mapping babel

(Barbara E. Mundy)

Anna-Sophia Zingarelli-Sweet

LIS 2975: Digital Scholarship

University of Pittsburgh iSchool

9 October 2013

@aszingarelli // anz31@pitt.edu

Work of digital scholarship recently published in The Appendix, "a new journal of narrative & experimental history" (October 2013, 1:4)

Late 1570s: Spanish royal officials distribute printed broadsheets among holdings in the Americas
"Instructiõ, y memoria"
Questionnaire about climate, geography, history, economy, religion
Distributed from Mexico City throughout "New Spain" (now Mexico & Guatemala). In majority indigenous towns, an interpreter translated
100s of indigenous languages in Mexico (eg Nahuatl, Zapotec, Mixtec)
Replies translated back into Spanish - Relaciones geográficas

Pintura

One of the questions required a "pintura", understood as a map of the town or region

In some languages/regions with pictorial languages, this was understood to have a greater significance:
"more than a scrivener. Rather, he (and sometimes she) was understood to have the capacity to translate immaterial knowledge into visible form. Every act of putting a brush loaded with pigment onto paper was an act of inquiry into the nature of the world." (2)

"At the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec writing used mostly pictographs supplemented by a few ideograms...
could not represent a full vocabulary of spoken language...
not meant to be read, but to be told"
(Wikipedia, "Nahuatl orthography")