George Aaron Broadwell is Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at University of Florida. He is a specialist in Native American languages of the Southeastern US and Oaxaca, Mexico, with a special focus on Choctaw, Timucua, several varieties of Zapotec, and Copala Triqui. He is interested in the issues of integrating language description and documentation with contemporary work in linguistic theory. He is also committed to working with Native American communities to provide dictionaries, texts, and other materials that are useful in language revitalization and maintenance. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation and IARPA. He is the author of
Moisés García Guzmán was born in Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca, Mexico and is a native speaker of Valley Zapotec. He teaches English to high school students at CETIs #124 in Tlacolula. His education from primary school through University was in his home state of Oaxaca. His dad was an immigrant to the U.S. and they reunited in the U.S. after many years of not seeing each other. After that, he lived in California for 14 years, during which time he earned his certification to teach English back home. It was during this time that he became a Zapotec activist and his work includes a documentary web series (
Brook Danielle Lillehaugen is an associate professor at Haverford College in the Tri-College Department of Linguistics. Her research profile includes technical grammatical description as well as collaborative language documentation and revitalization projects. She publishes on the grammar of Zapotec languages in both their modern and historical forms and has found combining linguistic fieldwork with tools from the digital humanities to be a productive way to collaborate with both Zapotec speaking communities and undergraduate students. Recent publications can be found in the
Felipe H. Lopez is a postdoctoral scholar in community engaged digital scholarship at the Haverford College Libraries. Originally from the Zapotec town of San Lucas Quiaviní, Oaxaca, he migrated to California at age 16, speaking no English and little Spanish. By 2007 he had earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in urban planning. It was there that he began working with linguists to document his language, resulting in a trilingual Zapotec-Spanish-English dictionary (Munro and Lopez et al., 1999). He is a Zapotec writer and poet and his work has been published in the
I am going homewas awarded first place in the narrative category in the 2017 Premios CaSa competition for the creation of literature in Zapotec. He serves as a board member to the Ticha Project.
May Helena Plumb is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Donald D. Harrington Graduate Fellow. May’s research focuses on the documentation and description of Zapotec languages, and her most recent work investigates the expression of temporal-modal semantics in Tlacochahuaya Zapotec.
Mike Zarafonetis is the Coordinator for Digital Scholarship and Research Services at Haverford College Libraries. He earned his PhD in US History at Auburn University in 2010, and entered libraries and the field of Digital Scholarship in 2011. As the head of a leading liberal arts digital scholarship program, he is interested in the intersections of technology, research, and pedagogy, and in exploring new ways for engaging communities and students in digital scholarship.
This is the source
There are hundreds of alphabetic texts in Zapotec languages dating back to the 16th century. Today, however, Zapotec speakers are generally unable to read these texts, due to lack of access to the texts and an unfamiliarity with the orthographic practices. Moreover, significant changes have taken place in the grammar in the intervening centuries. This results in a situation where Zapotec people may not have access to history in their own language. Ticha is an online digital text explorer that provides access to images, transcriptions, analysis, and translations of the Colonial Zapotec texts. The Ticha project includes in-person workshops with Zapotec community members as part of an iterative development process. Feedback from these interactions inform design decisions for the project. Here we reflect on transnational collaboration with stakeholders in building a digital scholarship project that seeks to use the power of digital humanities to democratize access to materials and resources which were previously the exclusive domain of a few experts. When community members have access to important documents from their own history, archiving, scholarship, and community engagement can be brought together in a powerful synthesis.
Hay cientos de textos alfabéticos en lenguas zapotecas desde el siglo
dieciséis. No obstante, hoy en día los zapoteco-hablantes generalmente no pueden
leer estos textos, debido a una falta de acceso a los textos como también por
falta de familiaridad con las prácticas ortográficas. Además, la gramática ha
cambiado mucho en los siglos intermedios. Por consiguiente, muchos zapotecos no
tienen acceso a su historia escrita en su propia lengua. Ticha es un explorador
digital de texto que brinda acceso en línea a las imágenes, transcripciones,
análisis y traducciones de los textos en zapoteco colonial. El proyecto de Ticha
incluye talleres con miembros de la comunidad zapoteca como parte de un proceso
de desarrollo interactivo. Los comentarios y reacciones que resultan de estas
interacciones informan las decisiones del diseño para el proyecto. Aquí
analizamos y reflexionamos sobre la colaboración transnacional con los
This article discusses the Ticha project which is a digital text explorer that provides access to media and documents associated with the Zapotec community.
Around 1675, Sebastiana de Mendoza, a prominent woman in the Zapotec community of
Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca, created her last will and testament bequeathed to her daughters, Gerónima
and Lorenza, and her granddaughter named Sebastiana, an array of belongings
that included religious paraphernalia, valuable agricultural goods, and
finished goods and money. She divided her property in the following manner:
ten magueys, a wool skirt, a cotton huipil, and ten pesos went to her
daughter Gerónima. She gave her granddaughter Sebastiana five magueys and a
picture of Saint Sebastian. She did not bequeath her house to anyone
specifically, but she gave her daughter Lorenza a total of thirty-five
magueys and declared that, as the oldest, she should be in charge of the
house and its affairs.
Sebastiana was careful to distribute her property, but also scrupulous in noting
her debts and obligations to others in the community as well as the debts and
obligations owed to her. This complex system of interconnected social and fiscal
responsibilities is known as and I order [that] my
For an understanding of the social relationships and networks of colonial Oaxaca, there are few sources as rich as testaments like that of Sebastiana de Mendoza. Documents like these are of potential interest to many, particularly those with personal and / or academic interests in the histories, cultures, and languages of the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica. This document is of particular interest to the Zapotec people of Tlacochahuaya. Yet this remarkable text — and many others like it — are practically unknown to a large group of potential readers.
Why have vital manuscripts like these not been accessible to members of
Indigenous communities who would like to read them? As we explain below, they
have mostly been held in physical archives where they are accessible primarily
to scholars with sufficient resources and privilege to use them. That these
archival resources are little known to Zapotec stakeholders aligns with the
analysis that archives have functioned as mechanisms of
colonialism
What constitutes
the archive, what form it takes, and what systems of classification and
epistemology signal at specific times are (and reflect) critical features of
colonial politics and state power.
Ticha seeks to use the power of
digital humanities to democratize access to materials and resources which
previously were almost exclusively the domain of scholars. Archiving,
scholarship, and community engagement can be brought together in a powerful
synthesis when community members have access to important documents from their
own history.
Zapotec is a language family indigenous to southern Mexico, and is the third largest Indigenous language family in Mexico. Today, there are over 50 different Zapotec languages, most endangered, spoken primarily in what is now the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, by a total of approximately 450,000 people within a much larger Zapotec ethnic community. The Zapotec language family, which belongs to the Otomanguean stock, is on par with the Romance language family in terms of time depth and diversity of member languages. The Zapotecs are one of the major civilizations of Mesoamerica, with cultural traditions going back to 500 B.C. and distinct from the better-known Nahua (Aztec) and Maya.
With the arrival of the Spanish in 1519, alphabetic writing was introduced and
adopted by Indigenous peoples. McDonough [2014, 199] points out that, as opposed to being
passive receivers of an imposed European technology, Nahuas have
appropriated and adapted alphabetic writing for their own purposes.
The same can be said of speakers of Zapotec, who quickly put this new technology
to use. Zapotec has one of the longest records of alphabetic written documents
for any Indigenous language of the Americas
These documents hold invaluable information for a wide range of interested
parties. They provide insight into the ethnic diversity, religious history, and
familial, social, and economic structures of Mexico for a 500-year period. They
create a bridge across multiple cultural borders: a link between modern
scholars, colonial priests, and Zapotec people throughout time. The large corpus
of Colonial Nahuatl language material has proven useful to scholars across many
disciplines (e.g.
Reading and translating these Colonial Valley Zapotec documents can be extremely difficult. Physical access alone can be a barrier to reading the documents, as these texts are housed in various archives not only throughout Oaxaca and other parts of Mexico, but also in archives in the United States and Europe. One must know which archive to visit and how to request a document, and sometimes that is insufficient. For example, the Archivo General del Poder Ejecutivo del Estado de Oaxaca has changed their archival numbering system, and now reference numbers like those published in Smith Stark et al. (2008) are no longer accurate. Moreover, discrimination against people perceived to be Indigenous means that some employees at an archive, including guards, may discourage and intimidate some potential users from entering the archives, as we have ourselves witnessed on more than one occasion.
Even if one has physical access to the texts, many aspects of the documents themselves can be a barrier to access. The writing and printing conventions for colonial documents can be opaque to contemporary users. Reading handwriting from this period often requires special training, and printed texts often use extensive abbreviations and may also contain printing errors (such as reversed letters and broken type) and handwritten corrections.
The Zapotec language poses additional challenges in understanding the texts.
Knowledge of (or fluency in) a modern Zapotec language is not enough to
translate the colonial documents due to variation in orthographic choices and
regular processes of language change. The orthography in the texts is highly
variable and inconsistent throughout the corpus, and there is as of yet no fully
adequate Zapotec-to-Spanish or Zapotec-to-English dictionary that reflects the
full range of orthographic variation found in the corpus
In addition to these more tangible obstacles, discriminatory linguistic
ideologies pose systemic challenges to the access of Zapotec language materials.
In Mexico, Zapotec is viewed as something less than a real language, and
knowledge of Zapotec language is devalued. There are pervasive false beliefs
that Zapotec has never been written, cannot be written, and perhaps even should
not be written. Janet Chávez Santiago, a native Zapotec speaker and language
activist, reflects (in English) on the impact of such beliefs: When I was in elementary school in the 90s, I remember children
speaking Zapotec in many contexts: playing in the streets, at parties, and
during town celebrations — but never at school. Instead, we had to
These ideologies about the value of Zapotec language certainly impact access in
multiple ways, but they also create a space for projects such as ours to
intervene in larger questions of social justice. In the following sections we
describe how Ticha addresses inequities of access in an effort to make the
Colonial Valley Zapotec corpus available to the widest possible audiences.
Moreover, we discuss how the creation and evolution of Ticha is done in
consultation and collaboration with Zapotec-speaking community members such that
both the methodology and
Ticha (https://ticha.haverford.edu) is a large, collaborative,
interdisciplinary digital resource
The Ticha project seeks to provide access to the corpus and language of the
Colonial Valley Zapotec corpus in a way that mitigates the systemic language
devalorization described above. In regards to the corpus itself, we practice
post-custodial archiving In the United States, we have a
long history of removing historical records from the communities that
created them, often in the name of preservation… The post-custodial model of
archival practice uses digital technology in pursuit of a more collaborative
approach to multinational archival work
[2018, n.p.]. Post-custodial practices are
usually discussed in relation to institutions that are capable of taking
possession of materials — like libraries and archives. Ticha is not a library or
a physical archive, nor is it an institution that seeks to assume possession of
archival texts. The creation of digital surrogates and the maintenance of
collaborative partnerships with stake-holding communities allow us, however, to
curate a collection of texts digitally.
The Ticha interface, built in the Django framework, allows users to browse and
search the corpus of Colonial Valley Zapotec texts, including the images and
metadata. Given the sociolinguistic context around this language and these
texts, we make any resources we have available as soon as possible, borrowing
from the idea of progressive archiving
Ticha allows users to navigate a corpus that is otherwise physically dispersed. Figure 1 illustrates one interface for browsing the corpus, which can be searched or filtered along several fields, including date of document, town of origin, archival home, genre, and language of the text. The corpus can also be navigated through a timeline and a map, the latter of which is shown in Figure 2.
In order to make Ticha more accessible to a wide range of users, we present the
texts not as flat objects but as dynamic resources. Other scholars have
published translations and annotations of colonial-era linguistic materials in
print form; Lockhart’s translation of a Colonial Nahuatl grammar is a notable
example
Figure 3 shows a page from the
Layers of accessible linguistic information are also used to communicate more about the Zapotec language in these texts. As the
As we considered what kind of access and collaboration could mitigate the type of language devalorization described above, we also wanted to be careful that a project on a historical corpus of Zapotec texts did not reinforce another harmful false ideology — that Zapotec language and people are only of the past, frozen in time. This type of thinking regarding Indigenous people, culture, and language is ubiquitous. We wanted Zapotec people and modern language to be clearly visible in the Ticha Project.
One way we addressed this was by bringing Zapotec voices to the site. Figure 4
shows one of the resources available on Ticha: a vocabulary of the most common
words found in the corpus, along with their definitions and alternative
spellings. Wherever possible, we connect these lexical entries for historical
forms of words with their modern counterparts, by linking entries in Ticha’s
Vocabulary with entries in online Talking Dictionaries for several Valley
Zapotec language varieties (described in
Connecting these modern lexical resources with this historical vocabulary not only allowed us to resist a reading of these materials that excludes the modern Zapotec community, but also allowed us to incorporate a Zapotec designed engagement with the texts. As described further in the section that follows, our iterative methodology includes regular trips to Oaxaca, where we not only solicit feedback and suggestions from Zapotec speakers with interest in the corpus but also spend time looking at Colonial Zapotec language texts together.
In this section, we turn to directly examining the structure and methodology
surrounding our development process, and in particular the role of stakeholding
communities in our project design. Thorpe and Galassi note that long-term
engagement with stakeholding communities requires libraries to challenge their
traditional workflows and establish new ways of practice
that allow Indigenous people and communities to guide and control the
process
[2014, 91–92]. These ideas
are echoed in the literature on community-based linguistic research, where
scholars have recently emphasized community collaboration and sharing control of
research project design the engaging of a community of Zapotec speakers
is very clearly the backbone of the project and, through recurrent
workshops, has given shape to its other components
[2019].
Our project benefits from other digital scholarship projects working with
Indigenous languages, corpora of manuscripts, and community engaged projects
generally, especially those working with marginalized communities and languages.
We are aware of one other project that also makes Zapotec language texts
publicly accessible: Satnu: Repositorio Filológico Mesoamericano (https://satnu.mx/), which as the name
suggests is a repository and digital archive for texts in Mesoamerican
languages, including — but not limited to — Zapotec language texts. The Early
Nahuatl Library (http://enl.uoregon.edu/), for example, gathers together 16th- through
19th-century Nahuatl-language manuscripts with transcriptions, translations, and
historical context. In this issue, Matthew and Bannister describe NECA:
Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America (https://nahuatl-nawat.org/), a digital project that makes a corpus of
Nahuan-language documents produced in Spanish Central America publicly
available. Olko (2019) describes a community-engaged approach in which archival
work on Nahuatl language texts is fused with ethnolinguistic fieldwork in a
project that seeks to combine Western/academic and
Indigenous methodologies
[2019, 7].
Moving beyond Nahuatl, the Proyecto Oralidad Modernidad (https://oralidadmodernidad.wixsite.com/oralidad) uses a
community-engaged approach to language documentation that encourages Indigenous
Ecuadorians to connect with their history through language as they document the
knowledge of elders
Ticha extends the traditional user-centered approach to design by defining user groups as communities. Each community brings its own skill sets and experiences to the project, which shapes the technology and workflows that make up the project. The array of communities that make up Ticha include the Zapotec community members, Haverford College linguistics and computer science students, scholars in linguistics and ethnohistory, and librarians, though membership in these categories may overlap. Each community is both a user and a participant in their engagement with the project web site. Access to the materials includes traditional methods of discovery, but also engagement with and close reading of the materials through features like transcription, text encoding, and audio recording. The artifacts of this engagement become part of the Ticha workflow (e.g. manuscripts transcribed by Zapotec community members or Haverford linguistics students, recordings for the Talking Dictionary by Zapotec community members, or morphological analysis of Zapotec words by linguists), and emerge as additional points of engagement for the project’s communities. As such, the design of the project accounts for the experiences and needs of each community, is informed by feedback from its communities, and is iterative in its approach. The morphological analysis is done in Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx), and discussed in Broadwell and Lillehaugen, 2013. This is exported as XML and processed with the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding of the text by a Python script and XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) to ultimately produce HTML. This HTML creates the public-facing interface for the encoded texts.
Our development process has a clear institutional component, as Haverford College Libraries is an active partner in the design and development of the Ticha project site. The Digital Scholarship group, which partners with faculty and students to produce multimodal scholarship through the use of digital tools and methods, has been primarily responsible for web design, web and application development, server administration, archival and preservation workflows, and data curation practices for the project.
Ticha is a system of tools that fit together in ways that meet the needs of its community members. The skill sets and tools available to each community determines the choices of tools and methods for the project. While the library is responsible for technical development of the project site, digital scholarship librarians and student employees are often developing tools or features for the first time. The library exercises a strong preference for existing tools that meet community needs and standards and prefers to develop custom-made solutions only when the project exceeds the capacity of ready-built tools. The ability to export data in standard formats (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML) is essential for each tool so that future flexibility is built into the project in all areas.
Existing tools come with their own set of limitations, as they are not developed in the context of a specific project but instead designed to be used broadly. When the needs of a community reach beyond the limits of — or are not being effectively met by — existing tools, it is necessary to built upon existing project features. An open channel for feedback is crucial, and that feedback drives iteration on the features that require it. Feedback comes in two primary forms: workshops and web analytics. Web analytics (Ticha uses Google Analytics) provide meaningful data on site usage and user location, from which we can draw useful conclusions. For example, analytics in late 2017 suggested that users that visited the home page of the project site often moved on quickly, while those who visited specific manuscripts directly (from a link shared on social media or search results) tended to engage with other areas of the site. This data strongly suggested that a redesign of the home page was necessary to provide users with more information on what they can do in the Ticha project site, and such a redesign was implemented during the summer of 2018.
Some of the most meaningful feedback comes from engagement with members of the Zapotec-speaking community in Oaxaca. Transcription workshops helped the project team see the tools in action on the equipment available to its users (i.e. tablets or computers that aren’t necessarily current, running the latest software, or reliably connected to the Internet). A series of workshops with students at the Centro de Estudios Tecnológicos Industrial y de Servicios No. 124 (CETIs #124), a high school in Tlacolula de Matamoros, Oaxaca, was significantly affected by Wifi connectivity issues, highlighting the need to account for access to the manuscripts and some features of the project site when the network connection is unreliable. As a result, the project now features a PDF export option for manuscripts that include high-resolution images of the documents and associated metadata that can be saved to a storage device for offline access.
The transcription feature for the manuscripts on Ticha is a particularly instructive case study of this iterative approach. In 2015, members of the Zapotec-speaking community expressed a strong desire to transcribe the manuscripts through the project site. While the Haverford College Libraries could have attempted to build a custom transcription interface, the Digital Scholarship team did not have technical capacity to develop such a feature. The project was already using Omeka as a digital collections platform to serve and describe the digitized manuscripts in parallel with the Django project site. The Scripto plugin for Omeka provided a ready-built solution for a transcription feature. Implementation of that feature occurred in the spring of 2016, at which point the project group conducted two workshops with Zapotec-speaking community members in Oaxaca on document transcription. During these workshops, the affordances and limitations of the Scripto interface became apparent. Users of the web site needed to perform three or four clicks to move from the manuscript viewer to the transcription tool, and the interface itself was difficult to customize for language and format. With this feedback, the digital scholarship group developed its own transcription interface in parallel with the already-launched Scripto interface, which then replaced Scripto in the spring of 2018. The new transcriber is completely integrated within the existing manuscript viewer interface, accessible by only one click or tap from an input device.
An interest on the part of academics and/or community members to contribute to online transcriptions and translations should not be assumed, as demonstrated in the context of NECA (Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America) in Matthew and Bannister, this issue, who also express encountering similar limitations with Scripto in their project.
As part of our commitment to community-led research, Ticha includes an advisory
board of Zapotec community members. While community workshops provide feedback
on the functionality of the site, members of the advisory board give ongoing
advice to shape the project as a whole. In this section, Moisés García Guzmán
and Dr. Felipe H. Lopez, two members of the advisory board, reflect on the
impact of Ticha in their community. Their words speak best for themselves and
thus are intentionally presented here as they were written by the co-authors.
García Guzmán, a Zapotec educator and activist, offers the following reflection:
Many local communities in Oaxaca were not aware of the
existence of documents in Zapotec. Ticha has helped them to see how
important their language was in official procedures in the past, but has
also helped to create a link with revitalization efforts that are going on,
by showing community members that their proposals on contemporary Zapotec
can lead to a new standardized written system. García Guzmán, a Zapotec
educator and activist, offers the following reflection:
As a speaker and activist in my community, Ticha is a great
tool in raising awareness on all revitalization efforts. Young kids can see
how our language played an important role in some activities of our towns in
the past. But also I encourage them not to see the language as only a part
of our past, but to also work towards restoring use of our language in many
contexts where Zapotec seems to be losing ground. In the end, I hope to
instill in them the idea to work towards an official recognition again. I
also hope that our efforts will encourage local authorities to give us
better access to archives, by showing them all the work that is done. The
existence of Ticha makes archival authorities more open and cooperative with
these efforts.
Overall, it has been a great experience, and as the work
progresses, it helps students, speakers and communities to strengthen the
sense of identity with our native language.
Lopez has been key in starting and facilitating the workshops at the high school
in Tlacolula. He offers these reflections: I have always
believed that the youth could be very influential in their communities today
and have sought ways to engage with them to promote the Zapotec languages in
their pueblos. For the last three years I have had the opportunity to
participate in Zapotec workshops at CETIs #124 in collaboration with
Haverford College and the Ticha project. These workshops have become pivotal
for engaging with students and school officials to rethink the value and
importance of Zapotec. In a sense, these workshops have given this school
community a different access to the language. In these three years, I have
witnessed the way the students involved in these workshops have strengthened
their values towards their own language at the same time their
identities.
At the beginning there was some skepticism about these
Zapotec workshops given that only six students participated. However, each
year there has been an increase in the number of students participating, and
last year there were more than 20 students who signed up for the Colonial
Zapotec workshops.
This particular workshop gave students an opportunity to
understand their language from a historical perspective and to work with
Colonial documents. The Zapotec students tried to understand Colonial
Zapotec words and to think about the equivalent modern Zapotec words.
Through these documents, they understood that Zapotec is a living language
which has been written for hundreds of years, dispelling the notion that
Zapotec is not a written language. All the students found commonalities
between Colonial Zapotec and the various Zapotec languages they spoke.
Furthermore, they were pleasantly surprised to learn ways to count in
Zapotec. As is the case in my own community of San Lucas Quiaviní, most
students can only count up to ten or so and then use Spanish words, and so
through these Colonial Zapotec documents they learned something about their
own language.
The openness of the Principal Dr. Marcos Pereyra Rito and
the support of the main advocate of this program, Abisai Aparicio, has given
this opportunity to students, despite the absence of a clear precedent in
the educational system in Mexico. In fact, historically, schools served as
an instrument of assimilation and punished people who spoke their Indigenous
language. However, as part of this collaboration at CETIs #124, the
vice-principal, who isn’t a native speaker of Zapotec, made an effort to
read a message in Zapotec to the participating students in the workshop last
year. Also, one of the teachers, Dr. David Velasco, was willing to accept
work written in Zapotec in his literature course. I have also witnessed how
students have changed their behaviour towards using their language since
these workshops have started. I see students talking Zapotec more openly on
campus, whereas prior to this project, we were told that students were
embarrassed to speak Zapotec on campus or even to admit they spoke it at
all. So, the conditions in which these students decide to use their language
is being reshaped at this institution, hopefully as well as outside. These
efforts, then, are working to reshape the sociolinguistic possibilities at
this institution, and potentially even beyond.
As Nakata and Langton say, effective community collaboration is not just
dialogue, conversation, education, and working through things
together
[2005, 5]. Ticha embraces
this philosophy by working through an ongoing conversation with user
communities. Our iterative approach allows the technical design of the project
to continually meet the needs of its communities. Furthermore, it situates the
project in dialogue with other digital projects that employ similar tools or
methods, and provides a model for doing truly community-engaged digital
scholarship. For example, Albert-Abrams et al. describe their work as being
practiced not through a static set of methodologies, but
rather an ongoing process of learning, unlearning, and restructuring in
pursuit of a collective good
[2019, 1]. We recognize our own practice in this description, as well
as in the framing provided by Duff et al, that Social
justice is always a process and can never be fully achieved
[2013, 324].
Our engagement with the Ticha project has yielded many positive results, both for
scholars and members of the Zapotec community. The Zapotec language documents in
Ticha are a resource for those interested in Zapotec people, their languages,
and their history. Ticha’s project design is grounded in well-established
theories of cultural and linguistic reclamation and revitalization. Scholars
have long discussed the importance of schools in creating positive language
ideologies, particularly among youth
As local language ideologies in Mexico favor Spanish over Indigenous languages
such as Zapotec, a project like Ticha serves as a resource for local language
activists. In particular, Ticha forefronts Indigenous voices and knowledge. As
Pratt says: If one studies only what the Europeans saw and
said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the
imperial enterprise sought
[2007, 7].
Important historical documents, like the testament of Sebastiana de Mendoza,
demonstrate in a very concrete way the long literate history of Zapotec people
and the importance of the Zapotec language to understanding this history.
We also take this project to be a clear demonstration of the power of digital humanities projects to democratize access to materials and resources which might otherwise be used primarily by scholars. We seek to practice transformational work as part of a larger interdisciplinary project that we would also classify as engaged scholarship. When community members have access to important documents from their own history, we are able to bring together archiving, scholarship, and community engagement in a powerful synthesis.
We want to acknowledge our appreciation to the editors Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Clayton McCarl for all their work in making this issue possible, including their advice in the development of this piece. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for the helpful and encouraging feedback and to K. David Harrison and Peter Austin for their thoughtful suggestions. We are grateful for comments from attendees at the following conferences: the annual meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Encuentro de Humanistas Digitales, and the Coloquio sobre Lenguas Otomangues y Vecinas. In addition, we thank Julie Gonzales and Eloise Kadlecek for their editorial support in the preparation of this manuscript. Special thanks for K. David Harrison and Jeremy Fahringer in facilitating the connection between the Zapotec Talking Dictionaries and Ticha’s Vocabulary.
The Ticha project is grateful to funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship at Haverford College, the Provost Office of Haverford College, the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College, the Haverford College Libraries, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Tri-Co Digital Humanities. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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