Methodology of the atlas Con el agua de por medio

What this document declares

The atlas is a research instrument, not a visualization. This page fixes its construction rules so that any reader can audit it: follow a current on the map down to the source that sustains it, or down to the honest mark that the source has not yet been verified. The numbers here describe the corpus as of July 2026 and will change with each version; the rule is that this page changes with them.

The unit of analysis

The unit of analysis is neither the country nor the author: it is the phenomenon that runs through the basin of the Greater Caribbean. The corpus recognizes ten: coloniality, post-plantation, racial capitalism, climate catastrophes, sovereignties, violences, memory and spirituality, marronage, creolization, and body, gender and erotics. A work enters the atlas when it works one of those phenomena in depth from the Caribbean, not when it merely mentions it. The place that hosts the work is recorded, but stays in the background: Cartagena is better understood alongside New Orleans and Paramaribo than alongside Bogotá.

The admission criterion is the academic register or documentary density of the work, not its fame. The rule also excludes: in July 2026 a general-history school textbook of the Caribbean was turned away because its instructional register does not converse with the rest of the corpus. Decisions of that kind are made work by work and left on record, because a corpus is also defined by what it does not admit.

The two layers

The corpus distinguishes two layers: research works and cultural manifestations. The distinction does not separate theory from ethnography. All anthropological work implies ethnography, and a good part of the corpus consists of ethnographies in the full sense. The manifestations layer records something else: living expressions of the Caribbean (carnival, vodou, the sound system, the palenque) as entries of their own, with their node and their relations, instead of existing only as objects mentioned inside the books that study them. As of July 2026 that layer holds six entries against 128 works; it is the project’s declared growth front.

Relation types

The atlas’s three relation markers, resonance, dissonance and epistemic friction, come from Michael Monahan, Creolizing Practices of Freedom: Recognition and Dissonance (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). Monahan builds the three around a deliberate sonic metaphor: freedom is creolizing because it is a dynamic relation between diverse elements that reshape each other over time, and that dynamism is incompatible with any ontology of purity or closed system. Friction, in that scheme, is not a flaw to correct but the physical condition of sound itself: without rub there is no vibration, just as without contact between distinct frameworks of knowledge there is no recognition. The atlas inherits that conceptual architecture rather than inventing its own.

Resonance is what Monahan calls constructive interference: two currents of thought that, in interacting, enhance each other without fusing into a single voice. It is not agreement or unanimity. Monahan insists that resonance needs distinction to function as resonance, the way a chord needs different notes to sound like a chord rather than unison. The atlas marks this link when one work continues, amplifies or inherits another’s: a genealogy of ideas that reinforce each other rather than repeat.

Dissonance is not the same as criticism or plain disagreement. For Monahan it is the tool that interrupts the white noise of a dominant intellectual soundscape, the imposed silence that passes for harmony or stability. Introducing a dissonant voice is often the first move of a liberatory praxis: it establishes the presence of a perspective that was previously inaudible and opens space for forms of resonance the prior order did not allow. Monahan adds a point the atlas cannot fully honor: a dissonant note can later resolve into a more complex harmony, and what a context normalizes as resonant can in fact be destructive interference wearing the mask of agreement. The atlas works with a necessary simplification of that idea: it marks dissonance when one work strains, criticizes or contradicts another explicitly and verifiably in the text. That is an operational proxy for Monahan’s category, narrower than the category itself, and the gap is declared here.

Epistemic friction takes up a concept from José Medina that Monahan makes his own: the necessary clash that occurs when an established framework of knowledge comes into contact with forms of resistance that unsettle it. That contact produces what Medina calls meta-lucidity, the capacity to notice the gaps in one’s own practical knowledge of oneself and of others. The atlas engine cannot read that unsettling directly off each work’s text, so it approximates it with a verifiable proxy: it flags epistemic friction when a relation crosses distinct linguistic traditions (Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic, Dutch), because that crossing, kept apart by the academy for decades, is where Monahan locates the actual creolization of thought. Here too the data approximates a finer category than it can capture.

The current corpus records 281 resonances and 14 dissonances. That imbalance does not describe the field alone: a field this given to polemic does not produce fourteen disagreements in 295 links. It also describes the proxy, since verifying in the text that one work cites and continues another is simpler than verifying that it deliberately strains it; the operational simplification above defaults toward resonance. The editorial task under way is to reread already-connected pairs and look in them for the real tension that the declared inheritance does not show.

Source: Monahan, M. J. (2023). Creolizing Practices of Freedom: Recognition and Dissonance. Rowman & Littlefield. The work has its own entry in the atlas corpus: see the «Monahan» entry →

The corroboration rule

Every relation carries a source field, visible on the work’s card. A relation is only marked as corroborated when the connection has been verified against the full digital text of the work, searching for the actual citation, mention or discussion; never by title, by memory, or by intuited thematic affinity. Where that verification has not been done, the field reads «Por corroborar» (to be corroborated), and it is published that way. We prefer the marked doubt to the invented source.

Of the current 295 relations, 148 are corroborated and 147 remain pending. The atlas publishes that state in every version, because declared debt is information, not shame.

The pending percentage rises with each new seeding of works and falls with verification sessions. Both are fine: it means the corpus grows faster than it is audited, and that the audit is never skipped.

Workflow and roles

Every work travels the same road before appearing on the map. The book is obtained in digital form and processed in an analysis notebook under a set protocol that extracts the bibliographic metadata, the contribution, the classification by phenomena and the cited connections with page numbers. That record is systematized in a Zotero group library, where each work is a complete bibliographic item with controlled tags and its relations noted on the item itself. An automated compiler then validates every field and every relation against the atlas catalogue: identifiers that exist, valid types, recognized places and phenomena. Nothing malformed reaches the published page.

Academic direction and the editorial decisions on inclusions, exclusions and relation types belong to Roberto Almanza Hernández (Pensamiento Caribe Research Group, Universidad del Magdalena). Bibliographic systematization is carried out by the group’s research assistance team. Technical validation is automatic, and its rules are the ones on this page.

Open data, versions and citation

The complete corpus (works, places, phenomena and relations with their source field) is published as a dataset in JSON format, deposited in Zenodo with a persistent identifier. The concept DOI —which always resolves to the latest version— is 10.5281/zenodo.21483568; the last deposited version (v1.2.0, 143 works and 289 relations) has its own version DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.21554775. The living corpus in this repository is already at v1.3.0 (145 works and 295 relations, with the addition of Anténor Firmin and Mimi Sheller’s Consuming the Caribbean); that version does not yet have its own Zenodo deposit. Each work in the atlas also has its own citable link and a button that copies its citation in APA format.

Declared limitations

• Dissonances are underrepresented: 14 of 295 relations. Part of the bias is the field’s, part is the operational proxy for Monahan’s category: it is easier to verify inheritance in a text than deliberate tension.
• The manifestations layer holds six entries. The Caribbean’s living expressions still appear more as objects of books than as nodes of their own.
• Two phenomena remain thin: climate catastrophes (14 works) and violences (19). Targeted seeding continues there.
• 50.9% of the relations are pending verification against text.
• The Zenodo deposit is two versions behind the living corpus.

None of these limitations is hidden in the interface: the state of the corpus is published in the atlas itself. This is exactly where a digital humanities project parts ways with a pretty visualization.