Topography of imperial Hispanic urbanisation – TopUrbi

This project on the urbanisation of the Spanish Empire in the 18th century aims to map the continuities and discontinuities of the inhabited spaces of the empire, listing at the same time the areas that were under the control of independent indigenous political units or rival powers of Spain. Based on the cross-referencing of Antonio de Alcedo's famous Diccionario (1789) with manuscript sources, it will lead to the creation of a toponymic database and a geolocalized Atlas of villages, mission pueblos, mining centres, towns and cities of the Americas - which does not exist to this day - constituting a patrimonial collection for the use of historians, anthropologists and linguists. The parallel work on about twenty 18th century maps will make it possible to locate all the places thus obtained (some of which have disappeared nowadays).
Two hypotheses structure this project. The first is that the cartography of this urban network allows another history of the empire to be made, one that is more pragmatic and attentive to real topography than to the question of new colonial knowledge, because it reveals a multiplication of borders (local, regional, continental) that has been neglected until now. In so doing, it reveals the contingency of empire. The second hypothesis of this project is that the cross-referencing of systematic and comprehensive sources (Alcedo's dictionary) with practical sources (reports and censuses made on a very local scale), as well as with cartographic sources from the period, is capable of constructing a new documentary heritage of toponyms, maps and a record of territorial occupations. This heritage is highly sensitive material at a time when various indigenous peoples are making claims, particularly territorial claims, to their respective governments. In its own way, therefore, the heritage revealed by this research corresponds to the equivalent of a declassified archive.
The project will first carry out a computer processing of the Alcedo Dictionary (OCR processing, validation, tagging and data extraction) in order to compose a gazetteer which will then be geolocated by a geomatics engineer. The gazetteer will mobilise anthropological and historical know-how through linguistic, cartographic, demographic and political research (usually handwritten documents) which will have to enrich it. Data and cartography will constitute the material of an interactive portal on the topography of imperial urbanisation, in open access, where researchers will be able to draw on new sources for their work.
The main scientific events of the project will be a mid-term colloquium on Alcedo's work, a closing colloquium on the methodological contributions of the project and its dialogue with other contexts and periods, provisionally entitled Colonising Territories, and a travelling exhibition. These will be complemented by training seminars in automatic text analysis and geomatics, as well as by more permanent research tools (edition of Alcedo's Dictionary in XML TEI format, toponymic directory of villages, towns and cities in the Americas, interactive open access portal, edition of an atlas of geolocated ancient maps). The project is also conceived as a place of training through research for master, doctoral and post-doctoral students.
In addition to its interest as a tool for creating archives, the most salient feature of this project is the great complementarity of the transdisciplinary and international team that is leading it, in terms of field, profession or scientific skills: associating archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, specialists in automatic language processing and geomaticians, this team is in fact able to answer all the questions raised by the project.