=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1992/paper_3
|storemode=property
|title=Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to Mid-17th Century Iberian Sources
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1992/paper_3.pdf
|volume=Vol-1992
|authors=Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar,Richard Cheng Yong Ho,Yikang Feng
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/histoinfo/VillamarHF17
}}
==Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to Mid-17th Century Iberian Sources==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1992/paper_3.pdf
Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling
Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to mid-17th
Century Iberian Sources
Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Richard Cheng Yong Ho Yikang Feng
Villamar National University of Singapore National University of Singapore
National University of Singapore NUS Libraries NUS Libraries
Department of History Singapore Singapore
Singapore clbhcyr@nus.edu.sg fengyikang@nus.edu.sg
villamarc@u.nus.edu
ABSTRACT related to the first encounters with Southeast Asia, since the six-
This paper describes the development of a teaching tool for explor- teenth century. The current trend of digitalization of knowledge
ing fifty-seven early Iberian writings on Southeast Asia from the calls for this type of interdisciplinary approaches and open-minded
sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century. This is an interdisciplinary collaboration.
grassroot effort initated by a historian and two librarians, in hope We wanted to identify the books that refer to Southeast Asia,
of stimulating conversations surrounding adoption of digital meth- and apply digital methods to explore the printed volumes difficult
ods in the local historian community. The teaching tool takes the to access even to specialists. We confined our exercise to the re-
form of interactive connection maps. It augments the exploration of gion South of China and East India [12], which has received many
where these early texts were published, their subsequent reprints designations, among others, the Land below the Winds [18], or the
or translations over space and time, and the system of influences Asian Mediterranean [22]. The exercise is an invitation to read and
behind early European concepts of Southeast Asia. also to see the Southeast Asia region through a selection of fifty-
seven books that were written in Europe between the sixteenth
CCS CONCEPTS and mid-seventeenth century; to be more precise, writings that
were produced as a result of the deployment of Portuguese and
• Human-centered computing → Information visualization;
Spanish forces, commercial, military and religious militias in Asia
during that period. The intention was to share the opportunity of
KEYWORDS
approaching that literature now available thanks to the advance of
southeast asia, digital humanities, visualization, interdisciplinary internet and valuable archives that have been working to digitize
collaboration, iberian literature, digital storytelling, 16th century,17th books which would otherwise be extremely difficult to consult.
century, history, event-based data model We understand the problem in approaching this mixture of mate-
ACM Reference Format: rial from a contemporary perspective. It comes in different formats,
Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar, Richard Cheng Yong Ho, and Yikang Feng. at least four languages, and each text was written with the inten-
2017. Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling South- tion to inform, to convince or to hide problems. It is necessary to
east Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to mid-17th Century Iberian develop some basic training to catch the nature of each document,
Sources. In Proceedings of 4th HistoInformatics Workshop, Singapore, Novem- to compare with the historical context, to know more about the
ber 2017 (HistoInformatics 2017), 4 pages.
authors, the cities in which they were printed and even the printers
https://doi.org/10.475/123_4
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 semi-
1 INTRODUCTION secret reports and others were written for public entertainment in
In August 2016, during a workshop on digital humanities at NUS a time in which the readers in reality were listening the texts in
Libraries 1 , the idea of attracting new generations of university the voice of someone with basic literacy skills. There is a story that
students to the old collections of books was discussed. How can Philip II of Spain liked to listen from time to time the adventures of
we steer interest into old and dusty books in an era of internet and Fernandes Pinto in Asia in the Portuguese language, the same way
digital screens? This was the starting moment of the collaboration nowadays we entertain ourselves with films 2 .
between the authors of this project, one historian and two digi- For that purpose, we suggest to use a form of interactive visu-
tal scholarship librarians, to make a selection of European books alization we have created with the curiosity of a traveller of the
sixteenth century. One can see the books, pinpointing the time in
1 The workshop was titled "Heritage interfaces: Presenting cultural specificity in digital
which the texts were created, printed, distributed or translated. In
collections", organized by Dr. Miguel Escobar Varela from Department of English
Language and Literature, National University of Singapore and took place from 12 to
some cases, the public knew only chapters of the books, without
14 August 2016. knowing the name of the author. We can discover how the European
knowledge about Southeast Asia started quite soon after the fall of
HistoInformatics 2017, November 2017, Singapore
2 Pedro Cardim highlights the interest of Philip II to incorporate the Portuguese knowl-
2017. ACM ISBN 123-4567-24-567/08/06. . . $15.00
https://doi.org/10.475/123_4 edge to the Spanish intellectual circles; himself the son of a Portuguese Queen. [6]
HistoInformatics 2017, November 2017, Singapore Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar, Richard Cheng Yong Ho, and Yikang Feng
Melaka (or Malacca) in 1511 through the narrative of Giovanni d’ Portugal, from 1581 to 1640. Further to this fact, is the interaction
Empoli, an Italian secretary of Afonso de Albuquerque. Almost four that existed in Asia (not exempted of conflict) between officials,
decades later, the same historic moment was recreated in hindsight merchants, religious orders, and colonizers in the cities around the
by Bras de Albuquerque with the particular intention to embellish Asian continent. It should be noted that the books were printed in
the image of his father. Another early story of the time of discovery several parts of the Iberian world: Valladolid, Madrid, Lisbon, Goa,
became popular in Europe thanks to the ability of a young German Mexico City, Manila. This fact provides additional interest to the
living in Spain, Maximilian Transilvanus, which produced a kind analytical exercise.
of "news report" interviewing the surviving sailors of the Magellan
expedition. He wrote it in Latin, more as an exercise of journalism 3 METHODOLOGY
of his time, providing fresh news to a handful of selected readers 3.1 Data
(including the Archbishop of Koln). The text was almost immedi-
ately translated into vernacular languages and reprinted in various We created a practical catalogue of the literature produced dur-
cities. ing the deployment of Portuguese and Spanish in Southeast Asia
This exercise is a "grassroots initiative" which, unfunded, had to during the sixteenth century until the mid-seventeenth century.
start small in scope. Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar, a PhD student There are fifty seven books in total. In this exercise, we hope to
from the Department of History, approached NUS Libraries and cross the formal division of Portuguese and Spanish knowledge as
formed a project team with two digital scholarship librarians with a separate corpus of information that is usually treated in two his-
backgrounds in information studies, geography and computing. toriographic traditions. The starting point for this compilation was
The team shared the interest for digital methods in the humanities. the monumental work of Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe,
The historical vision allows the analysis of information produced in published in six volumes from 1965 to 1988 [2, 3, 13, 14, 19, 20]. To
the early modern period through the data contained in the library complement the catalogue, we used a collection compiled by Fran-
materials, now increasingly digitized and available to the public. cisco de Herrera Maldonado at the beginning of the seventeenth
The deliverable of this exercise is a teaching tool to encourage century, published in the first Spanish translation of the Peregri-
students to engage with library materials. Equally important, we naçāo of Fernandes Pinto. In this list, the books about the Orient
wanted to demonstrate the potential of digital methods in historical were representative of the knowledge of Asian region in both Por-
research, in the hope of stimulating more conversation in the digital tuguese and Spanish literature, and was a kind of ideal personal
humanities within the local historian community. library in his time. It must be said that, for practical reasons, we had
to exclude texts referring to China, Japan (East Asia) or India (South
Asia), and concentrate in Southeast Asia. Recent interpretations
2 HISTORICAL CONTEXT about the Iberian presence in the region, critical to the traditional
The focus on the relation between the European "discovery" on one imperial narrative about the early modern period, helped to shape
side, and the rich and manifold number of cultures in Southeast the approach and limits of this project [1, 8, 9, 15, 21, 23].
Asia on the other, opens an opportunity to observe the changes We adopted an event-based data model that took reference from
in both parts. The Portuguese were pioneers in exploring the sea the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM), an on-
routes to circumvent the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. Attracted tology for cultural objects [10] accepted as ISO 21127 standard in
by the possibility of dominating the spice trade, they reached in 2006. Books were seen as information objects created from writ-
few years the Ormuz Strait, the coasts of India, and all the way the ing and printing events that were carried out by different actors
Spice Islands in today’s Indonesia. This coincided with the time of across space and time-spans. This design enables our data to be con-
the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru. However, the Spanish vertible to "reduced CRM-compatible" form, which may promote
interest to reach the Asian region, attracted also by the spice trade, understanding and reuse by other digital humanities projects.
was accomplished on 1565 when they settled in the Philippines. It
was evident from the books included in this exercise that this was 3.2 Collaborative Workflow
a period in which many European concepts were subverted, from Our workflow broadly comprises of three steps which weaved
the geography to the human landscape of the globe. together the expertise of our team members:
The reasons to combine Portuguese and Spanish sources corre-
spond to the nature of the Iberian literary culture, which had mutual 3.2.1 Transcribe Books into Tables. The historical books were
influences. The wider public impact produced by such literature is identified, read and interpreted. For each book, all relevant infor-
elusive because it seems limited to the Iberian public. However, the mation was transcribed into a pre-designed table template which
fact that such narratives were almost immediately translated into specified information to extract, then saved as a text document file.
other European languages indicates the appetite of other publics to The files were stored in a shared drive. This step was owned and
know about the events in the so-called Far East. During the closing performed by the historian who has command of several languages.
decades of the sixteenth century, there were Portuguese authors 3.2.2 Data Modelling. The tables were interpreted, and tran-
that published in the Spanish language to have a larger number of scribed into an event-based graph data model. The transcription
readers. One more reason to study Portuguese and Spanish texts effort included conversion of data fields into controlled vocabulary.
together is that it is an important part of the production of nar- Occasionally, the data model had to be refined to capture the phe-
ratives which corresponds to the period of Union of the Crowns, nomenon more closely. We used SylvaDB [7], a user-friendly free
commonly known as the time in which the Spanish monarchs ruled online tool that enables modelling of graphs and data entry without
Visualizing Across Space, Time and Relationships: Unveiling Southeast Asia to Contemporary Eyes Through 16th to mid-17th Century
Iberian Sources HistoInformatics 2017, November 2017, Singapore
any need for programming. This step was owned and performed
by a librarian, in conversation with the historian who populated
the tables.
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
file-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 OVERVIEW OF VISUALIZATION Figure 2: Relationship view.
The persistent URL for the project is: https://doi.org/10.25541/V5AF-
1BBY. 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 notion that they tend to hide information within their capitals,
hyperlink which opens up the relationship view. thus creating room for further investigation. In terms of aesthetic
The relationship view (Figure 2) provides for exploration of the provocation, the interactive and visual nature of the connection
relationships between works and entities involved in the produc- maps makes the information relatively accessible to students and
tion. It comprises of a connection map of the relationships between the public. The visualization platform also showed potential as a
publications and their creators, publishers, sponsors, places of pub- mediator between disciplines such as history, geography and litera-
lishing and derived works. ture. It makes visible how one author takes after another author,
intertextuality, and how information is reproduced, promoting crit-
5 DISCUSSION ical discussion with regards to the production and distribution of
Through our iterative prototyping process, it became apparent knowledge in the early modern period in Europe.
that the visualization may indeed influence humanities research The visualization could be a starting point for analysis of several
thinking in ways described by Hinrichs and Forlini [11]: (1) as a themes. A first theme could be the pride provoked by the “discov-
speculative process, (2) as aesthetic provocation and (3) as mediator ery” of new territorial and human spaces in Asia, as a result of the
between disciplines. As a speculative process, one immediate dis- initiative of Portuguese and Spaniards explorers. It was canonical
covery is the significant amount of printing of Portuguese and Span- in the literature to mention the importance of the role of the monar-
ish books overseas, which seems contrary to the well-established chies 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 [5, 16, 17].
As future development, the data can be collapsed from a mul-
timodal graph to a monopartite graph for computational social
network analyses in a way similar to Brown, Soto-Corominas and
Suárez [4], to derive insights on key players behind the construction
Figure 1: Geographic view. of the earliest European perspectives on Southeast Asia.
HistoInformatics 2017, November 2017, Singapore Cuauhtémoc Tonatiuh Villamar, Richard Cheng Yong Ho, and Yikang Feng
6 CONCLUSION [21] Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2012. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A Political
and Economic History. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, West Sussex, UK.
An interdisciplinary team comprising of a historian and two librari- [22] Heather Sutherland. 2003. Southeast Asian history and the mediterranean anal-
ans embarked on a collaborative endeavor to create a teaching tool ogy. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, 1 (Feb. 2003), 1–20.
[23] Ernst van Veen. 2000. Decay or Defeat? An Inquiry Into the Portuguese Decline
that could also serve to create awareness and conversation in the in Asia, 1580-1645. Research School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies,
adoption of digital methods within the local historian community. Universiteit Leiden, Leiden.
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 interpre-
tations and imaginings of Southeast Asia amongst Europeans in
the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and Dr.
Miguel Escobar Varela for their constructive comments.
REFERENCES
[1] Peter Borschberg. 2014. The Memoirs and Memorials of Jacques de Coutre. Security,
Trade and Society in 16th and 17th-Century Southeast Asia. NUS Press, Singapore.
[2] Charles R. Boxer. 1984. From Lisbon to Goa, 1500-1750: Studies in Portuguese
Maritime Enterprise. Variorum Reprints, London.
[3] Charles R. Boxer. 1992. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. Carcanet Press
Ltd./ Calouste Gulbekian Fundation and the Discoveries Commission, Lisbon.
[4] David M. Brown, Adriana Soto-Corominas, and Juan Luis Suárez. 2016. The
preliminaries project: Geography, networks, and publication in the Spanish
Golden Age. Literary and Linguistic Computing fqw036 (2016).
[5] Mercedes Maroto Camino. 2005. Producing the Pacific. Maps and Narratives of
Spanish Exploration (1567-1606). Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York.
[6] Pedro Cardim. 2014. Portugal Unido y Separado. Felipe II, la unión de territorios y el
debate sobre la condicion political del Reino de Portugal. Universidad de Valladolid,
Valladolid.
[7] Javier de la Rosa Perez, Juan-Luis Suárez, and Fernando Sancho-Caparrini. 2013.
SylvaDB: A Polyglot and Multi-backend Graph Database Management System.
In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Data Technologies and Appli-
cations. 285–292.
[8] Paulo Jorge de Sousa Pinto. 2012. The Portuguese and the Straits of Melaka,
1575-1619. NUS Press, Singapore.
[9] A. R. Disney. 2009. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire. Cambridge
University Press, New York.
[10] ICOM/CIDOC Documentation Standards Group and CIDOC CRM Spe-
cial Interest Group. 2016. Definition of the CIDOC Conceptual Refer-
ence Model. http://icom.museum/resources/publications-database/publication/
definition-of-the-cidoc-conceptual-reference-model/. (2016). Accessed: 2017-08-
08.
[11] Uta Hinrichs and Stefania Forlini. 2017. In defense of sandcastles: Research
thinking through visualization in DH. In Proceedings of the Conference on Digital
Humanities. International Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO).
[12] Paul Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt. 2005. Locating Southeast
Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (1st. ed.). NUS Press and
Ohio University Press, Singapore.
[13] Donald F. Lach. 2014. Asia in the Making of Europe. Vol. 3. Universidad de
Valladolid, Valladolid. 306–366 pages.
[14] Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera. 1998. Guia de Fuentes Manuscritas para La Historia de
Filipinas Conservadas En España. Fundación Mapfre Tavera, Madrid.
[15] Manel Ollé. 2002. La Empresa de China: De La Armada Invencible Al Galeón de
Manila. El Acantilado, Barcelona.
[16] Ricardo Padrón. 2009. A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of
the Pacific Rim. Hispanic Review 77, 2 (Jan. 2009), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.2307/
40541410
[17] María Portuondo. 2009. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
[18] Anthony Reid. 1988. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. Vol. 1.
Yale University Press, New Haven.
[19] Marcela Londoño Rendón. 2010. La biblioteca oriental de Francisco de Herrera
Maldonado. Studia Aurea: Revista de Literatura Española y Teoría Literaria Del
Renacimiento y Siglo de Oro 4 (2010), 105–137.
[20] Isacio Rodríguez and Jesús Álvarez. 2014. Fondo de Filipiniana en la Biblioteca de
Agustinos de Valladolid. Biblioteca del Colegio de San Agustin, Valladolid.