Collaborative editing of sixteenth century Indigenous graphic manuscripts from Central Mexico

Understanding the messaging of an Indigenous graphic manuscript from early colonial Central Mexico requires the accumulation and amplification of many voices. Restricting interpretation to a single expert or academic discipline, without the input of descendant communities for whom these objects held and hold significant valency, stifles the communicative potential of such manuscripts. This chapter highlights a collaborative, replicable, flexible, and linkable solution to presenting such objects online to an open audience of users: the CITE Architecture. This chapter begins with a brief overview of this Indigenous manuscript painting tradition, demonstrating its unique challenges to reading, interpreting, and citing its narrative structures. It then demonstrates how producing collaborative editing frameworks is necessary to caption, interpret, and link information to visual documents such as the objects in question. It then introduces how an existing solution—the CITE Architecture—can be leveraged to facilitate new collaborations between scholars and Indigenous communities for whom these manuscripts hold living meaning.