Creating the Digital Florentine Codex: Transforming Colonial Nahua Knowledge to Multilingual Data

In 2016, the Getty Research Institute initiated a major collaborative project to transform this singular codex into an enhanced digital critical edition. The Digital Florentine Codex (DFC), launching in late 2023, presents the newly digitized codex alongside its bilingual transcriptions and translations. Texts and images will be searchable, achieved by tagging images with multilingual keywords drawn from the codex’s unique linguistic content. This image metadata is being produced in four languages—Classical Nahuatl, Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, Spanish, and English—and is generated following a rigorous research process that involves the interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars, some of whom are native Nahuatl speakers. The DFC will give unprecedented access to this manuscript of human cultural heritage and may be considered a digital repatriation to Mexico, as the original continues to reside in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana where it has been housed since the late sixteenth century. This presentation will detail the collaborative process for this ambitious project and demo the newly launched DFC.