Corpus of Colonial Spanish Texts
The Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies began work on the Corpus of Colonial Spanish Texts (CORCOST) project in 2017 with the aim of producing philologically rigorous paleographic transcriptions of Spanish Colonial narrative texts, a textual type that is significantly under-represented in existing digital corpora. All texts will be made freely available through open, interactive online access.
Temporal and Geographic Scope
The corpus will include texts written in any area of the Americas during the colonial period, broadly defined as spanning from 1492 to Independence. Given the varied chronology of independence movements across the region, the end date will depend on the area in question—for example, 1810 for Mexico and 1898 for Cuba.
A flexible approach will also be applied to place of composition. Until the arrival of the printing press in Mexico in 1539 and its subsequent spread to other areas of the Americas, many early colonial texts were printed in Spain. Accordingly, place of composition will be loosely construed as "American" for texts closely related to colonial Latin America that may have been written or published elsewhere. Texts whose original production date (OPDT) and specific production date (SPDT) both fall within the colonial period are preferred.
Text Type
The CORCOST will include texts of a wide variety, both verse and prose. Although we recognize the value of archival materials for studying the historical development of the Spanish language, brief notarial documents will not form part of the corpus. Our focus is on more extensive texts of a narrative nature, which will also be incorporated into the Old Spanish Textual Archive (OSTA). Examples of the types of texts to be included are: chronicles, memoriales, relaciones, official letters, and travel narratives, as well as works of a religious or literary nature. Legal texts that form part of a larger whole, such as judicial proceedings, will also be included, as will personal letters forming part of a larger epistolary collection.
Norms and Methodology
All texts in the corpus will be transcribed according to the guidelines established by the HSMS in the Manual of Manuscript Transcription for the Dictionary of the Old Spanish Language. Contributors will prepare their transcriptions following philological best practices. Typically, scholars will work from digitized images of the source text and, when feasible, verify the transcription against the original document in the archive where it is held. Once the transcription has been finalized, contributors will submit their files to one of the two principal investigators for processing and review.
Each publication will include the transcribed text, indices, concordances, and the digital facsimile (when available), with an optional scholarly introduction. This introduction will be peer-reviewed. All materials will be published in open-access format on the Corpus of Colonial Spanish Texts.
CORCOST Members
| Sonia Kania, co-director | Department of Modern Languages University of Texas at Arlington skania@uta.edu |
| Francisco Gago Jover, co-director | Spanish Department College of the Holy Cross fgagojov@holycross.edu |
| David Arbesú, consultant | Department of World Languages University of South Florida arbesu@usf.edu |
| Cynthia Kauffeld, consultant | Department of Spanish and Portuguese Macalester College kauffeld@macalester.edu |
| Pablo Pastrana-Pérez, consultant | Department of Spanish Western Michigan University pablo.pastrana@wmich.edu |
| Israel Sanz-Sánchez, consultant | Department of Languages and Cultures West Chester University isanzsanch@wcupa.edu |
