Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: DECM Machine Ready Corpus, 1577-1585

Murrieta-Flores, Patricia and Jimenez-Badillo, Diego and Favila-Vazquez, Mariana and Liceras-Garrido, Raquel and Bellamy, Katherine (2022). Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: DECM Machine Ready Corpus, 1577-1585. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855935

The 'Colonisation of America' is a fundamental process in the history of the modern world. Along with archaeological remains, the historical writings related to the establishment of the so-called Virreinatos constitute primary sources of information for the understanding of this period. An extended compilation of information ordered by the Spanish crown in the 16th century, called Relaciones Geográficas, served to gather vast amounts of information about the New World through multiple records and descriptions, both in Spanish and indigenous style. Traditional research of these documents has relied on the close reading of a handful of these texts, which can take the scholar a life-time to examine. Using a Big-Data approach, this project will apply for the first time ground-breaking computational methodologies to study one of the most important sources for the colonial history of America, and it will identify, extract, cross-link, and analyse information of vital importance to historical enquiry. Our highly interdisciplinary team will combine techniques from different disciplines, including Corpus Linguistics, Text Mining, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Geographic Information Systems, to address questions related to the recording of information about indigenous cultures, the Spanish exploration of indigenous social and religious concepts, the appropriation and ideas about place and space in the indigenous world, and their attitudes towards politics and economy. In doing so, the project will transform the way historical sources and large corpora are approached and analysed by modern scholars.

Data description (abstract)

This digital version of the RGs corpus contains only the historical information produced in the 16th century. All the comments and footnotes by René Acuña and Mercedes de la Garza have been removed to provide a clean version of the transcribed documents. This version of the corpus is now ready to be used for Text Mining, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Corpus Lingüistics, and any other computational methodologies available for the study and exploration of historical textual sources.

The Data Collection is available from an external repository. Access is available via Related Resources.

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