Inventar el virreinato de la Nueva Granada: curaduría crítica de fuentes primarias y la construcción de conjuntos de datos espaciales, 1739-1810

The invention of the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada (today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama) in 1739 was a response to an economic project of the Spanish monarchy to protect the north of South America from foreign incursions and to extract greater resources for the crown. This project of seeking administrative and geographical unity was nourished by the production of knowledge on political economy, that is, on how to create wealth in competitive contexts. Primary sources such as maps, texts on economics and geographical descriptions created by bureaucrats, naturalists and the military in the colony, show the difficulties of integrating a mountainous and extensive territory and the importance of geographical imagination in this process. The central question guiding this project is: how can the relationship between the search for territorial unity in northern South America and the diversity of landscapes and political economies in tension be visualized in an archival interface and a digital map? The first phase consists of the critical curation of primary sources between 1739 and 1810. This implies the selection of documents, of fragments within documents and of maps of the period, in order to organize them, enrich their metadata, and arrange them around a historical argument and narrative. Some of these documents are available in published books, others are digitized and a small number will be digitized. The second phase consists of the formulation of a methodological process to extract data on the spatial and political economy dimensions of this curated set of primary sources. The aim is to generate relational datasets for visualization, analysis, and interpretation of historical-spatial transformations of the invention and crisis of the viceroyalty of the New Granada and the actors involved in this process. The project seeks to make both the primary sources and datasets open resources in Spanish for research and teaching about the period