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The Archive and the Internet*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Rolena Adorno*
Affiliation:
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Extract

The American Historical Association has been in the forefront of professional academic organizations that have seen the potential of the Internet for fomenting the production and circulation of academic scholarship and for contributing to the teaching of history. This has been no more apparent than in the AHA Workshop, “Entering the Second Stage of Online History Scholarship,” carried out in the days before the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association and under its auspices. In the AHA Workshop, the topic was electronic scholarly publishing: maintaining its quality, mediating its use and access, and assessing its impact on the changing shape of the profession. It took into account the perspectives of all those involved in scholarly production: authors, journal editors, department chairs, university press publishers and editors, and, at the same time, those involved in mediating its use and access at the technical level, that is, the librarians and technicians.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2004 

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Footnotes

*

A talk presented at the annual business meeting and luncheon of the Conference on Latin American History (at the 118th annual meeting of the American Historical Association), University Club of Washington, D.C., 1135 16th St., NW, Washington, D.C., Friday, January 9, 2004.

References

1 The American Historical Association's Gutenberg<e> project is the premier example. In collaboration with Columbia University Press, the AHA's sponsorship of electronic publication of outstanding doctoral dissertations in any field of history provides a model for the relationship of the professional society, the university, and the advancement of scholarship.

2 American Historical Association, Program of the 118th Annual Meeting, January 8–11, 2004, Washington, D.C., ed. Tune, Sharon K., pp. 7577.Google Scholar See also, for example, the feature “Publishing History,” Perspectives, Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 40:5 (May 2002), pp. 37–43, and “The Internet at the History Classroom,” Perspectives 41:5 (May 2003), pp. 23–31.

3 Echevarría, Roberto González, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative [1990] (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 30.Google Scholar (Myth and Archive won the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award in 1992.)

4 Echevarría, González, Myth and Archive, p. 32.Google Scholar

5 In Spain Charles V established the royal archive at Simancas in 1544, but its origins are found in the reign of the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabel, when the word archivo was registered in Castilian for the first time in 1490 ( Echevarría, González, Myth and Archive, p. 32).Google Scholar In Denmark, which is of special interest here, king Frederick III (1648–1670) created the king's library in 1665–73, constructing inside Copenhagen Castle a new edifice to house some 20,000 books and manuscripts; see Det Kongelige Bibliotek—et has på Slotsholmen (København: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1993), p. 74.

6 In addition to its many digitized collections, the University of Alicante inaugurated in February 2003 the project “Manuscritos de América en las Colecciones Reales” in collaboration the Royal Library of Spain (Real Biblioteca) (<http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portal/patrimonio>); see Noticias de la Real Biblioteca 8:32 (2003), p. 1. However, the usefulness of works digitized depends entirely on the criteria with which they have been edited. To date, many scanned texts in the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes are unaccompanied by critical apparatus, and modern transcriptions, such as that of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios, suffer from a lack of philological rigor. Described as being “based on the edition of Valladolid, 1555, and compared with the 1989 Cátedra edition of Juan Francisco Maura and the 1996 Alianza edition of Trinidad Barrera,” the modern digitized transcription thus relies on two popular (not critical) editions, and the resulting digitized text combines common-sense and sometimes fanciful readings that, in any case, modernize (and hopefully, correctly interpret) the 1555 text. Among the collections of pictorial images presented by the Biblioteca Virtual Cervantes, the digitized map collections give an idea of the originals, but they lack sufficiently high-quality resolution to be useful to the scholar. The advantage of online presentation, however, is that items can be substituted, updated, or improved at any time, and this will likely be the case. The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes also has links to other websites, and the Royal Library's Guarnan Poma website (<http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>) is now accessible through the highly frequented Biblioteca Virtual. The URL of the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes is: (<http://www.cervantesvirtual.com>).

7 Dastin is reissuing in print the Crónicas de América series, consisting of “the most important chronicles and relations dealing with the conquest and colonization of the New World”, which had been published in the 1980s and 1990s by Historia-16 in Madrid under the general editorship of Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois. Dastin is currently preparing some twenty-five of these chronicle editions for Internet presentation. Again, the modernization of the orthography and the uneven quality of editorial presentation in the original, print-edition series will be characteristic of the new virtual “collection”. Dastin's URL is: http://www.artehistoria.com/cronicas/autores.htm.

8 See The Royal Library's Manuscript Department's “ELECTRA -e-manuscripts” front page at <http://www.kb.dk/kb/dept/nbo/ha/manuskripter/index-en.htm> and, as an example of a finely digitized artifact, its 1605 Flemish psalter (<http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/gks1605/index.htm>).

9 de Ayala, Felipe Guarnan Poma, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Copenhagen, Royal, Library, Gks 2232, 4to).Google Scholar Online at <http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>. click, at left, “portada” for the image of the title page. Following the Murra-Adorno 1980 edition of the Nueva corónica, the digitized electronic edition corrects Guarnan Poma's flawed pagination and provides consecutive page numbering. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations to the Nueva corónica refer to the autograph manuscript.

The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno was acquired and incorporated into the Royal Library during the reign of King Frederick III, mentioned above, almost certainly before 1663. It was housed in the Old Royal Collection (a designation employed since 1784–86 or earlier to refer to the Royal Library's earliest holdings) and classified under the subject category “Spanish History.” This early Danish collection of Spanish manuscripts reads like one of Jorge Luis Borges's famous lists of apparent miscellany, and in addition to the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno it includes a remarkable number of manuscript materials on affairs of governance of the Spanish state, and even fragments of a biography of the Count-Duke of Olivares and Grand Chancellor of the Indies, Don Gaspar de Guzmán; see Adorno, Rolena, “A Witness unto Itself: The Integrity of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616),” Fund og Forskning 41 (2002), pp. 1620.Google Scholar

10 Adorno, Rolena, Guarnan Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru: From a Century of Scholarship to a New Era of Reading/Guaman Poma y su corónica ilustrada del Perú colonial: un siglo de investigaciones hacia una nueva era de lectura (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press and The Royal Library, 2001).Google Scholar

11 Codicology takes into account all those features of a manuscript book's preparation apart from paleography, which was the first and most ancient of the manuscript sciences.

12 Pietschmann, Richard, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno des Don Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, eine peruanische Bilderhandschrift, in Nachrichten von der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Berlin: Philologisch-historische Klasse, 1908), pp. 637659.Google Scholar This text was translated into French for use as the introduction to the 1936 Paris facsimile edition of the Nueva corónica (see note 15, below), pp. vii-xxviii. It appears in Spanish translation, from the French, as “Nueva corónica y buen gobierno de Don Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala: Códice peruano ilustrado,” en Tello, Julio C., Las primeras edades del Perú por Guarnan Poma: ensayo de interpretación (Lima: Museo de Antropología, 1939), pp. 7991.Google Scholar

13 Adorno, Rolena, “The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno: A New Look at the Royal Library's Peruvian Treasure,” Fund og Forskning 24 (1979’80), pp. 7–28;Google Scholar idem, “La redacción y enmendación del autógrafo de la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, in de Ayala, Felipe Guarnan Poma, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. Murra, John V. and Adorno, Rolena, Quechua analysis and translations by Urioste, Jorge L., 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), pp. 3246.Google Scholar

14 de Ayala, Felipe Guarnan Poma, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. Murra, John V. and Adorno, Rolena, Quechua analysis and translations by Urioste, Jorge L., 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980);Google Scholar idem, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge L. Urioste. 3 vols. (Madrid: Historia-16, 1987).

15 de Ayala, Felipe Guarnan Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Codex péruvien illustré). Travaux et Mémoires de l'Institut d'Ethnologie XXIII (Paris; Institut d'Ethnologie, 1936; rpt. 1968).Google Scholar The manuscript was photographed by the atelier of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The photographic negatives were then sent to Paris where they were retouched (retouché) by technicians who “painted out” stains of ink that had “bled through” from the other side of the sheets and then attempted to redraw lost bits of text. These efforts were ultimately reviewed in Copenhagen by Hans Aage Paludan of the Royal Library. See Adorno, , “A Witness unto Itself,” reprinted in Adorno, Rolena and Boserup, Ivan, New Studies of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), pp. 3046.Google Scholar

The Paris print facsimile was prepared under the direction of Dr. Paul Rivet (1876–1958), the French ethnologist who founded the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, gathered considerable data on the South American languages of Quechua and Aymara in his years of residence in the Andes, and trained many ethnologists at the University of Paris's Institute of Ethnology which he had helped to establish in 1926.

16 Poma, Guarnan, El primer nueva corónica (1936), p. 306;Google Scholar Poma, Guarnan, El primer nueva corónica (1615), p. 308.Google Scholar As mentioned earlier, the difference in page number is due to the digitized electronic edition's consecutive numbering that corrects Guarnan Poma's flawed pagination. See “Pagination Survey of Copenhagen, GkS 2232, 4to” in Adorno and Boserup, New Studies, pp. 107–113.

17 Guarnan Poma always used Latinate letters when writing in the upper case; hence, the only way he wrote in the upper case the letter with the value of Spanish “u” was Roman “v”: “ADVLTERAS” is “adúlteras.”

18 See the correct transcription, “DE ADVLTERAS,” in Poma, Guarnan, El primer nueva corónica (1980), p. 308.Google Scholar

19 John Charles completed his Yale doctoral dissertation, “Indios ladinos: Colonial Andean Testimony and Ecclesiastical Institutions (1583–1650),” in 2003 and is now on the faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Tulane University, New Orleans.

20 Poma, Guaman, El primer nueva corónica (1615), pp. 11791188, 466, 1185, respectively).Google Scholar See Adorno, and Boserup, , New Studies, pp. 6673.Google Scholar

21 There are 398 drawings on 399 pages because Guarnan Poma's “Mapamundi de las Indias del Pirú” occupies two facing pages; see Poma, Guarnan, El primer nueva corónica (1615), pp. 10011002.Google Scholar

22 Murra prepared the ethnological index; Urioste, the Quechua glossary. All three indices were also reprinted in our 1987 Madrid edition of the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno.

23 Urioste, Jorge L., “Estudio analítico del quechua en la Nueva corónica ” in Poma, Guarnan, El primer nueva corónica (1980), p. 29. Urioste provides a comprehensive overview of Guarnan Poma's language, particularly the ways in which his Spanish grammar and syntax are affected by his Quechua language substratum.Google Scholar

24 <http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>, click, at bottom of screen, “Enlaces,” then scroll down to “Documents,” click on Mendoza y Luna, Don Juan de, 1615. Luz de materias de Indias, click “Introduction and manuscript,” click on “1 recto” at left.

25 Figure 5: <http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>. click, at bottom of screen, “Enlaces”, then scroll down to “Documents”, click on Expediente Prado Tello, Ca. 1560–1640.Legal actions regarding land titles in the valley of Chupas near Huamanga. Peru, click “Introduction and manuscript,” click on “Illustration 1-Guaman Malque”. Figure 6: <http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>. click, at bottom of screen, “enlaces”, then scroll down to “Documents”, click on Expediente Prado Tello, Ca. 1560–1640. Legal actions regardine land titles in the valley of Chupas near Huamanga. Peru, click “Introduction and manuscript,” click on “map (2 folios)”. They appear as 52 verso and 53 recto.

26 For an analysis of these litigations in relation to the mentioned materials, see Adorno, Rolena, “The Genesis of Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala's Nueva corónica y buen gobierno ,” Colonial Latin American Review 2:1–2 (1993), pp. 5392,CrossRefGoogle Scholar or its Spanish-language translation, “La génesis de la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno de Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala,” Taller de letras (Santiago de Chile), no. 23, pp. 9–45. Both are available on the Guarnan Poma website (<http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss.poma/>).

27 Regarding the “virtual library,” the joint Real Biblioteca/Bibilioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes project, “Manuscritos de América en las Colecciones Reales,” mentioned above, is such a long-term endeavor. The second and third phases of their collaboration will include the digitization of the entire corpus of Americanist sources of the Real Biblioteca and the University of Salamanca (Colegios Mayores Salmantinos) and those of the Biblioteca del Real Monasterio de El Escorial. The goal is to create unified access to all the Americanist sources of Spain's Patrimonio Nacional, and to contribute to the development of a European standard of manuscript description; see Noticias de la Real Biblioteca 8:32 (2003), p. 1.

28 Miall, David S., “The Library versus the Internet: Literary Studies under Siege?,” PMLA 116:5 (2001), p. 1412.Google Scholar The “granite and glass” refers to the Royal Library's new (1999) home; attached by skyway to the old facility, it directly overlooks a canal in central Copenhagen. Constructed of black granite and glass, it is known as “The Black Diamond.”