Digital Humanities Seminar: Old sources, new technology: Computational approaches for the study of colonial Latin American sources

In this talk I will present the T-AP funded project ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large scale computational analysis of 16th century historical documents’. This project is a 3 year collaboration between the History Department at the University of Lancaster, the Computer Science and Engineering Institute at the University of Lisbon, and the Museum of Templo Mayor from the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico. Within this project we are developing computational approaches to identify, extract, cross-link and analyse historical information from the corpus of the 16th century ‘Geographic Reports of New Spain’. Using approaches from Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Corpus Linguistics and Geographic Information Sciences, the project is creating new digital datasets and exploring historical questions related to the political, economic and social environment of Mexico and Guatemala.