Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: Creating Computational Approaches for the Study of Historical Sources

Abstract

The Computational Humanities, particularly with the increasing accessibility of digital resources, have opened many opportunities to study materials that are highly relevant to history and archaeology and tackle challenges in adProfessing questions at a large scale that were hard or impossible to surpass before. These opportunities include using methodologies from Artificial Intelligence and other computational fields that can facilitate the large-scale analysis and exploration of information in massive collections of historical documents. For the history of early colonial Mexico, there is an enormous variety of documents related to the encounter between the Mesoamerican Indigenous societies and Europeans, and the eventual establishment of colonial power in America. An example is a sizeable sixteenth-century corpus called the Geographic Reports of New Spain (Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España), which was created from the responses to a questionnaire ordered by Philip II. Obtained between 1577 and 1585, the Geographic Reports sought to compile all the information available about the American territories under Spanish rule. Due to the vastness and importance of their content, many researchers have studied these reports, and they are frequently used in the historical analysis of the colonial period. Although numerous studies have sought to understand the shifting territorial situation in New Spain during this time, two critical challenges have remained. The first one is the considerable size or volume of information to be analysed, cross-referenced, and compared within these reports and from the numerous primary sources available. The second has been the enormous difficulty of identifying with precision many of the historical locations mentioned in these reports, especially on a large scale.