Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: DECM General Historical Gazetteer, 1577-1800

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 General Historical Gazetteer, 1577-1800. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-856074

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)

Digging into Early Colonial Mexico (DECM) is a highly interdisciplinary project that combines 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.

Focusing on the corpus known as Relaciones Geográficas de la Nueva España (RGs) – one of the most important colonial historical sources of America – concerned with the territory of Mexico, this project is creating and developing novel computational approaches for the semi-automated exploration of thousands of pages contained in these 16th century documents.

DECM_Gazetteer includes all the researched historical toponyms contained in primary and secondary sources. The information is organised by RGs volume. It also includes layers and tables of historical information digitised and/or created by the project from secondary sources. All is accompanied by metadata, including the DECM Gazetteer Registry. This is available in Linked Places format, GIS shapefiles and CSV files.

This set is composed by: a) all toponyms with coordinates, mentioned and disambiguated from the edited collections of the RGs and from secondary sources as specified below; b) 30 geographical layers of additional historical information derived from secondary sources; c) 32 tables with other important historical information related to the RGs; d) a table with the percentages of disambiguation achieved for each volume; e) the DECM Gazetteer Registry; f) a text file with the sources used for disambiguation; and g) a README file with all information on the dataset.

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

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