HGIS de las Indias

HGIS de las Indias is a collaborative digital humanities initiative that compiles and publishes open-access spatio-temporal 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.