Event: Ghost Landscapes: Recovering & Visualizing Hidden Histories and Landscapes of the Early Colonial Andes (1530s-1700)

Jeremy Mikecz
Neukom Institude Postdoctoral Fellow
Native American Studies, Darmouth University

Wednesday May 11th, 2022 at 4pm PT

Register here (Link for both in-person and Zoom attendance)

How can patterns embedded in historical texts be made visible? How can we map texts and visualize narratives? How does doing so allow us to confront historical silences and challenge scholarly erasures in new and productive ways?
In this presentation, the historian Dr. Jeremy Mikecz will discuss how he answers these questions through the integration of digital mapping and qualitative visualization as well as the close reading of Spanish and Indigenous texts. In doing so, he will show how qualitative, humanistic, and narrative visualization can complement more traditional ethnohistorical approaches to historical recovery. His talk will explore his work on two separate, but related research projects. First, he will describe how he develops or adapts new methods, borrowed from experimental cartography, literary geography, and even data science, to re-imagine the Spanish invasion of the Inka Andes (1530s AD). Drawing from his forthcoming book, Mapping Conquest, Mikecz recovers an alternative history of the so-called “conquest” by rendering the gaps and silences of colonial texts visible, thus showing what colonial authors worked hard to conceal. It then fills in those gaps by tracing and mapping Indigenous activity—as recorded in Indigenous texts—thus re-animating the contributions of Andean actors to the creation of the colonial world. In doing so, it shows how long-term Indigenous histories, politics, and geographies shaped events of the period in ways that Spanish authors could not comprehend.
Second, Mikecz will share his preliminary efforts to create a digital "database" of some of the most foundational historical texts written in or about the Andes of the 16th and 17th centuries. Digitizing and encoding these texts using xml will then allow them to be searched and queried in sophisticated ways. The goal is to post this searchable text corpus or "database" online for use by students and scholars in the Americas and beyond.

Sponsored by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and UCLA Latin American Institute