Check out the official project website here.
The Parlamentos project at Pitt-Greensburg is a born-digital edition and translation from Spanish to English of historically significant documents called parlamentos. From the seventeenth century to the nineteenth, agents of the Spanish Empire, and then agents of the independent Chilean state, periodically met to negotiate with leaders of the Indigenous peoples, collectively known as the Mapuche, of the borderlands region of Araucanía in southern Chile. These meetings, and the treaties agreed at them, were called parlamentos. By making these texts available to English speakers, along with maps, scholarly notes, and other educational materials, the project team aims to increase access to information about indigenous peoples of the Americas and their historical efforts to diplomatically negotiate for agency and independence. The team was granted a Digital Humanities Planning Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the 2022-2023 academic year to create a pilot version.
This CDS sponsored project uses a digital format called TEI-XML to markup text, rendering it interactive for educational purposes and transferable to HTML. Two Pitt-Greensburg students provided invaluable work on this project. Eleanor Withers (History and Creative & Professional Writing) and Aaron Zavatchan (History and Anthropology), learned the XML process in Humanities courses “Coding and Digital Archives” and “Coding and Digital Visualization” before contributing to the project as Research Assistants. Additionally, Eleanor shared her contributions in the talk “The Chilean Parlamentos: Using XML to Create a Translation-to-Public Workflow” at Keystone DH at Penn State-Behrend in Spring 2024.
Pitt-Greensburg Faculty Sponsors