), all of which provide different points of entry into the digital objects’ metadata as well as direct links to these sources in their original repositories. These objects can be queried through multiple fields such as resource type, author, edition, date, full text search, and providing institution, among others. The BDPI’s collections contain a selection of documents curated by specific word searches on the digital objects’ metadata. These collections range from botany and fauna to gastronomy, folk tales, the Paraguayan War, and sound records, just to name a few examples. The BDPI is part of a new stage in the long-term efforts of national libraries across Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, with the purpose of enabling public access to historical materials via the Internet. Thus, the analysis of this initiative implies also a reflection about the overall public importance of libraries and the open access to their collections. Due to technological and institutional difficulties, the BDPI still has a lot of room for improvement, especially in terms of mapping variants into more standardized metadata. Nonetheless, this digitization and web outreach initiative has great potential for scholars around the globe interested in the study of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.
Article
Stephanie Wood
Mesoamerica is a culture zone that stretches geographically from approximately north-central Mexico into the northwestern half of Central America. Human occupation of this region dates back thousands of years. The end of the Post-Classic Period (c. 1519) is marked by the invasion of the region by Europeans, who were looking to extract goods, services, and taxes from the Mesoamerican peoples. Spanish occupation stretched into the early 19th century. Neocolonial Mesoamerica, of the 19th and 20th centuries, came to experience increasing influences from the United States, Britain, Germany, and other external powers. The past two centuries have also been marked by a continuing local control by a minority, Euro-originating elite over a majority, indigenous population, even as what we once knew as Mesoamerica faded from view. The division between these ethnicities has grown somewhat less clear as a result of the increasing mixed-heritage mestizo or ladino population across the region. Authoritarian regimes marked much of the 20th century, and civilian rule (still without much or any indigenous participation) came at the end of that century, continuing up to the present. But police and military authorities remain present, concerned with internal dissent and unrest at least as much as external threats.
For the present purposes, Digital Mesoamerica has as its focus the region’s indigenous cultures and their histories. Shared cultural traits in the pre-contact era—such as the calendars, glyphic writing, the ball court, human sacrifice, certain legends and religious beliefs, agricultural methods, art, and technologies—set off the many peoples of Mesoamerica from other parts of the Americas. The history of the culture zone is rich for exploring the rise of civilizations, social, economic, and political systems, gender ideologies and practices, religions, land tenure and agricultural systems, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, calendrics, and language diversity (among many other themes). Colonization and its dimensions—such as the impact of epidemic disease, the nature of hybrid religions, evolving tribute and labor systems, struggles over land, efforts to defend some measure of local autonomy, and more—is another arena of great scholarly interest. Contemporary studies are marked by human rights and cultural survival issues, ethnography, mining and other environmental crises, and fair trade, among many other topics.
The most popular and numerous digital resources supporting research and teaching related to Mesoamerican cultures and their histories tend to center on indigenous-authored manuscripts and maps, some of them pre-contact and most of them colonial. These sources are located primarily in Mexican, Guatemalan, U.S., and European repositories, where institutional funds are supporting the creation of open-access digital collections of such materials, along with audio demonstrating language use, videos of all kinds, educational units, and photographs of three-dimensional cultural heritage materials. We are also witnessing moves toward the aggregation of digital content across multiple repositories, such as we see with the World Digital Library, the Internet Archive, and the Getty Research Portal, among others, which increasingly represent Mesoamerica along with other regions of the world. Individuals are also submitting their full-text publications to such aggregators as Academia.edu, announcing their public talks and publications on listservs, Twitter, and Facebook pages, or creating their own robust, one-of-a-kind Web-based projects (with funding from host institutions or national endowments).
Article
Barbara E. Mundy and Dana Leibsohn
Across the last 25 years, digital projects on the visual culture of Latin America have begun to shape, ever more fundamentally, both research and teaching environments. To be sure, books and journal essays remain the dominant mode of publishing (and significantly so), but digital projects—made possible in part because of increasingly accessible databases and less expensive editing platforms—are becoming widely recognized as key elements in the visual and intellectual landscape. The visual culture of Spanish America (also known as colonial visual culture or viceregal visual culture) extends across three centuries, dating from roughly 1520 to 1820. Yet its history, which embraces both the physical traces of everyday life and ephemeral experiences, is arguably the least familiar of Latin America’s artistic and material legacies, especially outside Latin American Studies. Nonetheless, the period has inspired a suite of projects that, considered together, highlight the current potentials (and limits) of digital work, provide useful models for future research, and open onto debates relevant across the digital humanities (as they are currently called).
If this is the basic landscape, then what are the important issues when it comes to the intersections of digital technologies and colonial visual culture? This question is considered here along three avenues. First, what can be achieved with existing software, particularly imaging software, and the inherent epistemological assumptions imbedded in software commonly used? This topic receives the most attention because future research depends so heavily upon our perceptions and understandings of present technological capabilities. The second theme considered is accessibility. Given that institution-driven projects, most often online ventures sponsored by a museum or a library, have opened certain collections to an online public, what are the implications of the accessibility they offer, and how might such databases shape the parameters of research—both in the data they provide and in the kinds of questions their technologies make it possible to pose and answer? Finally, consideration is given to the possibilities and potentials for collaboration that the online environment offers in the study of visual culture of Latin America.
To set a framework for discussion, this article begins with a broad view, “The Object(s) of Visual Culture,” and then turns to examples of scholar-driven projects currently online. Typically, these are generated by scholars working at universities and dependent upon both internal and external funding. The sections “Seeing Images, Knowing Landscapes” and “Epistemological Assumptions” not only describe examples, but also explore the modes of interpretation that digital environments enable and the habits of viewing that are produced as a result. Because scholar-driven projects do not exist in isolation, the article turns to institution-driven projects, represented primarily by digitized museum collections and archives, which have become central components of the research environment. Many projects in this vein are well-described elsewhere—our focus therefore rests on the effects on the larger research landscape, in a section called “Accessibility, Canonicity, Finance.” Lastly, issues related to collaboration are dealt with, in order to both address ideas that are being explored through digital work in other fields, but which have not yet surfaced with much force in the field of colonial visual culture, and to ask why.
Article
Liza Bakewell and Byron Ellsworth Hamann
Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Culture is a variously incarnated bilingual resource for teaching and research on indigenous Mesoamerica. The project’s first iteration began in the late 20th century, when its authors developed a CD-ROM/Internet hybrid and released it on two discs in 2001. This version of the project centered on three interactive primary-source Ñudzavui documents from Oaxaca, Mexico: the prehispanic Codex Nuttall, the Codex Selden (c. 1560), and the Mixtec Vocabulario of Francisco de Alvarado (1593). Ten tutorials on Ñudzavui writing and culture, three introductory video lectures, an interdisciplinary gallery of scholarly portraits, four audio debates, and an atlas supported these core materials.
The explosion of broadband Internet at the dawn of the 21st century suddenly made it possible to deliver Mesolore’s high-resolution images and multimedia content online—and simultaneously sounded the death-knell for the CD-ROM as a medium. The second phase of the project therefore worked to gather funding for an online reincarnation and expansion of the project’s core content to include three documents from Nahua Central Mexico: the Matrícula de Tributos (c. 1519), the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (c. 1552), and the Nahua vocabulary of Alonso de Molina (1555). Like their Oaxacan predecessors, these three documents were supported by ten tutorials. Also new for the online relaunch was an archive of hundreds of primary-source alphabetic documents transcribed from physical archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States. In addition the authors and designers redesigned Mesolore’s atlas to allow for better comparison of the geographic scope of the four core pictorial primary sources (the Nuttall, the Selden, the Matrícula, and the Lienzo). After much drama involving funding agencies, incompetent designers, and incompetent programmers, mesolore.org went live late in 2012, just in time for the non-Apocalypse on December 21.
Although Mesolore’s creators now focus on print publications delivered on paper, their efforts to offer democratically accessible, multidisciplinary pedagogical and research materials to any and all users, as well as translate three-dimensional painted manuscripts into the light of computer screens, generated productive inquiry. Furthermore the detailed interpretations of text offered from the outset insights into how those documents communicated visual information at various scales, as well as how the differing scales of their geographical representations connected to 16th-century political claims.
Article
Allison Margaret Bigelow and Rafael C. Alvarado
The Multepal project is an online thematic research collection devoted to the aggregation, integration, and presentation of primary and secondary sources to support the teaching and research of Mesoamerican culture. The current focus of the project is to create a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj, or Popol Vuh, as it appears in colonial orthography, a genre-defying work from the Maya K’iche’ world that is considered one of the most important indigenous texts to survive the Spanish conquest. The Multepal edition of the Popol Wuj consists of page facsimiles, marked-up textual transcriptions (using TEI), scholarly annotations, and a linked network of characters, places, technologies, and other topics referenced in the story. These tools allow readers to understand the text in its full historical, cultural, and cosmological complexity. The project was originally developed in a graduate seminar in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. It is currently supported by the School of Data Science and the DH@UVa initiative at the University of Virginia. The project title derives from the Yukatekan word Multepal, which refers to a pre-Columbian model of collaborative political organization that the project seeks to emulate through interdisciplinarity and collaboration with early-career and established scholars in the United States and, eventually, through substantial and sustainable exchanges with colleagues in Guatemala.
Article
Celeste González de Bustamante and Verónica Reyes-Escudero
The Documented Border: An Open Access Digital Archive combines creative and research strategies to contribute to the digital humanities. Officially launched in October 2014, the project advances understanding about the borderlands between the United States and Mexico and their peoples during a period of unprecedented change. As a repository and interactive tool, the open-access archive is useful for faculty and student research, journalists, and the community at large.
Currently, the archive divides into two parts. The first part focuses on journalists and human rights activists, and it includes the oral histories of journalists who cover northern Mexico from both sides of the border and human rights activists who are working to improve freedom of expression in Mexico. More than a hundred journalists in Mexico have been murdered since 2000. The oral histories help to illuminate the complex environment in which journalists must work as they negotiate between political and economic forces and the need to inform the public. The second part of the archive features the inner workings of US immigration policies through the documentation (artists’ illustrations) of Operation Streamline, a “streamlined” federal-court proceeding in which a judge determines the status of migrants who are detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
A unique aspect of the Documented Border is its living-archive status. As archives in general struggle to close the gap in the representation of underrepresented communities in the historical record, the Documented Border Digital Archive has gotten in front of current research and primary-source documentation. The archive not only presents the documentation being created by interdisciplinary researchers in digital form but also donates it to the institution to ensure long-term preservation and access. The project forms part of the Borderlands Collection of the University of Arizona Libraries Special Collections.
Article
Stephanie Saunders
The Berg Fashion Library forms part of Bloomsbury Fashion Central, a digital lynchpin for research involving fashion and dress. Alongside the Fashion Photography Archive, Fairchild Books Library, and Bloomsbury Fashion Business Cases, the Berg Fashion Library tightly weaves together an interdisciplinary array of digital resources for those interested in the multifaceted inner workings of dress. Enriching both students and researchers of fashion studies, the vast visual corpus offers an abundant repertoire of benchmark texts in e-book format, and encourages cross-cultural study, especially through the digitalized ten-volume reference work, The Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion, and the section “Museum Exhibitions,” dedicated to a global representation of fashion, dress, and the body throughout history. Specifically, for those interested in Latin American fashion, accessories, and textiles, the Berg Fashion Library facilitates an introduction into the subject while also delving into the particularities of Latin American fashion. Cognizant of the diverse cultures involved, the Berg Fashion Library provides a comprehensive platform to explore the geographical, political, and historical markers that interlace the complexities of Latin America.
Article
Patricia Murrieta-Flores, Diego Jiménez-Badillo, and Bruno Martins
The application of digital technologies within interdisciplinary environments is enabling the development of more efficient methods and techniques for analyzing historical corpora at scales that were not feasible before. The project “Digging into Early Colonial Mexico” is an example of cooperation among archaeologists, historians, computer scientists, and geographers engaged in designing and implementing methods for text mining and large-scale analysis of primary and secondary historical sources, specifically the automated identification of vital analytical concepts linked to locational references, revealing the spatial and geographic context of the historical narrative. As a case study, the project focuses on the Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España (Geographic Reports of New Spain, or RGs). This is a corpus of textual and pictographic documents produced in 1577–1585 ce that provides one of the most complete and extensive accounts of Mexico and Guatemala’s history and the social situation at the time. The research team is developing valuable digital tools and datasets, including (a) a comprehensive historical gazetteer containing thousands of georeferenced toponyms integrated within a geographical information system (GIS); (b) two digital versions of the RGs corpus, one fully annotated and ready for information extraction, and another suitable for further experimentation with algorithms of machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and corpus linguistics (CL) analyses; and (c) software tools that support a research method called geographical text analysis (GTA). GTA applies natural language processing based on deep learning algorithms for named entity recognition, disambiguation, and classification to enable the parsing of texts and the automatic mark-up of words referring to place names that are later associated with analytical concepts through a technique called geographic collocation analysis. By leveraging the benefits of the GTA methodology and resources, the research team is in the process of investigating questions related to the landscape and territorial transformations experienced during the colonization of Mexico, as well as the discovery of social, economic, political, and religious patterns in the way of life of Indigenous and Spanish communities of New Spain toward the last quarter of the 16th century. All datasets and research products will be released under an open-access license for the free use of scholars engaged in Latin American studies or interested in computational approaches to history.
