This paper describes the development of a teaching tool for exploring fifty-seven early Iberian writings on Southeast Asia from the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century. This is an interdisciplinary grassroot efort initated by a historian and two librarians, in hope of stimulating conversations surrounding adoption of digital methods in the local historian community. The teaching tool takes the form of interactive connection maps. It augments the exploration of where these early texts were published, their subsequent reprints or translations over space and time, and the system of influences behind early European concepts of Southeast Asia.
In August 2016, during a workshop on digital humanities at NUS Libraries 1, the idea of attracting new generations of university students to the old collections of books was discussed. How can we steer interest into old and dusty books in an era of internet and digital screens? This was the starting moment of the collaboration between the authors of this project, one historian and two digital scholarship librarians, to make a selection of European books 1The workshop was titled "Heritage interfaces: Presenting cultural specificity in digital collections", organized by Dr. Miguel Escobar Varela from Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore and took place from 12 to 14 August 2016. related to the first encounters with Southeast Asia, since the sixteenth century. The current trend of digitalization of knowledge calls for this type of interdisciplinary approaches and open-minded collaboration.
We wanted to identify the books that refer to Southeast Asia,
and apply digital methods to explore the printed volumes dificult
to access even to specialists. We confined our exercise to the
region South of China and East India [
We understand the problem in approaching this mixture of material from a contemporary perspective. It comes in diferent formats, at least four languages, and each text was written with the intention to inform, to convince or to hide problems. It is necessary to develop some basic training to catch the nature of each document, to compare with the historical context, to know more about the authors, the cities in which they were printed and even the printers who bore the task of putting the book in the market. We need to ask who were the intended readers of these books - some were semisecret reports and others were written for public entertainment in a time in which the readers in reality were listening the texts in the voice of someone with basic literacy skills. There is a story that Philip II of Spain liked to listen from time to time the adventures of Fernandes Pinto in Asia in the Portuguese language, the same way nowadays we entertain ourselves with films 2.
For that purpose, we suggest to use a form of interactive
visualization we have created with the curiosity of a traveller of the
sixteenth century. One can see the books, pinpointing the time in
which the texts were created, printed, distributed or translated. In
some cases, the public knew only chapters of the books, without
knowing the name of the author. We can discover how the European
knowledge about Southeast Asia started quite soon after the fall of
2Pedro Cardim highlights the interest of Philip II to incorporate the Portuguese
knowledge to the Spanish intellectual circles; himself the son of a Portuguese Queen. [
This exercise is a "grassroots initiative" which, unfunded, had to start small in scope. Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar, a PhD student from the Department of History, approached NUS Libraries and formed a project team with two digital scholarship librarians with backgrounds in information studies, geography and computing. The team shared the interest for digital methods in the humanities. The historical vision allows the analysis of information produced in the early modern period through the data contained in the library materials, now increasingly digitized and available to the public. The deliverable of this exercise is a teaching tool to encourage students to engage with library materials. Equally important, we wanted to demonstrate the potential of digital methods in historical research, in the hope of stimulating more conversation in the digital humanities within the local historian community. 2
The focus on the relation between the European "discovery" on one side, and the rich and manifold number of cultures in Southeast Asia on the other, opens an opportunity to observe the changes in both parts. The Portuguese were pioneers in exploring the sea routes to circumvent the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. Attracted by the possibility of dominating the spice trade, they reached in few years the Ormuz Strait, the coasts of India, and all the way the Spice Islands in today’s Indonesia. This coincided with the time of the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru. However, the Spanish interest to reach the Asian region, attracted also by the spice trade, was accomplished on 1565 when they settled in the Philippines. It was evident from the books included in this exercise that this was a period in which many European concepts were subverted, from the geography to the human landscape of the globe.
The reasons to combine Portuguese and Spanish sources
correspond to the nature of the Iberian literary culture, which had mutual
influences. The wider public impact produced by such literature is
elusive because it seems limited to the Iberian public. However, the
fact that such narratives were almost immediately translated into
other European languages indicates the appetite of other publics to
know about the events in the so-called Far East. During the closing
decades of the sixteenth century, there were Portuguese authors
that published in the Spanish language to have a larger number of
readers. One more reason to study Portuguese and Spanish texts
together is that it is an important part of the production of
narratives which corresponds to the period of Union of the Crowns,
commonly known as the time in which the Spanish monarchs ruled
Portugal, from 1581 to 1640. Further to this fact, is the interaction
that existed in Asia (not exempted of conflict) between oficials,
merchants, religious orders, and colonizers in the cities around the
Asian continent. It should be noted that the books were printed in
several parts of the Iberian world: Valladolid, Madrid, Lisbon, Goa,
Mexico City, Manila. This fact provides additional interest to the
analytical exercise.
We created a practical catalogue of the literature produced
during the deployment of Portuguese and Spanish in Southeast Asia
during the sixteenth century until the mid-seventeenth century.
There are fifty seven books in total. In this exercise, we hope to
cross the formal division of Portuguese and Spanish knowledge as
a separate corpus of information that is usually treated in two
historiographic traditions. The starting point for this compilation was
the monumental work of Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe,
published in six volumes from 1965 to 1988 [
We adopted an event-based data model that took reference from
the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM), an
ontology for cultural objects [
Our workflow broadly comprises of three steps which weaved together the expertise of our team members:
3.2.1 Transcribe Books into Tables. The historical books were identified, read and interpreted. For each book, all relevant information was transcribed into a pre-designed table template which specified information to extract, then saved as a text document file.
The files were stored in a shared drive. This step was owned and performed by the historian who has command of several languages.
3.2.2 Data Modelling. The tables were interpreted, and transcribed into an event-based graph data model. The transcription efort included conversion of data fields into controlled vocabulary.
Occasionally, the data model had to be refined to capture the
phenomenon more closely. We used SylvaDB [
3.2.3 Implementation. In this step, a librarian with background in information visualization developed a web application using a preservation-friendly technology stack (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and ifle-based database). The graph data from SylvaDB was converted to text file representations via Gephi, and QGIS was used to derive a table of place names with geographic coordinates. When loaded, the web application reads and stores the data from text files into data structures and uses Leaflet library to draw an indicative connection map on OpenStreetMap, filtered by a time slider. SigmaJS library was used to draw an indicative connection map of relationships.
This step involved iterative prototyping in consultation with the team. 4
The persistent URL for the project is: https://doi.org/10.25541/V5AF1BBY. It has two distinct views: geographic view and relationship view. The geographic view (Figure 1) enables the user to explore geographic and temporal patterns. Hovering on each node opens a popup window with related resources. At the bottom, there is a hyperlink which opens up the relationship view.
The relationship view (Figure 2) provides for exploration of the relationships between works and entities involved in the production. It comprises of a connection map of the relationships between publications and their creators, publishers, sponsors, places of publishing and derived works. 5
Through our iterative prototyping process, it became apparent
that the visualization may indeed influence humanities research
thinking in ways described by Hinrichs and Forlini [
The visualization could be a starting point for analysis of several
themes. A first theme could be the pride provoked by the
“discovery” of new territorial and human spaces in Asia, as a result of the
initiative of Portuguese and Spaniards explorers. It was canonical
in the literature to mention the importance of the role of the
monarchies in the enterprise to discover and colonize other continents,
deemed as prizes for their wisdom and benevolence with other
populations. This was somehow motivated on the other hand by
the constant accusations since the early sixteenth century for the
destruction and abuse against the indigenous peoples of America,
that gave elements to the ideological battle with other European
powers that stands the black legend of Spain. In this regard, the
translations into other European languages also had the intention
to downplay the actions of the Iberians in Asia. Another theme
could be the mental construction of a geography that evolved, in
bits and pieces, through the Iberian narratives. The avidity of the
European readers was translated into a cartography of Asia, made
with the chronicles and reports from the Far East. The study of
these connections, between travellers and armchair cartographers,
might produce an interesting scope for additional study [
As future development, the data can be collapsed from a
multimodal graph to a monopartite graph for computational social
network analyses in a way similar to Brown, Soto-Corominas and
Suárez [
An interdisciplinary team comprising of a historian and two librarians embarked on a collaborative endeavor to create a teaching tool that could also serve to create awareness and conversation in the adoption of digital methods within the local historian community. This involved research and curation of a historical collection, their transcription into an interoperable data model and expression into interactive connection maps across space, time and relationships. The interactive visualization prototype provocates further inquiry into the reading cultures and the production and flows of interpretations and imaginings of Southeast Asia amongst Europeans in the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr. Miguel Escobar Varela for their constructive comments.