Subaltern Recogito
Available
Editors
- Patricia Murrieta-Flores
- Katherine Bellamy
Description
The Subaltern Recogito project uses Recogito to explore the advantages of digital annotation for analysing a corpus of sixteenth-century maps created for the Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España (RGs). Commissioned by the Spanish Crown and compiled between 1577 and 1586, the RGs form a 2.8-million-word collection of reports that also includes 78 surviving maps from the Mexico region.
These maps, produced using a combination of Indigenous and European visual conventions, contain both pictographic and alphabetic information, such as logographic Mesoamerican toponyms, personal names, and European glosses. Digital annotation of these heterogeneous elements enables more systematic study of how Indigenous spatial knowledge and cartographic practices changed over time, and how such forms of representation became subaltern to European models.
The project has developed a tailored ontology for annotating the map corpus and organised training workshops for scholars at UNAM, ENAH, and the University of Texas at Austin. It is now expanding into a citizen-science initiative through weekly online mappathons, aimed at completing the annotation of all surviving maps. Collaborators include partners from LLILAS Benson (UT Austin), ENAH, UNAM, INAH, and the University of Lisbon.