HGIS de las Indias
Mapping the Spanish Indies
A Digital Atlas of Late Colonial Spanish America
Guidebook
- Overview
- Case studies
- Teaching resources
- Conduct analyses
- Contribute data
- Download raw data
Data
- Geodata repository
- Gazetteer
- Workflow
Maps and Tools
- Map Galleries
- Interactive Map Tools
- About webGIS
About
- Team
- Project history
- Publications
- Data licensing information & citation
News & Events
New dataset released, new data available; New institutional partners or contributors; Workshops, publications, or teaching use cases
HGIS de las Indias is a collaborative digital humanities initiative that compiles and publishes open-access spatio-temporalal data focusing on the late colonial Spanish America period (years ~1701-1808). Through a growing collection of maps, datasets, and interactive tools, the platform offers insight into the administrative divisions, settlements, religious missions, communication networks, and economic activities of the period. With a historical gazetteer, reconstructed geographies, and detailed metadata, HGIS de las Indias supports scholars, educators, and the public in understanding the layered, contested spaces of the early modern Americas.
Use the WebGIS tools to trace the shifting boundaries of jurisdictions, discover where indigenous communities lived and resisted, follow the routes of postal couriers and galleons, and examine population data from censuses and archival sources. Use the gazetteer to search, explore and navigate information on individual places and territories.
HGIS de las Indias is a key component of ARCA (Archive and Resource Center for the Americas), a collaborative initiative aimed at uniting diverse datasets and resources, building a data landscape for the field. Within this effort, it is a key connecting resource, relating the datasets through a shard framework. Via integration in World Historical Gazetteer, HGIS de las Indias also connects data also to the wider world of Linked Open Data as a part of the Semantic Web.
Explore the Story
- Use screenshots or previews of interactive maps/dashboards
(use manual pagination instead of autorotation) - Include storymap navigation or step-by-step panels
- Add captions, labels, and audio/video narrations if possible
Territories MAP (1728-1780):
Focus on colonial provinces, capitals, indigenous territories, and treaty lines.
Church Map:
Focus on parishes, missions, diocesan territories and presence of religious orders (red stars: Sagrarios, small black stars: Curatos, +: Misiones)
Settlements Map:
Focus on settlements and their types (Red dots: Ciudades y villas, green dots: Pueblos, brown dots: Poblaciones 'hispanas').
Data
Under construction
Cartography
This project will build a comprehensive database with immigrant flows from Spain and Africa to the Americas since the Conquest in 1492 until today. By tracking immigrant flows, we will estimate the human capital brought by voluntary and involuntary migrants and their migration networks in Spain and in the Americas.
Links
We thank the support of the following organizations:
American Historical Association
Asociación Peruana de Historia Económica
European Historical Economics Association
📣Collaboration opportunities
Social Media links, sources, contributor logos, contact information & email address for feedback.
Copyright: Leticia Arroyo Abad and José Antonio Espin-Sánchez 2021
Funded by NSF award number 2121697