Voyeur

WHP is experimenting with the Voyeur text mining tool using the concatenated text from the Manuscrito de Tolcayuca. One submits a URL and this online, free tool returns an analysis of the text on that page.  For this one manuscript, at least, the results were promising. After disregarding small particles (such as “and”), the first word of substance is “don” (with 68 hits) the title of nobility for men, including indigenous men, not just Spaniards.  It is a loanword from Spanish that was included in the Nahuatl text but also appears in the English and Spanish translations, hence its frequency.  The next most frequent word was “altepetl,” the Nahuatl word for the socio-political unit we call a “pueblo” in Spanish. The focus on these two words alone, “don” and “altepetl,” captures the flavor of the document, a testimonial of the town’s origins and territory, and the role of the male leadership in recording and recounting this history.