Old sources, new technologies

LLILAS Benson "Digital Scholarship in the Americas" Speaker Series

Dr. Patricia Murrieta-Flores will introduce the project sponsored by the Transatlantic Platform for the Humanities and Social Sciences (T-AP) called "Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: a large-scale computational analysis of historical documents", and some of its results. Taking as a basis the historical corpus of the sixteenth-century Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España (the Geographic Reports of New Spain), the project main objectives have been: 1) to adapt and develop techniques from Artificial Intelligence, including aspects of Natural Language Processing, Text Mining and Geographic Information Systems for the extraction and analysis of historical information from this source, and 2) to design computational methodologies for the identification of possible large-scale historical patterns. This research is allowing us to clarify some of the essential geographic questions related to the period and the colonial situation in this territory. I will also present a methodology termed Geographical Text Analysis and some of the most critical outputs from this project. These include software developed to carry out this type of analysis, the first sixteenth-century digital gazetteer of Mexico and Guatemala, and the first experiments using Natural Language Processing to automatically annotate the Relaciones corpus.

Registration opens Monday, March 15 and closes Sunday, April 11 through Eventbrite.

Dr. Patricia Murrieta-Flores is the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University. My interest lies in the application of technologies for Humanities and my primary research area is the Spatial Humanities. My main focus is the investigation of different aspects of space, place and time using a range of technologies including GIS, NLP, Machine Learning and Corpus Linguistics approaches. I am PI on the Transatlantic Platform (T-AP) funded project 'Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th-century historical sources', and also a collaborator and Co-I in multiple projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, AHRC, HERA, and the Paul Mellon Centre among others. I have edited and contributed to numerous books on Digital Humanities, Cultural Heritage, the use of GIS and other technologies in Archaeology, History, and Literature, and I've published multiple articles exploring theories and methodologies related to space and place.