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| HGIS de las Indias | |
|---|---|
| Name | HGIS de las Indias |
| Established | 2010s |
| Founder | King's College London; University of Portsmouth; Spanish National Research Council |
| Location | Iberian Peninsula; Caribbean; Latin America |
HGIS de las Indias is a historical geographic information system project focused on mapping and analyzing spatial dimensions of the early modern Iberian Atlantic and colonial networks. The initiative integrates archival sources, cartographic corpora, parish records, and commercial registers to reconstruct movement across the Atlantic Ocean, Mediterranean Sea, and inland rivers tied to the Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, and indigenous polities.
The project emerged from collaborations among scholars affiliated with King's College London, University of Portsmouth, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Universidad de Sevilla, and Universidad de La Habana in response to digital humanities programs like Clio initiatives and the Digital Humanities movement. It builds on precedents such as Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, Pelagios, Pleiades (database), ORBIS (model), and the Mapping the Republic of Letters project, while drawing on archival traditions exemplified by the Archivo General de Indias, Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico), Archivo General de la Nación (Peru), and the Archivo Histórico Nacional (Spain).
HGIS aims to spatialize records from the Casa de Contratación, Corregimiento de Indias, Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, Viceroyalty of New Spain, Viceroyalty of Peru, Captaincy General of Guatemala, and Captaincy General of Venezuela to interrogate routes tied to the Treaty of Tordesillas, Treaty of Zaragoza, and mercantile flows linked to the Spanish Armada period. The scope encompasses ports like Seville, Cádiz, Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Veracruz, Callao, and interior nodes such as Potosí, Cuzco, Mexico City, and Santo Domingo.
The methodology combines prosopographical databases modeled after Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England, linked open data conventions from Linked Data, and gazetteers akin to Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and GeoNames. Primary datasets include manucript logs from the Casa de Contratación, notarial acts from the Archivo General de Notarías, baptismal and matrimonial registers from parishes catalogued in Indice de Libros Parroquiales, mercantile ledgers referencing Compañía de las Indias Occidentales, ship manifests reflective of Carrack and Galleon traffic, and fiscal records tied to the Quinto Real. Chronologies reference events like the Conquest of Tenochtitlan, Potosí silver boom, Treaty of Utrecht, and the Bourbon Reforms to situate economic and demographic change.
Technologies employed include spatial databases such as PostGIS, georeferencing tools influenced by QGIS, web mapping stacks like Leaflet (JavaScript library), and semantic frameworks based on RDF and SPARQL. Visualization outputs adapt techniques from TimeMap, Gephi, D3.js, and the Google Earth platform for 3D terrain contextualization. Interoperability aligns with standards from Open Geospatial Consortium, metadata schemas from Dublin Core, and archival encoding resembling TEI conventions.
Case studies have examined the demographic impact of the Transatlantic slave trade on port networks including Luanda, Bissau, Havana, and Santo Domingo; commodity circuits for silver from Potosí through Seville to Antwerp; peregrinations linked to missionaries such as Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Junípero Serra; military logistics in campaigns like the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) and the War of Spanish Succession; and epidemiological spread during outbreaks associated with voyages tied to Black Death analogues and Yellow fever. Interdisciplinary collaborations include partnerships with the British Library, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Smithsonian Institution, Museo del Oro (Bogotá), Archivo General de Indias, and university centers such as Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis.
The project has contributed datasets cited in journals like Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Historical Geography, Colonial Latin American Review, Revista de Indias, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. Educational uses appear in curricula at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad de Salamanca, Princeton University, and Yale University through modules on the Atlantic World, colonial urbanism, and historical demography. It has informed museum exhibits at institutions including the National Museum of American History and policy briefs referencing heritage conservation by the ICOMOS and UNESCO.
Challenges include reconciling toponymic shifts evident between early maps by Gerardus Mercator, Abraham Ortelius, Sebastian Münster, and provincial eighteenth‑century cartographers; standardizing variant place-forms documented across the Carte de l'Amérique corpus; and integrating fragmented records from colonial and indigenous archives such as those of the Inca and Taíno remaining in ecclesiastical collections. Future directions propose greater use of machine learning approaches pioneered at Stanford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology for record linkage, expanded Linked Open Data connections to Wikidata, crowd-sourced transcription initiatives inspired by Zooniverse, and enhanced engagement with descendant communities including organizations from Caribbean Community and indigenous federations.
Category:Digital history projects