This project seeks to build a multilingual & spatially-aware catalog of historical references to health and environmental crises in premodern Mexico. Initially, data collection will be sourced from collaboratively aggregated records about mortality in human populations or in the ecological systems that sustain them.
We believe that knowledge of the timing, location, severity and ecological contexts of historical mass mortality events will permit and encourage a rethinking of health outcomes in the age before modern medicine. Moreover, geolocation enables data to be compared with other geolocated datasets, such as with historical demography datasets, imperial policy datasets, or those of the Mexican Drought Atlas. To this end, we hope that the ecocrisis database will allow us to think differently about how government policy and practices, especially those of the Spanish imperial government between 1521 and 1821 contributed to mass mortality; how climate change initiated or drove mortality; or how food system economics might help to explain mortality events.
We hope that this database will encourage cooperation and research about the history of health in Mexico. In the coming years, we foresee the project evolving and growing to encourage the following activities:
- Collaboration between new and established scholars of Mexican history from anywhere in the world, for purposes of contributing data, disseminating knowledge, initiating and expanding research, and encouraging PhD and Post-Doctoral research about health in Mexican history;
- Undergraduate and graduate student involvement in a collaborative, big data research project within the framework of coursework and by means of the crowdsourcing application and/or database repository for research and pedagogical purposes;
- A fully bilingual version of the database to encourage student and international use of ecocrisis resources; and
- A series of curated pages about health, ecology, and mass mortality in Mexican history, providing short essays, maps, graphs, and bibliographic resources.