About CADIEM

Description

CADIEM (Cabildos Atlánticos Digitales en la Edad Moderna — Digital Atlantic Cabildos in the Early Modern Period) is a digital infrastructure for consulting and analysing the Books of Minutes of the Cabildo de La Palma (1559–1599). Through the scholarly edition of this documentation and its structuring as an annotated historical corpus, the platform opens up access to one of the main documentary sources for the study of the history of the Canary Islands during the early modern period.

The Cabildo, or municipal council, was the main institution of government in the Canary Islands from the completion of the Castilian conquest until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Presided over by the Governor, the Deputy Governor or the Chief Magistrate, and with the participation of the aldermen and the council notary, its sessions concentrated the political, economic, social and administrative activity of each island. The Books of Minutes preserve the written record of that activity, and are therefore an essential documentary source for understanding Canarian society in the early modern period

Origins of the project

CADIEM has its origins in the doctoral research of Sergio Hernández Suárez, Assistant Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and a member of the Division of Documentation, Heritage and Atlantic History of the University Institute for Text Analysis and Applications (IATEXT). That research focused on the study, transcription, revision, scholarly edition, corpus structuring and analysis of the eight Books of Minutes of the Cabildo de La Palma covering the period 1559–1599. The work produced a documentary corpus of more than 4,000 pages. On that documentary basis the CADIEM website was developed: a digital infrastructure that allows the corpus to be consulted, searched and analysed with dedicated tools for exploration, visualisation and linguistic processing, most notably the CADIEM Search Engine, built on the InteLiText technology created by IATEXT, considerably extending its potential for research, university teaching and the dissemination of Canarian documentary heritage.

Authorship and development

How to cite this resource

To cite the CADIEM website as a whole (rather than a specific book or council session), you may use any of the following references.