Review of Power of Attorney


I’ve chosen to review Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks because I am interested in digital history/humanities projects that visually display social networks. Although I don’t study indigenous Mexican culture, mapping individuals in relation to each other and in relation to power structures (in this instance, the court system) connects to my interest in visualizing social networks, particularly among authors/intellectual communities and networks of distribution of their works and ideas.

Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks (https://www.powerofattorneynative.com/) is a mapping and visualization site which displays connections among “people, places, and courts created by a common legal procedure: the granting of power of attorney” during Spain’s colonization of Mexico (Power of Attorney). The project aims to “Contribute[s] to interdisciplinary scholarship that shows how native people interacted with the law across geographical expanses and differences of language and culture” (Power of Attorney). It is directed by Dr. Yanna Yannakakis, Associate Professor of History at Emory University, and its main contributors are librarians and specialists from Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship.

Based on the thorough footnotes, the project appears to be grounded in relatively recent scholarship, with many citations from the last ten years. The site provides a great deal of historical context, a thorough methodological description, and a “Stories in the Maps” section which describes some of the more noteworthy narratives the mapping project reveals.

The extensive description and historical context on the site is understandable in light of its status as a scholarly, rather than public-facing, project (which I infer from above-mentioned quote from the homepage). But the heavy text-to-visual ratio makes interacting with the site feel at times like reading a textbook. This can also be attributed to its organizational scheme. While navigating the site is relatively intuitive, with the menu offering “about,” “power of attorney/power of letters,” and “maps” drop-down menus, finding and interpreting the maps themselves takes more digging than one would expect for a project that “constructs a geography” (Power of Attorney). The maps are the second to last menu option and interacting with the first map on the page requires downloading Google Earth and KMZs (which my computer was not able to run).

My assertion that reorganizing the information of the site would be useful is reinforced by the fact that other interactive maps are available near the bottom of the “maps” page and would be more effective if placed in a prominent location, such as the homepage. These interactive CartoDB maps are the most helpful of all the project’s maps (with the possible exception of the ones I couldn’t access) in understanding the spatial relationships between those guaranteeing the powers of attorney and those receiving them. The interactive maps also allow for zooming out far enough to understand that legal networks existed not only throughout Mexico but also between Mexico and Madrid, a helpful visual reminder of the impacts of colonization.
The “Stories of the Maps” page states that
The maps allow us to see each authorization of power of attorney as a web of relationships among people, places, and institutions in which patterns emerge and individual connections stand out.  In this regard, the maps are a tool as much as an end: they allow us to see data in a new way, and to ask questions that send us back to the archive to reconstruct the stories within the maps. (Power of Attorney)
This quote points to the strength of this project: a tool for those pursuing a deeper knowledge of history in this time and place. The site’s technical features do not seem to accomplish much that still frames in a textbook couldn’t also accomplish. The scholarship of the site is extremely thorough, and a great resource for understanding this chapter in Mexican history for those willing to do a bit of digging and a great deal of reading.
Power of Attorney. Emory University. https://www.powerofattorneynative.com/. Accessed 9                    October 2019.





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