Modeling Oral Narrative in Central Veracruz, Mexico: A Digital Itinerant Community-Based Library/Museum 

Introduction

Late capitalist frameworks have profoundly reshaped how culture is produced and valued, often reducing both material and non-material culture to commodities. Karl Marx long ago anticipated the totalizing reach of commodification under capitalism, observing that even intangible human qualities would eventually become part of the economic market. However, it was later, when critical theorists Adorno and Horkheimer, built on this insight to critique the so-called “culture industry” of advanced capitalism. In their view, art and cultural products were mass-produced as standardized commodities, stripping them of uniqueness and depth. In other words, capitalist modernity aggressively reifies living culture, objectifying practices, ideas, and relations all the way to turn them into commodities that become exchangeable assets (Yang; Miller; Ryan; Appadurai; Benjamin). Therefore, culture, as well as nature, becomes a target of enclosure and commodification (Miller). In practice, this often means that corporations or dominant industries and even dominant discourses extract and package the creative labor of communities for profit (Flores).

Within this framework, scholars have traced how late capitalism’s drive for profit enacts a global process of appropriation. They even argue that the entire imperial-colonial-capitalist system operates by robbing and destroying everything in its path (Grosfoguel 139; Stegemann; Castro-Gómez). Therefore, an important first step for appropriation is dispossession, as seen in many examples, including within the realm of culture (Coombe; Coombe and Weiss; Tsosie; Harvey). Even when dispossession does not involve overt violence, it necessarily entails a distortion of living cultural practices. Especially when dynamic practices are uprooted from their local contexts and packaged as consumable goods—losing the vitality and meaning that once defined them (Artz). This process has been described as folklorization, a hegemonic transformation of culture into static “folklore.” As Said stated, folklorization often leads to alienation, fossilization, decontextualization, homogenization and then commodification of traditions. In other words, rich practices such as music, storytelling (oral narratives), rituals, arts, clothes and medicinal practices get reified into fixed representations (museum exhibits, commercial performances, stereotyped folklore shows) that outsiders can easily consume. What remains is a pale imitation of the original living practice; whether it is a static heritage object or an exotic spectacle, it is divorced from the community and social relations that gave it meaning (Fernández Martínez). Folklorization disposes of control over their own culture. The knowledge that was once embodied in daily life and intergenerational exchange is extracted and refashioned as an aesthetic commodity for tourists, markets or even state cultural agendas. The result is a form of epistemic violence (Brunner; Perez; Fricker and Jenkins; Castro-Gómez; Teo), a dynamic that hollows out the content of culture, leaving source communities with externally defined representations of their heritage, but more importantly, reinforces an inequitable hierarchy in which global capitalist value systems overwrite local ways of knowing and being.

However, over time, we also have encountered many examples of resistance, persistence and even opposition to this process (Flores-Muñoz; Tuxa et al.; Milanez; Sallum and Noelli). Communities continuously assert the resilience of a living culture. As such, oral narratives have emerged as powerful sites of resistance to epistemic marginalization (Dutta et al.). Unlike written texts or commodified cultural products, oral narratives are often embedded in the ongoing social life of a community (whether in storytelling sessions, ceremonies, or everyday conversations with elders), and this resists being fully objectified as static artifacts. Within many Indigenous contexts, oral narratives serve as an epistemological practice, one that carries memory, safeguards communal knowledge and ties people to their territories. As Rivera Cusicanqui observes, collective memory in Indigenous oral culture is not a fixed record of the past but a living, polyvalent force, an emotional energy of memory that can inspire and guide in the present (Gago; Krenak; Krenak). Oral narratives preserve what official archives often cannot: the lived experiences, emotions, and interpretations of events in the past and the present from different points of view (Colmenares). Oral narratives keep cultural memory connected to its original contexts, such as, the land or the community relationships. Moreover, they are rich with territorial references, evoking sacred landscapes, ancestral journeys, and places, encoding geography and history together as collective memory (Sharma and Magar; Flores-Muñoz; Silliman). Each retelling is an act of renewal that can affirm identity, assert historical truth and even mobilize resistance. We believe that the very act of sustaining oral narratives in a world that privileges written knowledge is itself an act of epistemic resistance, a refusal to let local knowledge systems be eclipsed by dominant paradigms.

This essay presents a project that introduces a digital itinerant community-based library/museum as a strategy to preserve and showcase culture without stripping it of its dynamism. In doing so, this project contributes to the growing field of decolonial or anticolonial digital humanities by offering a model for archival practices grounded in epistemic sovereignty, territorial memory, and communal care. Rather than reproducing extractive paradigms of cultural digitization, our approach wants to challenge dominant archival infrastructure by centering Indigenous frameworks of knowledge production, transmission, and governance. The model we want to build and propose will emphasize community-led design, culturally embedded metadata structures, and differentiated access protocols, all of which contest the neutrality claims of conventional digital repositories. Moreover, the project will enact what some scholars have called a relational digital infrastructure: a system built not only to store data, but to sustain and renew relationships among people, stories, and places (Thorpe et al.; Pawlicka-Deger; Drake; Caswell et al.). By placing the archive in motion (geographically, linguistically, and ontologically) we align with decolonial scholarship that calls for infrastructures that listen, rather than capture (Rivera Cusicanqui; Krenan). In this way, we want to position our library/museum not as a digitized vault of culture, but as a living interface of ongoing memory work, shaped continuously by the communities it is meant to serve. We use the term “itinerant community-based library/museum” to signal both a practical and epistemological approach. Practically, the model is itinerant not in the sense that it moves across different regions, but rather in that it is designed to be replicable and implementable (digitally and physically) across multiple communities and schools in the Sierra de Zongolica, adapting to different linguistic, spatial, and cultural configurations. The infrastructure will include portable equipment and lightweight software designed for use offline or with minimal internet access. Epistemologically, the itinerancy refers to the shifting, relational nature of knowledge itself, a recognition that oral narratives live in movement (across generations, between ceremonial spaces, and through storytelling), all acts that do not fit fixed institutional containers. While the “library” aspect wants to emphasize preservation and access, the “museum” dimension foregrounds the curatorial labor of communities who actively will choose, contextualize, and will interpret what will be shared. This dual structure will allow both memory and agency.

The resulting digital repository is envisioned not as a fixed, closed collection, but as a living, evolving archive. Once recorded, these narratives can be supplemented with context from community members, linked to interactive maps of the territories they describe, and enriched by audio, video, and Nahuatl transcripts that capture performance elements beyond plain text. The enrichment of the original collection is done and owned by the members of the community, and each one should decide how to share their specific version. In essence, the project aims to preserve oral narratives on their own terms, retaining fluidity, adaptability, and communal ownership that characterise oral knowledge.

At this point, the project has access to a collection of Nahuatl oral narratives, has organised two annotation workshops with members of the communities, and has a proposed architecture for digital tools to converge and expand all the relevant information that will be contained on the platform. By leveraging digital tools in an ethically reflexive way, this project seeks to avoid the trap of turning oral heritage into just another commodified data point. Instead, it treats each narrative as part of an ongoing conversation, a thread in a large fabric of cultural memory that the community can continue to weave. This approach draws inspiration from other decolonial digital humanities initiatives that prioritize community access and co-creation (Kyker). While digital archives and spatial humanities projects have proliferated globally, relatively few focus on Indigenous epistemologies or community governance of spatial memory. Projects such as Mukurtu CMS, Tainacan, Mapas da Cultura, Native-Land.ca and topostext.org offer important precedents for localized, open-source infrastructure, while deep mapping approaches like those of HyperCities, Future Cinema, and Walking Through Time emphasizes multi-layered spatial narratives. Our model will be built on these by integrating oral narratives, semantic metadata, and participatory cartographies to construct what we call a relational geospatial archive—one that represents not only “where” stories happen, but “how” space is inhabited, remembered, and transformed. Unlike GIS-driven platforms that prioritize fixed coordinates and satellite imagery, our mapping includes non-Euclidean spatialities like ceremonial pathways, seasonal flows, and affective landmarks narrated by elders. This approach proposes a decolonial expansion of what counts as “location” and what qualifies as mappable. Our itinerant digital library/museum strives to fuse preservation with participation, ensuring that the archives remain responsive to the people and cultures they represent.

The Digital Cultural Heritage in Mexico

Since 2014, various national institutions in Mexico have launched initiatives to digitize and preserve cultural heritage, guided by public policy framework such as the Estrategia Digital Nacional (National Digital Strategy) and the Programa Especial de Cultura y Arte 2014-2018 (Special Program for Culture and Art). These policies underscore the potential of digital technologies to expand cultural access and safeguard heritage collections, particularly those housed in libraries, museums, and academic institutions.

While these efforts made important strides in digitizing tangible heritage, they tended to be implemented in a centralized top-down manner often with limited involvement of local communities or grassroots actors. Analysts have noted that many digitization initiatives were vertical (“top-down”) in approach, privileging institutional priorities and expert-driven standards over community engagement (Vinck and Camus; Fonseca Díaz and Rueda Ortiz; Rueda Ortiz). For example, traditional knowledge (as we present in this case study) has often been overlooked or rendered invisible in academic heritage projects, leading to calls for more inclusive practices that empower local stakeholders (Álvares et al.; Noelli et al.; Van Allen). This absence is not merely an oversight, but part of a deeper historical and structural neglect that has long shaped Mexican cultural policy. Unlike biodiversity, which has benefited from scientific institutionalization and digitization standards since the late 1990s, intangible Indigenous heritage, particularly oral narratives, have remained peripheral to state agendas. Several factors explain this silence. First, the dominant frameworks for heritage management in Mexico have historically privileged material culture and colonial archives, favoring what can be catalogued, displayed, and consumed within conventional museological logics. Second, institutional epistemologies often treat oral knowledge as unreliable or non-authoritative, further sidelining it from digitization efforts (Álvarez Larraín et al.; Fonseca Díaz and Rueda Ortiz). Third, there exists a tension between state-driven heritage discourse—which tends to homogenize Indigenous culture for national branding—and the living, plural, and contested nature of oral traditions. In addition, the absence of a legal framework that secures Indigenous control over the digital representations of their knowledge exacerbates this exclusion. As a result, many communities have had to build their own digital infrastructures from the ground up, often through collaborations with intercultural universities, communitarian radios or civil society. These grassroots responses, like the itinerant library/museum we present in this essay, are not merely compensatory, they are expressions of archival sovereignty and resistance to epistemic enclosure. They reflect a broader demand for plural, community-driven heritage models that honor the contextual, relational, and performative nature of oral knowledge, resisting its translation into extractive data.

In many cases, these communities have turned to cultural expressions such as music, dances or rituals, not only as a mode of artistic production, but also as a political and mnemonic tool for transmitting intergenerational knowledge, asserting territorial identity, and reconfiguring public heritage narratives. These more commonly musical practices often operate outside or in parallel to official state mechanisms while offering a more autonomous and culturally resonant path towards revitalization and preservation (Francese). Such initiatives reveal the limits of top-down heritage management and underscore the need to engage with heritage as a living, contested, and community-embedded process. This turn to music is not coincidental. In many contemporary contexts, music is far more accessible and widely consumed than oral narratives. Its availability through digital platforms, brevity, and adaptability to popular formats make it easier to disseminate and receive (Echeverria and Sparling). Moreover, while music is commonly recognized as a legitimate form of cultural expression and entertainment, oral narratives continue to struggle against perceptions that render them archaic or non-academic. These asymmetries in visibility and institutional mediation have positioned music as a more viable, though not unproblematic, channel for Indigenous communities to assert identity, memory, and cultural continuity in the absence of adequate heritage policies.

Ultimately, Mexico has yet to develop a national model that truly integrates diversity and plurality in the production and management of heritage knowledge, particularly when it comes to oral narratives. The prevailing paradigm remains fragmented and centralized, leaving many local communities on the margins of digital heritage efforts.

Although, prior to these recent policies, there were earlier initiatives to build digital repositories, particularly in the domains of biodiversity and biocultural heritage (Jiménez and Miramontes Vidal, interview, March 2024). For instance, during the late 1990s and early 2000s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)’s Instituto de Biología undertook large-scale projects (sometimes referred as “megaproyectos”) to digitize biodiversity collections. These efforts led to the development of standardized data processes for cataloguing species and ecological information. One such initiative was the Sistema de Informática para la Biodiversidad y el Ambiente (SIBA), created in 2004 under university project Impulsa 5, with the goal of publishing various biodiversity and environmental collections online. These biodiversity repositories normalized the use of standard data,such as, taxonomic data schemes), which was a significant step toward interoperability. However, they paid scant attention to the socio-cultural dimensions of the documented territories. In other words, while scientific data about specimens were carefully structured, local cultural contexts and community knowledge related to those natural collections were largely omitted. This reflects a broader trend of that era: an emphasis on technical standardization without commensurate regard for the human and cultural context of heritage.

In recent years, efforts have been made to coordinate and strengthen repository infrastructure within major institutions. Notably, UNAM established the Dirección General de Repositorios Universitarios (DGRU) around 2019-2020 as a dedicated office to manage and integrate the university’s digital repositories. The DGRU’s mandate includes developing and implementing technologies, methodologies, and norms to ensure that UNAM’s digital collections, archives, and research data are published online, interoperable, openly accessible, and preserved for the long term. This central initiative at UNAM has led to the rollout of an institutional repository and an open data portal for university collections.

Despite the creation of the DGRU and similar advancements, inequalities in infrastructure, access, and technical capacity persist among institutions across the country (Vargas Jiménez et al.; Vinck). Larger or better-funded institutions (like UNAM) are able to deploy robust digital repositories, while smaller universities, regional museums, and community cultural centers often lack the resources or trained personnel to do so. The result is an uneven landscape. While some collections are digitally preserved and accessible, others remain undigitized and forgotten. Furthermore, the centralization of digital heritage initiatives in a few major institutions reinforces vertical workflows that exclude many local stakeholders. For example, valuable traditional knowledge held by Indigenous and local communities is frequently left out of academic digital repositories, effectively excluding those knowledge holders from the official heritage discourse (Álvarez et al.). Paradoxically, regarding audio, the first effort to record a cultural expression was with Indigenous communities (Lira Larios). This gap highlights the need for a more decentralized and participatory approach to digital heritage, in which communities co-create and manage their own digital cultural records.

Classification Challenges and Metadata Standards

Digitizing cultural heritage is not merely a technical endeavor; it is fundamentally a challenge of organizing information across distinct epistemic systems (Ramos Sánchez). Cultural heritage materials, oral narratives in particular, are extraordinarily diverse. They are at once highly specific to particular contexts, and also part of general categories, which makes developing universal classifications and metadata schemes difficult. Even though various international metadata standards exist—from libraries to museums and archives and in biodiversity science—applying them to Mexico’s cultural heritage has proven challenging. Darwin Core, Object ID, CDWA, VRA Core, Spectrum, Dublin Core, all with their specific characteristics, have been employed in Mexican digital heritage projects to some degree. For instance, Darwin Core in biodiversity databases or Dublin Core in library and archive repositories. However, the nuanced cultural, emotional, and political dimension of heritage items in Indigenous contexts often exceed what such schemas can express. Oral histories in Nahuatl, for instance, may encode simultaneously mythical, geographical, and familial data in ways that resist atomization or classification through conventional fields like “subject”, “location,” or “creator.” Moreover, the kind of metadata required to describe these materials are often absent from existing controlled vocabularies, as we will explore more closely in the next section. Concepts such as chikawikatl (spiritual wind) or xochitlallis (ritual of feeding the land/space) carry deep cultural significance that general metadata categories simply cannot capture. Attempts to use overly general metadata structures risk erasing these meanings while too specific taxonomies can reduce interoperability, creating isolated silos of data.

This challenge had led to a growing recognition that metadata in Indigenous contexts must not only be technically robust but also culturally legible and collaboratively defined. Platforms such as Mukurtu CMS, originally developed in partnership with Native communities in North America, provide a powerful model for community-driven metadata. Mukurtu CMS introduces concepts like “cultural protocols” and “traditional knowledge labels” which allows communities to basically own, access, and modify the contextual framing according to their own norms (Christen; Local Contexts TK Labels FAQ; Rodriguez). Similarly, Omeka S, with its support for linked open data, has become a key tool in facilitating relationships between digital heritage items and ontologies. However, it also requires custom vocabularies and input from community stakeholders to avoid reproducing extractive logics.

These tools point to the broader necessity of semantic web approaches that are flexible and responsive to Indigenous worldviews. In other words, semantic modelling should not be a rigid categorization system but a way of mapping storytelling, memory and community co-presence. As a structure that enables relationships to emerge through co-creation and geographic context, a kind of territorial oral memory to be saved and transmitted through generations.

In practice, Mexican institutions have found that no single existing standard fully encapsulates their cultural heritage needs. Semantic approaches are promising not because they promise universality, but because they allow for plurality—the coexistence of shared vocabularies with locally meaningful terms, concepts, and classifications.Therefore, while international standards like those above provide valuable frameworks and are indeed widely used, they often require significant adaptation and localization when applied to diverse cultural collections in Mexico. In this context, semantic approaches must be able to accommodate both the universal and the particular.

Semantic Modeling and Community-Centered Ontologies

A promising strategy is the development of semantic data models (using technologies of the semantic web), which allows for the creation of flexible and meaningful data structures that can capture rich relationships and context. The use of ontologies (formal conceptual models of a domain) and specialized micro-thesauri (small, controlled vocabularies for specific cultural terms) are the key to improving terminological precision and cultural relevance in digital heritage records (Molina Salinas). By defining concepts and relationships that mirror the way local communities understand their heritage, semantic models can ensure that digital representations carry the proper context and meaning. Our project aim is to develop such a situated ontology, not as a fixed system, but as a living interface shaped by community engagement, narrative patterns, and spatial memory (see Figure 1). It is a model where metadata emerges from relationships, not extraction.

Figure 1: Actors engaged in the implementation of the museum and their interrelations within the model for the preservation of oral tradition.

To initiate this exploration, we developed a digital platform that allows users to view and access a set of transcribed oral narratives. At this stage, the narratives are annotated according to the location in which the events take place, the speakers involved, and the role of each speaker (interviewer, translator, or interviewee). In addition, the platform enables keyword searches, which facilitate the identification of elements relevant to the ontology (see Figure 2). The tool also provides access to the complete transcripts (see Figure 3).

Figure 2: Search for terms on transcribed oral collection.

Figure 3: View of the full transcription separated by speakers.

Some existing platforms and protocols provide a foundation for this approach. For example, Brazil’s Tainacan platform is an open-source repository solution that has gained prominence for managing and publishing digital collections on the web (Tarine et al.). Another tool, Omeka S, inherently supports linked open data, allowing heritage items to be published with references to semantic vocabularies and external datasets. Additionally, the OAI-PMH allows different platforms to share metadata, making it possible for aggregated catalogs or national portals to harvest records from local museums and archives in a standardized way. This trend of platforms has started to specialize in Indigenous communities; for instance, project Mukurtu CMS aims to facilitate the sharing of cultural heritage (Rodriguez).

While these platforms are valuable tools in the digital heritage ecosystem, their success hinges on developing robust ontologies and thesauri that are created collaboratively with local communities. All technology platforms, no matter how advanced, require culturally appropriate vocabularies and knowledge organization systems to truly represent heritage in context, previously we mentioned xochitlallis and chikawikatl, but we can add certain artifacts like metlatxontil (smaller grinding stone), or any other ecological knowledge like the specific name of a type of rain that may not exist in any international standard. All of them must be documented and incorporated through community-driven ontology building.

In this light, projects like Future Cinema Live¹ offer valuable models for integrating community voices into semantic infrastructures. By designing platforms that treat storytelling, cultural performance, and memory as dynamic and relational processes, rather than static artifacts. Future Cinema exemplifies how digital systems can be reimagined to reflect Indigenous and place-based ontologies. Their emphasis on co-creation, contextualization, and the expressive dimensions of heritage aligns closely with the goals of semantic modeling in community contexts.

Additionally, spatial and geospatial archiving projects like ToposText.org and Native-Land.ca offer further insight into how place-based heritage might be mapped, interpreted, and made navigable without reducing it to fixed coordinates or state-imposed borders. Native Land Digital, for example, visualizes Indigenous territories, treaties, and languages through crowd-sourced data and participatory mapping, creating a platform where geospatial reference does not mean epistemic foreclosure. It serves not only as an archive but also as a tool for educational justice and political visibility.

Taken together, these initiatives reveal that metadata is not neutral but instead it shapes how knowledge is represented, interpreted and accessed. Ultimately, the effectiveness of any digital heritage initiative depends on its ability to embed local terminologies, categories, and relationships within its technical architecture. Without this, even the most sophisticated platforms risk reproducing extractive or flattening modes of knowledge representation. Co-developing ontologies and co-designing thesauri and annotation protocols with communities ensures that data structures do not merely describe heritage but enact it, respecting the cultural logic, historical depth, and future aspirations embedded in local worldviews and knowledge.

Oral Narratives in Zongolica Mountain Range: The Set of Mixtla de Altamirano

The corpus of oral narratives used in this project originates from a series of collective interviews conducted in 2015 across 26 Nahua communities in the municipality of Mixtla de Altamirano, Mexico. While fieldwork in this region has continued in subsequent years, this specific collection remains vital due to the depth and complexity of the material, as well as in memory of the many elders who have passed away in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Mixtla de Altamirano is located in the heart of the Zongolica mountain range in Veracruz, a region known as part of the broader Grandes Montañas of the Sierra Madre Oriental. It remains one of the most linguistically resilient Nahua areas in the country. As of the 2020 census, 89.07% of the population speaks Nahuatl, although this figure has declined significantly from 99.7, as reported in 2015 (INEGI). This rapid drop, within five years, highlights the urgent need to preserve, interpret, and revitalize the oral knowledge embedded in the Nahuatl language. Elders serve as living archives of knowledge, encoding history, cosmology and ethical values in stories that link the landscape with mythology within the rhythms of everyday life. In other words, Nahua oral narratives in Mixtla operate as an epistemological, spatial, and material practice. Particularly, one that resists colonial reification, sustains communal memory, and transmits values of reciprocity, identity and collective survival across generations.

The archive itself comprises of interviews from communities located across three distinct ecological zones: seven of them belong to communities in the highlands (Mixtlantlapkak, Axoxohuilco, Mexcala, Tlaxcantla, Teapa-Ocotempa, Tenexcalco and Coximalco), twelve of them to the communities in the middle lands (Ayahualulco, Xometla, Xala, Tlachicuapa, Barrio Tercero, Barrio Primero, Colonia Miguel Aleman, Capultitla, Tetzilquila, Barrio Cuarto, Barrio Segundo and San Andres Mixtla), and seven to the Lowlands (Zacaloma, Xochitla, Zacatilica, Tecolotla, Mangotitla, Matlatecoya and Cuautlajapa). Each interview session brought together approximately ten Nahua elders, whose testimonies articulate a worldview in which memory, territory, and myth are interwoven. Rather than adhering to linear conceptions of time, these narratives collapse past and present into a shared landscape of experience, where “our grandparents” might refer both to biological ancestors and to mythic forebears who shaped the land and its rhythms (Flores-Muñoz et al. 2022; 2024). Table 1 provides some relevant information related to the interviews:

Although already distributed and partially explored, this archive offers an extraordinary opportunity for new interdisciplinary experimentation. Precisely because of its narrative density, linguistic richness, and temporal layering, it invites innovative approaches that connect computational methods, ethnographic sensibilities, and the perspectives of a new generation of Nahua youth. It challenges us to imagine annotation and archiving not merely as acts of description, but as collaborative, epistemological practices that can respect and sustain the cultural integrity not merely as acts of description, but as collaborative, epistemological practices that can respect and sustain the cultural integrity of the stories themselves.

The importance of exploring archival strategies becomes even more evident in light of the events in the region. When we approached Zongolica community radio to explore the possibility of collaborating with their data set, we were told that a catastrophic flood had destroyed their entire archive. Up to this day, they have not been able to recover or reorganize the material. This loss is not only logistical, but also cultural, historical, and deeply emotional. It underscores the fragility of community-held knowledge and the urgent need to develop resilient, decentralized, and locally controlled archival infrastructures. Losing those materials is a profound tragedy, and it reinforces the value of initiatives that treat oral narratives not just as data to be stored, but as living expressions that must be cared for, safeguarded, and continually renewed in partnership with the communities from which they emerge.

While our technical model focuses on semantic structuring and accessibility, the ethical and political dimension of data sovereignty remains central. Rather than treating oral narratives as public-domain objects, we adopt a model of governance by consent. This means that each narrative’s metadata includes a record of permissions, custodianship, and circulation terms, determined in dialogue with narrator and community representatives. The repository designed will allow for different levels of access and updates will be mediated through local curators trained in documentation and metadata annotation. This structure reflects the principle that oral narratives are not merely data, they are living cultural inheritance. The project explicitly avoids extractive logics by ensuring that long-term management of the archive remains in the hands of community-appointed stewards.

The Annotation Experience in Mixtla de Altamirano

To date, two community-based annotation workshops have been carried out in Mixtla de Altamirano with the aim of engaging local participants in the collaborative interpretation and digital annotation of the video archive recorded in 2015. These sessions were designed to foster a participatory approach to audiovisual heritage by inviting Nahuatl speakers to co-construct meaning through discussion, transcription, and thematic tagging of the materials. Figure 4 shows the workflow and the actors involved in these annotation activities.

Figure 4: Moment of collaborative work during one of the 2024 workshops in Mixtla de Altamirano.

Despite significant logistical challenges, including power outages caused by heavy rainfall and limited access to computing equipment, the workshops marked a pivotal step forward. Of the 26 available recordings, six were successfully transcribed and annotated with the input and knowledge of local participants. The sessions involved the collective viewing and discussion of the videos, with particular attention paid to cultural signifiers, territorial references, and intergenerational expressions embedded in the oral narratives.

These technical difficulties underscore the persistent infrastructural inequities that rural and Indigenous communities must navigate when engaging with digital humanities initiatives. Nonetheless, the commitment of participants and the depth of the narratives prevailed. The workshops emerged as more than annotation exercises; they became sites of intergenerational dialogue, critical reflection, and linguistic revitalization. They reaffirm the value of oral narratives not only as repositories of historical memory but as living archives that speak to the present and future of Mixtla de Altamirano.

The initial phase of the annotation process employed the ELAN - Linguistic Annotator (Sloetjes & Wittenburg) to structure the audiovisual materials (see Figure 5). The recordings were segmented by speaker turns and distributed among participants. While many recordings followed an interview format (with at least one interviewer and one interviewee), others reflected more communal conversational dynamics. In such cases, the presence of a cultural interpreter was crucial, mediating meaning and clarifying responses. Documenting participant roles and speaking turns proved essential for preserving contextual integrity.

Figure 5: ELAN interface before transcribing and translating the conversation.

Each turn is annotated along two primary tiers. The first includes a literal transcription, with a current focus on Nahuatl speech. Spanish-language segments are expected to be preliminarily transcribed using automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies. The second tier consists of bidirectional translations between Nahuatl and Spanish. As an outcome of this stage, we anticipate producing a proto-cultural-object that includes the audiovisual recordings, participant metadata, and aligned transcriptions and translations, thereby enabling a layered understanding of the material across languages and temporalities.

While the annotation process is time-intensive and will require sustained engagement, its value is already evident, not only in the generation of structured data but in the reinforcement of communal ownership over the archive. These early efforts lay the groundwork for imagining future platforms where the Nahua knowledge can circulate autonomously, grounded in the epistemic values of the communities themselves.

Challenges of the Platform

As described, several options exist for choosing a platform and its features to model, curate, preserve, and facilitate access to digital cultural heritage collections. However, these have been designed with textual or image documents in mind and do not necessarily support oral narratives. While they support audio media, they can’t fully capture the nature of oral recordings, which often involve multiple participants with their contributions to the narrative. Each participant has a turn in these recordings, and the sequence of such turns through time is essential. Additionally, since we are working with Indigenous languages, many considerations for dealing with them are often overlooked. For instance, dialectal differences among speakers of the same language tend to be more prominent in Indigenous Mexican languages. This highlights the importance of including information about where the narration took place, not just as a label, but with the help of a map and the georeferencing of the location and the origin of the speakers. At this point, the project is creating prototypes of how this information and its relations can be modelled.

Another challenge is associated with the digitalization stage that different actors are in. For instance, platforms are usually designed and developed in spaces with significant advancements in digitalization, including basic infrastructure that supports development, access to high-quality computer equipment, and interconnectivity through the Internet. However, as described in the annotation effort, the final users face a more challenging digitalization stage, with basic infrastructure presenting recurrent electric and Internet failures , and their computing equipment consists mainly of basic smartphones. This is a problematic scenario for preserving digital cultural heritage, which promotes the autonomy of the platform and its users. At this point, our project has decided to identify a third-party entity, closer to the community, an Indigenous university (Universidad Veracruzana Intercultural UVI-sede Grandes Montañas), that can safeguard the platform. Therefore, the community overcomes this digital disparity. In this way, we do not overlook the responsibility of preserving the cultural artefact, and we do not detach from its origin.

Although our Digital Itinerant Community-Based Library/Museum model is designed to be located within, and managed by, members of the community itself, various challenges (such as those mentioned above) prevent the model’s physical installation from being situated directly within the communities. Nonetheless, installation can be carried out in a facility that meets the minimum operational requirements, and in this case, the Intercultural University of Veracruz meets these conditions, as members of the community attend this university.

Another challenge arises in achieving the repository’s itinerant feature and its realisation as a library or museum. First, the platform should be able to travel among the members of the community, and they should take control of it. Our proposal relies on open technology to facilitate its adoption; however, we must balance this technology to ensure it is minimal and well-established, thereby preventing interference with its future adoption. At this point, we have identified a stack based on HTML, JavaScript, Python and a local DB. We are also relying on the fact that there would be members of the community who would be able to perform the technical support, mainly installation. We have identified Indigenous universities as potential recipients of the core platform. First, the objective is that any member of the community can potentially have their version of the platform. Second, members of the community should be able to enrich it and potentially share these elements with other users. We are following the general patterns of coding repositories that are not centralized and allow traceability of contributions. Third, this conceptualisation raises the problem of how to protect the information from actors with whom the community does not want to share with. For this, we have identified licenses and terms of use that could offer legal protection, besides the elements of authentication to give practical access controls. Finally, to reach the goal of conveying the feeling of a museum or library we will iterate on the design of the platform and the user experience.

Additionally, since the project focuses on modelling the nature of oral narratives, it also explores the use of techniques associated with what is today understood as Artificial Intelligence to support curation and access to the collection. Regarding curations, we are using speech recognition to facilitate the transcription of the Spanish segments and investigating the creation of speech recognition and translation systems for the Nahuatl segments. In terms of access, we provide strong capabilities for searching in both languages and aim to identify named entities during the conversation to help create ontologies and treasures.

Conclusions

Nahua oral historiography operates on a spatial and mnemonic logic distinct from Western linear timelines. Where Western archival traditions seek to pin events to specific dates in a straight chronology (Rüsen), Nahua oral narratives instead map memory onto sacred geographies and ancestral itineraries. A single narrative may traverse mountain shrines, river fords, and cornfields, invoking the presence of forebears and deities tied to those places rather than a sequence of years. Precolonial Nahua codices entwined mythical time with geography and communal movement, in stark contrast to Spanish colonial narratives that insisted on linear time and cartographic space (Flores-Muñoz and Murrieta-Flores). In these Indigenous narratives, the landscape is a living mnemonic (hills, caves, and other spaces are revered as repositories of history and the movement itself) and is a form of remembering. Instead of fixed dates or written records, memory dwells in the land and its sacred landmarks, privileging an embodied sense of history where the past is always co-present in the terrain of the present. This spatialized, non-linear sense of time challenges us to rethink the nature of historical chronology and archives.

Such oral narratives carry profound epistemological value, as we have already stressed; they function as living archives of the community and are continuously regenerated through storytelling. Rather than treating knowledge as static artifacts locked in museums or documents, these narratives function as dynamic, living archives, fluid repositories of collective memory that adapt and endure. Embracing them requires a shift in mindset that unsettles colonial notions of history as something to be objectified and collected. Decolonial scholars remind us that Western academia has long dismissed Indigenous epistemologies and oral narratives as non-knowledge, or relegated them to the status of folklore, thereby enacting what Grosfoguel (75) terms epistemic racism/sexism. This project takes the opposite stance, by valuing oral narratives and community interpretation, we affirm that Indigenous knowledge systems are legitimate and authoritative on their own terms. Indeed, oral historiography resists the colonial impulse to reify knowledge into objectified data, showing instead that history can be a living, communal process. We stand upon the idea of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui that memory-in-action, oral history workshops, communal remembrance, and of course oral narratives, can subvert internal colonialism by keeping subjugated histories alive and in circulation (Gago). In short, these living archives challenge the epistemic marginalization of Indigenous people, refusing to let their histories be confined or erased by colonial record-keeping.

The collaborative, community-centered approach of our project exemplifies a decolonial research praxis. Instead of extracting knowledge from the communities (epistemic extractivism), we have engaged in co-curation and co-authorship with Nahua elders, storytellers, and youth at every stage. This means that research questions, narrative interpretations, and digital exhibition design (cartograms and deep mapping) are all being developed in and with the communities involved (even though that makes every step of the process a long step). Such an approach aligns with the claim for equal footing and knowledge democracy (Tandon et al.). By centering Nahua oral narratives and community priorities, we resist the hierarchical model in which outside experts collect data and leave, a model that too often replicates colonial power dynamics. Our itinerant digital museum/library, instead, operates on the principle of reciprocity and respect, Elders’ knowledge is honored as expert knowledge, and young community members are trained as co-researchers and digital stewards of their heritage. The Nahua ethos of oral narratives, which value interconnectivity, oral transmission, and sacred reciprocity, thus infuses not only the content of the archive but the methodology behind it.

Importantly, the journey of imagining and building this itinerant digital museum/library has not been without challenges. Working in rural Indigenous communities, we often confronted basic infrastructural problems that transformed our workshops into exercises in adaptability and solidarity—where all researchers cook, clean and participate within the rhythms of everyday life of the communities. For example, a sudden downpour knocked out the electricity on one stormy afternoon when we were conducting an annotation session. Rather than halt the workshop, participants piled around a single battery-powered laptop and continued to share stories while transcribing the video. Once the battery went out, we sat down and shared coffee, until the next day. In other sessions, limited computing equipment such as mouses, and even laptops, and spotty internet connectivity forced us to innovate, printing transcriptions for manual annotations, and developing offline digital tools that could run on older services, among many other exercises. These technical setbacks, far from deterring the community, became opportunities for intergenerational collaboration, teenagers adept with technology listen carefully to the elders and the stories of resistance that have built the landscape that they know today. The determination and creative resilience shown by the Nahua contributors underscored the communal stakes of the project. Everyone involved so far, recognized that this is more than a data-gathering exercise; it is a labour of listening and caring (Supernant et al.) building “affective alliances” with communities based on cooperation, solidarity and affection (Krenan; Sallum and Noelli; Flores-Muñoz)

Beyond its practical goal of preservation, our itinerant digital museum/library represents a critical intervention in the field of cultural analytics and digital humanities. Too often, digital heritage initiatives and data projects privilege text-centric, quantitatively codifiable information, overlooking forms of knowledge that don’t fit neatly into spreadsheets or databases. In contrast, this project expands or problematizes the definition of “data” to embrace relational, non-textual, and community-authored knowledge. The oral narratives that have been recorded so far do not exist as isolated bits of information; they are embedded in relationships, between narrator, audience, human and land, past and present. By designing a platform that can accommodate audio, video, interactive maps and even performative elements, we are pushing the boundaries of what counts as data in digital scholarship. This approach resonates with emerging dialogues in the digital humanities around Indigenous data sovereignty and multimodal knowledge representations. Our itinerant museum/library would not want to be just a repository of content but a site of epistemic reclamation. In doing so, the project challenges digital humanities to broaden its scope and methods, recognising the community elders as analysts of their own right.

Finally, the long-term goals of this initiative remain both ambitious and deeply rooted in decolonial ethics. Our project aims to sustain Indigenous memory by providing future generations with continued access to their ancestors’ voices, images, and narratives, ensuring that these stories remain vibrant and adaptable rather than fossilized. But also, it enables collaborative interpretation of the materials by creating workflows and tools for communities to annotate, discuss, and continue contextualizing the narratives in their own languages and terms, rather than leaving the interpretation solely to outsiders. We would like, additionally, to foster intergenerational knowledge transmission using this itinerant digital museum/library as a bridge between elders and youth. Eventually, we would like to create pedagogical and activist tools that leverage the archived narratives for educational and social justice.

Underlying all these goals is a conviction that preservation is not passive, it is a form of activism and community empowerment. By preserving these narratives digitally in a format controlled and curated by the community, we are also creating a living toolkit for cultural continuity, education and political advocacy. Ultimately, this collaborative endeavor highlights the ethical, relational, and political dimensions of doing digital heritage work with and for Indigenous communities. We have learned that the process is as or more important than the product itself—how we engage matters just as much as what we produce.

Competing Interests

The authors have no competing interests to declare.