A Matter of Scales: Understanding Spatial Patterns of Colonial Spanish America’s Silver Mining in the Digital Age

Abstract

This essay explores the potential role of geospatial computational analysis and visualisations in understanding temporal developments in different aspects of human geography related to mining economy. Namely, changes in the distribution of extraction sites, settlements, administration and infrastructure, as well as production/registration numbers and facets of labour recruitment will be addressed. This is done by the way of temporal sequencing of data, showing emerging and declining mining areas as well as the entangled relationship between mining economy and institutional development. Furthermore, a simple cartographic representation and contextualisation of a textual mining report with the help of a GIS workflow serve as an example of how a geospatial data infrastructure helps generating knowledge through its immediate visual impression. In all parts of the analysis, the difficult matter of scale and aggregation serves as an interpretative thread of how to treat data extracted from different sources produced at local, regional or a general scale: What kind of place can be perceived as a “mining town”, and what could be its actual relation to its surrounding? Which productive centres may be overlooked depending on external factors of perception and categorisation, and which overemphasised due to the nature of some set of sources? Spatio-temporal data organisation is presented as a meaningful way to bridge the gap between small-scale and large-scale information by identifying gaps, proper data aggregation and confronting visions established from macro- and micro-perspectives on the map. In the last part, GIS software and tools are used to assess the vision of colonial mining geography presented by Alexander von Humboldt who, two hundred years ago, made a similar attempt to form a general vision on the basis of local information, although in an “analogue” world with more limited capacities of data integration.

This article is part of the project, “Reconstructing Colonial Rule: A Historical Web-GIS for Spanish America”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), P 26379 G-18.