Editing criteria

The manuscripts transcribed in CORDICan have been organized by typological, thematic, and chronological criteria with a threefold objective:

  • Overcome the remoteness of the Canarian archives, which are difficult to access for foreign researchers.
  • To make available to historians interested in the historical processes taking place within the framework of the first globalisation a remarkable amount of unpublished documentation. These testimonies remained inaccessible and will enable the specific study of the Canary Islands to be incorporated into general historiographical discourse.
  • To provide philologists with a significant set of texts that will allow them to learn about the historical evolution of the variety of Spanish spoken in the Canary Islands, and especially to deepen the analysis of its connections, both with peninsular Spanish and with the Spanish spoken in America.

Using the TEITOK tool, developed by Maarten Janssen (2014), each document has been transcribed and tagged in such a way that it is possible to retrieve, together with the image, the transliteration of the manuscript and, if desired, the version with the expanded abbreviations or the standardised document. The transcriptions have been made in XML, following the TEI standard.

The criteria adopted in other corpora such as P. S. Post Scriptum (Digital Archive of Everyday Writing in Portugal and Spain in the Modern Ages) and ODE are thus continued, with the aim of facilitating comparative studies with Canarian documentation.

Metadata

The metadata template that accompanies each document allows to contextualize the manuscript and describe its format (length, date of creation, typeface, location and textual typology) and its content (excerpt). To refine the search, other parameters have been added, such as the subject field and, in some documents, epistolary relations, the social status of the sender and recipient or the different discursive parts of the text.

Types of documentation

CORDICan so far contains mainly administrative documents, legal documentation (including inquisitorial documentation) and epistolary relations.  In this documentation, we can find topics of interest as diverse as those related to the Atlantic sugar industry, inventories, dowries, among others, and the forms of treatment in family and personal letters. This is a corpus in fieri, so other fields, types, archives and chronology will gradually be covered.

 

In the administrative documentation, the following types have been distinguished:

  • Rent
  • Acquittance
  • Assignment
  • Purchase
  • Share-cropping contract
  • Apprenticeship contract
  • Accounts
  • Datas /Albalaes
  • Debt
  • Dowry
  • Garnishment
  • Severance payment
  • Affreightment
  • Inventory
  • License
  • Memorandum
  • Obligation
  • Order
  • Power of Attorney
  • Reception
  • Retract
  • Service contract
  • Payments and agreement
  • Testament
  • Notarial testimony
  • Taking possession
  • Transaction
  • Tribute
  • Barter, exchange and transfer
  • Sale

 

In the legal documentation, witness statements from the archives of the Inquisition have been transcribed for the most part.

In the epistolary documentation, the following types have been considered, following the classification established in S. P. Post Scriptum:

  • Friendship letter
  • Family letter
  • Personal letter
  • Business letter

 

Within this type of documents, CORDICan includes some examples of emigrant letters. In the "subject" section they have always been marked as "emigration", so that the person consulting the corpus can carry out an advanced search for "epistolary documentation"/"type of letter"/subject "emigration" and the program will retrieve this group of documents, which is very significant in the social history of the archipelago.

 

It is foreseen that, in the future, the corpus will include chronicles.