About the Project

Ticha is an online, digital explorer for a corpus of Colonial Zapotec texts. (The name ticha comes from the Colonial Valley Zapotec word for ‘word’, which also means ‘language’.) Zapotec is an indigenous language family of Mexico, has a long record of alphabetic texts, the earliest dated 1565 (Oudijk 2008:230). Reading and interpreting these colonial documents can be extremely difficult because of the challenges of early Zapotec orthography, vocabulary, grammar, and printing conventions, yet the documents contain rich linguistic, historical, and anthropological information.

While currently in a mock-up stage, Ticha will eventually allow a user to access and explore many interlinked layers of these texts, including images of the original documents, transcriptions, translations into English and modern Spanish, linguistic analysis (including morphological interlinearization), and commentary. Ticha is innovative in bringing together data analyzed in FLEx (Fieldworks Language Explorer, fieldworks.sil.org) a system for lexical and grammatical analysis, with current TEI standards (Text Encoding Initiative, tei-c.org) for paleographic and translational representations of texts. This tool will make Colonial Zapotec texts accessible to scholars in diverse fields (including linguistics, anthropology, and history), Zapotec community members, and the general public.



Videos

May Plumb on the Ticha Project from Haverford College Libraries on Vimeo.

Michel R. Oudijk on the Ticha Project from Haverford College Libraries on Vimeo.

George Aaron Broadwell on the Ticha Project from Haverford College Libraries on Vimeo.



Presentations

Lillehaugen, Brook Danielle, George Aaron Broadwell, Laurie Allen, and Michel R. Oudijk. 2015. Archives, morphological analysis, and XML encoding: interdisciplinary methods in the creation of a digital text explorer for Colonial Zapotec manuscripts. Presented at Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas II: Congreso Internacional. Innovación, globalización e impacto, Madrid. [Slides PDF]