The Mapas Project

The Mapas Project is a multi-year project that aims to publish exemplary early Mesoamerican pictorial
manuscripts in electronic form and indexed to allow for scholars working on these or similar manuscripts to find key terminology or pictorial elements from multiple
manuscripts to support philological, historical, art historical,
anthropological, geographical, and linguistic research.
We will start by showing and describing one particularly interesting manuscript, the Mapa de Mixtepec. This sizable manuscript (47 cm x 74 cm) was painted on deer hide in the late seventeenth century. It comes from a Zapotec town (San Andrés Mixtepec) in what is now the state of Oaxaca. It shows the people’s ancient origins in Zaachila, their historic and legendary migration, the founding of their town, a genealogy of their leading families, and their colonization by Christians. The mapa is primarily
pictorial with multiple textual elements arranged and
relating to one another cartographically rather than in any particular linear order.
Our current aim is to encode the secondary textual
material developed by Wood and other scholars in TEI P5,
directly linking various annotations to the image,
and describing the relationship of the annotation to the
indicated section of the image. With the possible exception of problems posed by special terminology such as selecting
restricted sets of attribute values to encode key terms in indigenous languages (e.g., “altepetl”, the term for the key Nahua socio-political unit), the adaptations of TEI will be fairly straightforward. There are additional
complications, however, including the aforementioned need to create relationships between annotations and the whole document, relating text and image to each other and to their actual location within the manuscript, and due to the special nature of the manuscripts and the
multi-editorial and internationally collaborative nature of the project