Data Curation and Cartographic Narratives on Indigenous Circulation Networks in the Orinoco Region: Methodological Reflections on the Project Inventar Colombia

Inventar Colombia: una mirada desde el Orinoco is a digital research project that seeks to reconstruct aspects of the geographic imagination, forms of relationship with nature and its resources, of at least 15 Indigenous groups that inhabited the Orinoco region between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Responding to the limits to what we can know in the archive about the ways in which various Indigenous groups inhabited and conceived the territory, we carried out a process of curation and extraction of geospatial data in historical and archaeological sources. We identified some patterns of territorial occupation and exchange networks of the multiplicity of Indigenous communities that have inhabited the Orinoco region. From iterations for the construction of maps with QGIS and typical GIS conventions, we explored other forms of visualization and narrative construction to deploy the arguments of the research on the web. We proposed a CSM-free web interface developed with JavaScript and open-source libraries and developed a set of cartographic narratives.