Th r hv nd th nt rn t

Rolena Adorno

The Americas, Volume 61, Number 1, July 2004, pp. 1-18 (Article)

Published by The Academy of American Franciscan History

DOI: 10.1353/tam.2004.0078

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tam/summary/v061/61.1adorno.html

Access provided by City College (20 Aug 2014 18:44 GMT)

The Americas
61:1 July 2004, 1-18
Copyright by the Academy of American
Franciscan History

THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET*

T
he American Historical Association has been in the forefront of pro-
fessional 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.1 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: main-
taining its quality, mediating its use and access, and assessing its impact on
the changing shape of the profession.2 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.

The present discussion aims to complement those presentations by focus-

ing not on the production of scholarship but rather the preparation and pres-
entation of scholarly sources. Here the interests of historians and philolo-
gists (both of whose interests I share) merge, bringing together the historical
scholar’s selection of sources and the philologist’s skills at preparing them
as accurately transcribed, reader-adapted, user-friendly, and self-explana-
tory. This convergence of skills mediates between the secrecy or unavail-
ability of the Archive and the open access of the Internet, and it provides the

* A talk presented at the annual business meeting and luncheon of the Conference on Latin Ameri-
can 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.
1
The American Historical Association’s Gutenberg<e> project is the premier example. In collabo-
ration 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 soci-
ety, 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. Sharon K. Tune, pp. 75-77. See also, for example, the feature “Publishing His-
tory,” 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.

1
2 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

needed link between them. On the face of it, the Archive and the Internet
seem to be antithetical concepts. As Roberto González Echevarría has
argued, the notion of the archive brings together the concepts of secrecy (the
privacy of knowledge), power, and origins.3 “Archive” comes from the late
Latin archivum, which in turn comes from the Greek archeion, or “residence
of the magistrates,” which is derived from arkhe, “command,” hence power.
Arche, in philosophy, was “the first principle”; with Aristotle, it was
“cause,” hence “beginning,” “origin.” And finally, secrecy: through arche,
archive is related to arcane, arcanum, a secret or mystery.4

The secrecy of power, knowledge and origins was well kept in the insti-
tution of the royal archive.5 The topic to be considered here stands between
the secrecy or privacy of the royal or state archive,—translated today into
the far-flung modern public national archives worldwide,—and the open and
public domain of the worldwide Internet. I am referring to a new type of col-
laboration in the scholarly world between the archive and the academy, that
is, between the research library and the university scholar, creating together
not a set of print editions of library or archival holdings or establishing an
actual research center within a library. These models are the familiar, neces-
sary points of reference, but a newer version of them (which will augment
but not replace them) is just now coming into view: It is the electronic
research center, which can take maximum advantage of the flexibility of the
electronic medium and provide through it the resources that would be
impossible or extremely expensive to assemble and make universally acces-
sible by any other means.

The concept of the electronic research center becomes sharper if juxta-

posed to that of the library. The library provides a vast array of resources but
while doing so inevitably loses in uniform high quality what it gains in range
and inclusiveness. The tighter focus of a research center is organized themat-
ically and, if carefully done, can overcome the library’s limitations; though
sacrificing range, it gains in quality. Currently available electronic examples
of the “library” model are both institutional and commercial. In the institu-

3
Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative [1990]
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 30. (Myth and Archive won the Latin American Studies
Association’s Bryce Wood Book Award in 1992.)
4
González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, p. 32.
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 (González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, p. 32). In Denmark, which is of spe-
cial 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 hus på Slotsholmen (København: Det kongelige Bibliotek, 1993), p. 74.
 ROLENA ADORNO 3

tional setting, the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes at the University of

Alicante in Alicante, Spain, is pertinent. The Alicante institution’s “holdings”
are vast and it is, as it states, a “virtual library.”6 In the private sector, the
commercial publisher Dastin in Madrid also offers an example pertinent to
the field of Latin American colonial studies.7 With regard to the “electronic
research center” to be discussed here, its institutional home is the Royal
Library of Denmark and its Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books.
The Royal Library of Denmark in Copenhagen has been one of the for-
ward-looking national research libraries in Europe to perceive, and to
quickly but prudently act upon, the potential of the new medium for the dig-
ital facsimile reproduction of the rarest and most precious works from its
manuscript collections. The Royal Library’s website currently features three
divisions of digital facsimile reproductions, representing the Middle Ages
and Renaissance, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the modern
era.8 In 1998, the Royal Library began a project of digitization which, by
September, 2000, had included thirty-five facsimile editions of manuscripts
of differing age and complexity, consisting of some five thousand pages.
Beyond their digitized collections of illuminated Medieval and Renaissance

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 cri-
teria 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 col-
lections 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 Guaman Poma website (<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 Inter-
net presentation. Again, the modernization of the orthography and the uneven quality of editorial pres-
entation 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>).
4 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

manuscripts and those of the modern period that include the works of Hans
Christian Andersen and Søren Kierkegaard, the seventeenth century is rep-
resented by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y
buen gobierno (GkS 2232, 4to) (Figure 1: Title-page of the Nueva
corónica).9 The Royal Library made the decision to consider the digitization
of the Guaman Poma manuscript after its 1997 inclusion in UNESCO’s list
of the great monuments of world cultures, the “Memory of the World.” Per-
mission from the Director of the Royal Library to scan the Nueva corónica
y buen gobierno was not granted until 2000 when “cool light” became avail-
able, assuring that there would be no heat damage to the manuscript in the
course of the scanning.
The objective of all these Royal Library projects was first and foremost to
make available their most precious resources. The preservation and security
of these materials were also primary considerations. The Royal Library made
the decision to go “deep” into the Guaman Poma project because it was
unique and the most internationally significant of its manuscript holdings.
The Guaman Poma website (<www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/>) was inaugurated
on May 15, 2001, making the digital facsimile of the autograph manuscript
available gratis and worldwide. In the Royal Library’s conviction about the
complementarity of electronic and print media, the occasion was accompa-
nied by the publication of a small, bilingual Spanish-English book featuring
an essay on the manuscript’s contents, its history, and the current state of rel-
evant scholarship in various disciplines; it included as well fifteen high reso-
lution color plates of drawings from the manuscript, thus showing to a non-
online audience the fine quality of the digital reproductions.10

9
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Copenhagen, Royal
Library, Gks 2232, 4to). Online at 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 Guaman 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 earli-
est 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 materi-
als 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 Rolena Adorno, “A Wit-
ness unto Itself: The Integrity of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s El primer
nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615/1616),” Fund og Forskning 41 (2002), pp. 16-20.
10
Rolena Adorno, Guaman Poma and His Illustrated Chronicle from Colonial Peru: From a Cen-
tury 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).
 ROLENA ADORNO 5

Figure 1: Front page of the Guaman Poma website at the Royal Library, Copen-
hagen (www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/). Courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen.

The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno project was conceived and headed
by Ivan Boserup, Keeper of Manuscripts and Rare Books of the Royal
Library, who recognized not only the Nueva corónica y buen gobierno’s
importance but also the need to meet the challenges of its extraordinary
length, its bifocal verbal/pictorial contents, and the complexity of its organ-
ization. The manuscript consists of twelve hundred quarto-size folio pages,
399 of which are occupied by full-page drawings, and it includes Guaman
6 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Poma’s divisions of the work into chapters, groups of chapters, sections, and
subsections. The relationship of these textual divisions to one another is not
immediately apparent, and interpreting them is made more difficult by the
fact that Guaman Poma’s table of contents represents the antepenultimate
stage in his completion of the manuscript book.

By 2000 it was clear that a new codicological examination of the manu-

script was needed.11 The first such study had been done in the 1920s by
Richard Pietschmann, the Director of the Library of the University of Göt-
tingen, Göttingen, Germany, who had brought the chronicle to international
attention in 1908.12 The results of Pietschmann’s work were lost in the Allied
bombing of Jena in 1945. The second such investigation was undertaken in
1977 by the present author, and its results were published in 1979-80 and
1980, respectively.13 Because I had been the first scholar since Pietschmann
to undertake a codicological investigation, and because I had co-edited two
critical editions of the manuscript resulting from that work,14 the Royal
Library invited me to collaborate in the preparation of the digital edition. The
project was important because the 1936 print facsimile edition, which had
served so well for so many generations, could easily be superceded in the dig-
ital age.15 From the technical side, it was time to substitute the Paris edition’s

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
Richard Pietschmann, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno des Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala,
eine peruanische Bilderhandschrift, in Nachrichten von der königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften
zu Göttingen (Berlin: Philologisch-historische Klasse, 1908), pp. 637-659. 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 gob-
ierno de Don Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala: Códice peruano ilustrado,” en Julio C. Tello, Las primeras
edades del Perú por Guaman Poma: ensayo de interpretación (Lima: Museo de Antropología, 1939), pp.
79-91.
13
Rolena Adorno, “The Nueva corónica y buen gobierno: A New Look at the Royal Library’s Peru-
vian Treasure,” Fund og Forskning 24 (1979-80), pp. 7-28; idem, “La redacción y enmendación del autó-
grafo de la Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica
y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, Quechua analysis and translations by Jorge L.
Urioste, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1980), pp. xxxii-xlvi.
14
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra and
Rolena Adorno, Quechua analysis and translations by Jorge L. Urioste, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Siglo Vein-
tiuno, 1980); idem, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, ed. John V. Murra, Rolena Adorno, and Jorge L.
Urioste. 3 vols. (Madrid: Historia-16, 1987).
15
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Codex péruvien illustré),
Travaux et Mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie XXIII (Paris; Institut d’Ethnologie, 1936; rpt. 1968). The
manuscript was photographed by the atelier of the Royal Library in Copenhagen. The photographic neg-
atives 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 Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup, New
 ROLENA ADORNO 7

manually corrected photographic facsimile reproduction with an up-to-date

digital facsimile. From the scholarly point of view, the challenge was to pre-
pare a facsimile edition for online application, that is, to determine and con-
struct the means by which to accompany the text with a useful critical appa-
ratus. No such aids had been prepared for the 1936 Paris print edition, and the
disadvantages for readers of a raw facsimile were long obvious. But what
transformations were implied in translating the standard elements of critical
editorial apparatus into navigational aids pertinent to the electronic medium?
The first step in the process was to produce the digital facsimile. The
unique contribution of electronic digitization is the ability to present an
extremely high definition of the image. Working at the state of the art in
2000 (the technology has advanced further by this date), the camera took
some 120 fragmentary shots of a single page in the course of its scanning,
and these fragments were then assembled by the camera’s computer to pro-
duce high definition images. Although such images are still only reproduc-
tions on-the-web of first-generation digitizations, and despite the fact that
autopsy of the manuscript by specialists with technical instruments will
always and ultimately be superior, the digitized images provide far more
detailed views than any that can be provided by scholars using even the most
sophisticated instruments.
With the digitization of the manuscript, the 1936 Paris print facsimile has
been definitively superceded. Here is a good example of why this should be
so. The drawings reproduced here portray Guaman Poma’s interpretation of
one of the Inca-era punishments of adultery, death by stoning. The presenta-
tion of the Paris facsimile reproduction of this page alongside the digital fac-
simile reveals the problem. (Figures 2 and 3: Capital punishment of adul-
terers by stoning, or wach’uq).16 The digital facsimile shows that the word
in the drawing’s title affected by the bleedthroughs of ink from the other side
of the sheet is “DE ADVLTERAS.”17 Yet in the 1936 facsimile the

Studies of the Autograph Manuscript of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gob-
ierno (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002), pp. 30-46.
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 Amer-
ican languages of Quechua and Aymara in his years of residence in the Andes, and trained many ethnol-
ogists at the University of Paris’s Institute of Ethnology which he had helped to establish in 1926.
16
Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica (1936), p. 306; Guaman Poma, El primer nueva
corónica (1615), p. 308. As mentioned earlier, the difference in page number is due to the digitized elec-
tronic edition’s consecutive numbering that corrects Guaman Poma’s flawed pagination. See “Pagination
Survey of Copenhagen, GkS 2232, 4to” in Adorno and Boserup, New Studies, pp. 107-113.
17
Guaman 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.”
 8
THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Figures 2 and 3: The capital punishment of adulterers in the 1936 Paris facsimile edition, where "DE ADVLTERAS" has been cor-
rupted into "DE ADVETEIRAS", and in the autograph manuscript (GkS 2232, 4to). Courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen.
 ROLENA ADORNO 9

bleedthroughs were painted over by the Paris technicians and the now doubly
obliterated word, as they imagined and redrew it, turned into “Adveteiras,”
which does not exist in any Romance language. I discovered this and other
discrepancies between the autograph manuscript and the Paris facsimile
while at the Royal Library in 1977, but I was able to make note of only a few
of them in the Murra-Adorno 1980 edition of the Nueva corónica.18 Now
there is no need to describe in words what any Internet reader can see.

After the digitization was prepared, the navigation issue needed to be

addressed. Here the specialist scholar enters the scene to collaborate with the
manuscript librarian and the imaging technician to provide the next resource.
At the request of Ivan Boserup, who foresaw the need, my former student and
now colleague in the profession, John Charles, and I developed two naviga-
tional aids for the May 2001 inauguration of the Royal Library’s Guaman
Poma website.19 They were clickable lists, and in both cases, it is fair to say
that this type of work could not have been done by anyone who was not a
serious reader/scholar of Guaman Poma, because in each instance we had to
create new tools of access to the manuscript. The first of these was a com-
plete table of contents of the work that would allow the reader to go directly
to the desired section and page of the manuscript. This was necessary because
Guaman Poma’s own table of contents, “Tabla de la dicha corónica,” was
incomplete. He had prepared it on the manuscript’s last sheets, but he did so
before he wrote and inserted into the manuscript his final chapter, “Camina
el autor,” as well as other sheets, such as one portraying and describing the
rule of the viceroy Don Fernando de Torres y Portugal (1586-1589) and
another, commenting on the importance of the silver mines of Potosí.20

The second of these navigational aids was a clickable descriptive list of

Guaman Poma’s 398 full-page drawings.21 We also created this aid at the
suggestion of Ivan Boserup because, as he well knew, many if not most of
the potential scholarly as well as casual viewers would want quick access to
the hundreds of drawings of the work without having to sift through the
entire text or even the drawings themselves. Again, the knowledgeable
reader/scholar was needed insofar as a mere mechanical transcription of

18
See the correct transcription, “DE ADVLTERAS,” in Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica
(1980), p. 308.
19
John Charles completed his Yale doctoral dissertation, “Indios ladinos: Colonial Andean Testi-
mony 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
Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica (1615), pp. 1179-1188, 466, 1185, respectively). See
Adorno and Boserup, New Studies, pp. 66-73.
21
There are 398 drawings on 399 pages because Guaman Poma’s “Mapamundi de las Indias del
Pirú” occupies two facing pages; see Guaman Poma, El primer nueva corónica (1615), pp. 1001-1002.
10 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Guaman Poma’s titles and captions would be insufficiently helpful in iden-

tifying the themes or contents of the drawings. That is, Guaman Poma’s
titles and captions are intelligible when one simultaneously views the draw-
ings that they introduce, but they are not able to stand alone and be imme-
diately recognizable if presented as items in a comprehensive list. Hence,
John Charles and I created a full series of brief descriptive titles of the draw-
ings that would allow the reader to click on the desired item in the list and
go directly to the drawing(s) of interest.

With these aids, we made the twelve-hundred-page manuscript navigable

in a minimal way. In addition, Siglo Veintiuno Editores generously gave per-
mission for the use of the three indices that John Murra, Jorge Urioste, and
I had created for our 1980 print edition: the onomastic and toponymic index,
the ethnological index, and the Quechua glossary/index.22 As in any printed
book, the reader/patron can use these indices to access the page of the
desired item, but not the specific location of the item on the page. That is the
province (and the great advantage) of online display. But to create that fea-
ture requires the preparation of a transcription text that can be converted into
a searchable data base.

Hence, the next step, on which we are currently at work and nearing com-
pletion, is the transcription text. It will be the Adorno/Murra transcription of
1980, corrected against GkS 2232 4to by Ivan Boserup and myself on the
basis of a systematic review of the digitized facsimile. Transcribing and edit-
ing the text according to consistent philological criteria is a project in the
scholar’s hands. Creating a searchable data base on the basis of that text is
an entirely different one, and this requires, again, the collaboration of the
philological scholar, the internet technology specialists in the sponsoring
institution, and the manuscript librarian with a broad overview of both
scholarly and technical areas. In this particular case, the project relied on
Boserup’s joint expertises: his background as a classical philologist accus-
tomed to dealing with the criteria for editing archaic texts, and his work as
a librarian of the digital era well acquainted with the requirements of the dig-
ital tagging needed to create specialized formats of textual presentation.
Together we have been able to improve the formal presentation of the
Murra/Adorno transcription text on its surface and, at the same time, to
articulate its undersides, that is, to create the complex tagging that makes
possible its coherent presentation and searchability.

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.
 ROLENA ADORNO 11

Creating a searchable data base for a linguistically hybrid text presents

special challenges. In the case of Guaman Poma, his Spanish language text
is characterized by idiosyncratic orthography (still common in his day even
among writers of native Spanish tradition), such as the inconsistent use of
“b” and “v” in initial and intervocalic positions. His Spanish is furthermore
inflected by his native Quechua, in which the lack of phonemic difference
between the sounds of “u” and “o” produced such variants as Guaman
Poma’s “poma” instead of “puma” and “prulijidad” instead of “prolijidad.”
Likewise, the lack of functional distinction between the Spanish sounds of
“e” and “i” for a Quechua speaker yielded Guaman Poma’s “Pirú” instead
of “Perú” and “hicheseros” instead of “hechiceros.”23 In addition, there are
many substantial blocks of Quechua-language text and occasional instances
of Aymara words and phrases. There are various ways of handling the tech-
nical challenges presented by this complex linguistic corpus, and for the
present, the simplest of the possible alternatives (too technical to be
described here by the present author) has been chosen.

So much for building in; we also found that we needed to build out. A fun-
damental dimension of responsible editorship is the provision of appropriate
and helpful contexts. After digitizing the manuscript, preparing the tran-
scription and its critical apparatus, and converting the text into a searchable
data base, the attendant tasks were to draw together a constellation of
resources that give readerly access to the object of analysis. (A virtual
research center can do this far better than the print medium because the
items deemed appropriate can be changed, updated, or replaced as scholar-
ship advances.) In the case of Guaman Poma’s Nueva corónica y buen gob-
ierno, this meant augmenting the work with its nearest neighbors. In 2002,
it was possible to put online a manuscript copy of the viceroy Don Juan de
Mendoza y Luna’s (1607-1615) final report to his successor, prepared as he
ended his eight-year tenure in office. This document is also found in the
Library’s Old Royal Collection (Figure 4: GkS 589 2o, f 1 recto),24 and its
pertinence to the Nueva corónica is not only the coincidence of its date with
that of the completion of Guaman Poma’s illustrated chronicle, but also the
similarity of views expressed by the viceroy and the Andean chronicler
regarding colonial Peruvian governance, its problems and solutions. In

23
Jorge L. Urioste, “Estudio analítico del quechua en la Nueva corónica,” in Guaman Poma, El
primer nueva corónica (1980), p. xxix. Urioste provides a comprehensive overview of Guaman Poma’s
language, particularly the ways in which his Spanish grammar and syntax are affected by his Quechua
language substratum.
24
www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/, click, at bottom of screen, “Enlaces,” then scroll down to “Docu-
ments,” click on Mendoza y Luna, Don Juan de, 1615, Luz de materias de Indias, click “Introduction and
manuscript,” click on “1 recto” at left.
12 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Figure 4: Also located in the Royal Library (GkS 589, 2o, f.1), the final report of the
Peruvian viceroy, Don Juan de Mendoza y Luna, written when Guaman Poma fin-
ished his own work. Courtesy of the Royal Library, Copenhagen.
 ROLENA ADORNO 13

2003, thanks to the generosity of the heirs of Monsignor Elías Prado Tello,
Ayacucho, Peru, who own the document, and the intervention of Dr. Juan
Ossio of La Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima, it was possi-
ble to put online the illustrated manuscript containing the series of litigations
in which Guaman Poma had appeared in the 1590s, advocating the recogni-
tion of his and his kinsmen’s titles to lands in the valley of Chupas outside
Huamanga (today’s Ayacucho) (Figures 5 and 6: Portrait of Don Martín
Malque de Ayala, f49r; Guaman Poma’s map of Huamanga, f52v-
f53r).25 This important document, known only since the 1950s in published
fragments, establishes Guaman Poma’s activities and wherabouts in the final
decade of the sixteenth century. Aside from its drawings’ visual similarities
with those of the Nueva corónica, it constitutes a missing piece of the puzzle
regarding references that Guaman Poma makes in his chronicle and other
archival documents in which he appears.26

Apart from the collection of pertinent documentary sources, two other

dimensions are crucial: the development of an annotated, up-to-date bibli-
ography, and links to pertinent modern studies on the subject. The Guaman
Poma website currently features links to documents and scholarly articles on
the website as well as to external web sites with related materials. As such a
project expands in its goals in this and other ways yet to be foreseen, it must
move out of its ad hoc status and develop advisory boards and structures of
decision-making just as responsible journals and research institutions at
large do. In other words, the relationship between the Archive and the Inter-
net is steadily moving forward and, as it does so, it takes on new challenges
and new forms of organization and collaboration. The introduction of the
new medium into the world of scholarship implies, in fact, a number of new
relationships: budgetary, institutional, intellectual, and with other media.

Budgetary: The electronic research center, as I have described it, requires

the collaboration of institutions and individuals of varied disciplinary exper-

25
Figure 5: 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: 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 “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 Rolena Adorno, “The
Genesis of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno,” Colonial Latin American
Review 2:1-2 (1993), pp. 53-92, or its Spanish-language translation, “La génesis de la Nueva corónica y
buen gobierno de Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala,” Taller de letras (Santiago de Chile), no. 23, pp. 9-45.
Both are available on the Guaman Poma website (<www.kb.dk/elib/mss.poma/>).
14 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Figure 5: One of Guaman Poma's forebears, Don Guaman Malque de Ayala, as he

appears in a series of litigations in which Guaman Poma petitions for lands in Hua-
manga (Expediente Prado Tello, f49r). Courtesy of the heirs of Rev. Elías Prado
Tello, Lima, Peru, and the Royal Library, Copenhagen.
 ROLENA ADORNO 15

tises. In some regards, this is a utopian ideal, because for a research institu-
tion to do what the Royal Library is doing requires straining against limited
resources and working without extraordinary budgets. There are great
advantages in presenting colonial-era documents and codices electronically
and there is a great need to prepare them properly. The challenge is to estab-
lish on the Internet a set of common editorial and formatting standards, like
those suggested by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) or Manuscript Access
through Standards for Electronic Records (MASTER), that are especially
adapted for historical texts and their particularities. This requires time and
money, and for such projects, additional private funds are needed. How are
good partnerships to be struck up between research libraries and other insti-
tutions? Will/can the professional organizations and societies help? These
behind the scenes issues are the first to be resolved in order to carry forward
potential scholarly projects that require collaborative effort not only disci-
plinarily but also with regard to funding.

Institutional: There is great potential in the dynamic concept of the elec-

tronic research center based in institutions of research and higher learning,
and such long-term commitments by national and international institutions
and scholars answer the challenges posed by amateur, fly-by-night promo-
tional (and self-promotional) hobby horses on the web. If, on one hand, the
Internet reflects the real world’s opportunism, shortcomings, and partial
solutions, on the other and at the same time, it makes possible innovations
in collecting, contextualizing, and integrating scholarly resources.27 The vir-
tual library and the electronic research center need and support one another,
satisfying the complementary needs of range and inclusiveness, on one
hand, and specificity and a high degree of quality control, on the other. At
another level, we might ask if the institutions of the library and the univer-
sity, at one pole, and the Internet, at the other, are at odds with one another.
Will the use of electronic media replace the university professor and the
bricks-and-mortar (or granite-and-glass) libraries and their librarians, as
some fear?28 I think not, and if it were to happen it would be, in great meas-

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
David S. Miall, “The Library versus the Internet: Literary Studies under Siege?,” PMLA 116:5
(2001), p. 1412. 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 gran-
ite and glass, it is known as “The Black Diamond.”
16 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

Figure 6: This map of Huamanga, perhaps the oldest known one, also appears in
the Expediente Prado Tello (f53v); it bears striking resemblance to Guaman Poma's
drawings in his chronicle. Courtesy of the heirs of Rev. Elías Prado Tello, Lima,
Peru, and the Royal Library, Copenhagen.
ROLENA ADORNO 17
18 THE ARCHIVE AND THE INTERNET

ure, our own fault for failure to take advantage of this revolutionary new
medium.

Intellectual: What role can the Internet presentation of critical, contextu-

alized editions of scholarly sources have in the advancement of scholarship?
One of the great challenges to the development of colonial historical and
textual studies has been to draw the relationships—genealogical, dialectical,
and polemical—among the works produced in the colonial period of Latin
America. The electronic research center can make it possible to do just that,
creating, for example, a corpus of interrelated colonial texts, moving from
Guaman Poma, to Fray Martín de Murúa, and from Murúa’s work back to
Fray Bartolomé de las Casas’s, tracking the intellectual linkages and chart-
ing them electronically.

With other media: Finally, what is the relationship of the electronic text
and the printed word to be in the new world of digitized scholarly sources?
I am convinced that the complementarity of one to the other will prevail,
with the former providing universal availability and the latter, the cherished
sense and actual usefulness of the book in hand. Each medium provides
something that the other cannot, and each performs functions that the other
cannot do, or cannot do as well. The Internet and the Archive, in short,
enhance one another’s usefulness, and they can be as effective in advancing
historical scholarship as the efforts of scholars, librarians, technicians, and
institutions are prepared and willing to make them. The example of the
Royal Library’s Guaman Poma website is a modest one, but the lesson it
presents is much greater, namely, that the new technology is not everything.
It is sweetly ironic to point out that only together with nineteenth-century
disciplines, such as philology and codicology, can these remarkable twenty-
first-century capabilities advance the study of manuscript cultures in the
Internet era.

Yale University ROLENA ADORNO

New Haven, Connecticut