Brook Danielle Lillehaugen

The Zapotec language family has a long record of alphabetic texts, dating back to 1565. While Spanish-language texts from the Mexican colonial period are frequently consulted by scholars, the contemporaneous Zapotec-language texts are not, in part because of the challenge of interpreting the Zapotec-language manuscripts. This project elucidates the Zapotec-language materials by creating a collection of transcribed and translated wills, making them publicly available in an online text explorer which allows a non-linear exposition of the texts (http://ticha.haverford.edu). A book, including a sketch grammar of the Colonial Valley Zapotec language, draws from and complements these wills. Without such explication these texts will likely remain unused outside the small group of specialists already using them.

The Ticha Project (https://ticha.haverford.edu) is a digital text explorer for Zapotec language texts created during the Mexican Colonial period. This project propels Ticha forward through the creation of publicly available teaching modules targeted for use in high schools and colleges in both the United States and Mexico. The interdisciplinary team includes the PI (a linguist), Zapotec scholars and community members, and undergraduate students, who also work together to grow the resources available on Ticha, with an emphasis on Zapotec produced content. The community-engaged methods employed are also objects of study and reflection themselves, as the project explores questions of collaboration in digital scholarship and the intersection of collaborative digital scholarship with community-engaged research.