Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources

“对美国的殖民统治”是现代世界历史上的一个基本过程。与考古遗迹一起，与建立所谓的维雷纳托斯有关的历史著作是了解这一时期的主要信息来源。西班牙王室在16世纪订购了一种名为Relciones Geográfias的扩展信息汇编，通过多种记录和描述，收集了大量关于新大陆的信息，既有西班牙语风格的，也有土著风格的。对这些文献的传统研究依赖于对少数这些文本的仔细阅读，这可能需要学者一生的时间来审查。使用大数据方法，该项目将首次应用开创性的计算方法来研究美国殖民史最重要的来源之一，并将识别、提取、交叉链接和分析对历史调查至关重要的信息。我们高度跨学科的团队将结合不同学科的技术，包括语料库语言学、文本挖掘、自然语言处理、机器学习和地理信息系统，以解决与土著文化信息的记录、西班牙对土著社会和宗教概念的探索、对土著世界中地方和空间的挪用和想法以及他们对政治和经济的态度有关的问题。通过这样做，该项目将改变现代学者处理和分析历史资料和大型语料库的方式。

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.