We are currently reviewing thousands of images of archival materials from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries held in the city of Tunja, in the central highlands of Colombia. This material was produced by scribes and notaries on behalf of broad sectors of the very diverse population of this region, who went to them to record everything from contracts and business deals to wedding arrangements and wills. As a result, they provide a fascinating window into everyday life in a colonial Latin American city.
These images were created as part of a broader project with colleagues in the Colombian non-profit foundation Neogranadina to digitise the holdings of endangered archives and libraries in that country. Over the years, we’ve digitised hundreds of thousands of images from Tunja and other places in Colombia (the picture below shows just one portion of one archive), but in order to publish them and make them available to researchers we need to go through them and describe the documents, creating catalogues and finding aids. This is where we need your help!
We have been working with UCSB undergraduates, Colombian students, researchers, and community members to describe these materials for years. You can see some of the results of that work on Neogranadina’s digital archive platform, the ABC.
This is a wonderful opportunity to learn to read early modern Spanish manuscript materials. Students who have worked on this project in the past have gone on to do amazing research on colonial Latin America, even at graduate level.
If you are a UCSB undergraduate and would like to be involved, have a look at our opportunities page.