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 August 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.

That shift from the unit of country to the unit of phenomenon has a name in the literature: archipelagic thinking. Stephens and Martínez-San Miguel define it against the area logic that has organized Caribbean studies since the Cold War, the one that groups by imperial language or national border, and propose instead a relational comparison between islands and shores, with no continental center to rank them. The atlas does not cite that framework as decoration: it is the most precise description available of what this tool already does when it connects Cartagena to New Orleans, or Providence to Curaçao.

Source: Stephens, M. and Martínez-San Miguel, Y. (eds.) (2020). Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations. Rowman & Littlefield International.

Recorded objects and epistemic operations

The corpus distinguishes between works and cultural manifestations. This difference describes the kind of object recorded by an entry; it does not separate research from ethnography. Ethnography is widely present in the corpus, but the inherited structure cannot yet identify it consistently. In architecture 2.0 it will be recorded as an epistemic operation —“producing ethnography”— that may coexist with reconstructing an archive, listening, mapping, theorizing, narrating or documenting a practice.

The manifestations layer records living expressions of the Caribbean (carnival, vodou, the sound system, the palenque) as entries in their own right, with their own nodes and relations, rather than leaving them only as objects mentioned by the books that study them. As of August 2026, it contains three entries against 254 works. This count does not measure how much ethnography exists in the atlas.

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 category formulated by José Medina and reworked by Monahan within a creolizing practice of freedom. It occurs when a framework of knowledge meets resistance that reveals its limits, silences or assumptions and opens the possibility of transforming it. It is not equivalent to a difference of language. From this revision onward, the atlas separates a linguistic crossing —contact between traditions kept apart by imperial and academic borders— from epistemic friction, which requires an argued editorial claim and evidence in the relation. Until the corpus explicitly declares such frictions, the interface will neither count nor infer them.

The current corpus records 594 resonances and 20 dissonances. That imbalance does not describe the field alone: a field this given to polemic does not produce twenty disagreements in 614 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 614 relations, 394 are corroborated and 220 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 bibliographic metadata, contribution, classification by phenomena and 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 annotated relations.

Through version 1.15.0, the repository synchronizes the JavaScript file loaded by the page with the downloadable JSON, but it does not yet include automated content validation. Before migration to architecture 2.0, a validator will be implemented to check identifiers, relations, vocabularies, sources, corroboration states, languages, temporalities and consistency across fields. Editorial review remains indispensable: no automated check can decide on its own whether an intellectual relation is adequately argued.

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.

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 (v1.15.0, 233 works and 588 relations) has its own version DOI, 10.5281/zenodo.21875688. The living corpus in this repository is at v1.17.0 (257 works and 614 relations; v1.4.0 added nine entries aimed at the biases this document declares, and v1.5.0 six more drawn from the group’s own library, opening the indigenous axis that had been missing, with Whitehead and Rifkin; v1.6.0 and v1.7.0 seeded the Caribbean Colombia/independence cluster —Helg, Brathwaite, Múnera and Sæther— with several relations corroborated by verified cross-citation between the primary texts themselves, including a genuine dissonance: Sæther directly challenges Múnera’s thesis on Cartagena’s free people of color; v1.8.0 added a chapter by the researcher himself —Almanza and Granados Castellanos, on the black geographies of the Zona Bananera— published in Raíces, resistencias y territorios (Editorial Unimagdalena, 2026); v1.9.0 added El cobarde no hace historia, Joanne Rappaport’s study of Orlando Fals Borda and participatory action research in the Sabanas of the Colombian Caribbean coast (Editorial Universidad del Rosario, 2021); v1.10.0 read both texts in full and found verifiable direct citation: the Zona Bananera chapter engages Trouillot, Bassi, Glissant, Abello and Rediker, and Rappaport’s book builds its analysis of Fals Borda’s method around Trouillot’s historiographic framework; v1.11.0 added two more works —Cristo Rey, un espacio para permanecer en el tiempo, by Édgar Rey Sinning, and Culture et dictature en Haïti, by Laënnec Hurbon— and, on reading the first work’s full draft, upgraded two relations from "to be corroborated" to verified citation and added three more, with Escalante, Helg and Cunin; v1.12.0 added three works drawn from the group’s own library: Leyendo el carnaval (Lizcano Angarita and González Cueto, eds., 2009), the first work to anchor the atlas in Barranquilla, previously at zero; Volviendo al Caribe (Mukien Adriana Sang Ben, 2020), which cites at length both already-catalogued works by Glissant and credits Hurbon as a reading that changed her understanding of Haiti; and ¿Dónde hay música africana? (Chica Geliz and Fajardo Martínez, 2024), on Cartagena’s picó culture and the International Caribbean Music Festival; v1.13.0 added fifteen works identified through a systematic cross-check against the group’s bibliography folder: among them Conscripts of Modernity by David Scott and Mosquito Empires by J. R. McNeill, two titles marked “not yet obtained” since the first round of recommendations; Raíces, Resistencias y Territorios, a compilation on Santa Marta that turned out to share authorship with two works already in the corpus; and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking, the volume that theorizes the method the atlas was already practicing; v1.14.0 added nineteen works identified through a second systematic cross-check against the group’s bibliography folder, weighted toward Panama —until then almost entirely absent from the corpus, with Lasso, Flores-Villalobos and Corinealdi citing one another— and toward Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic; among them also The Argonauts of West Caribbean by Wilhelm Londoño Díaz, on the canoe tradition of Taganga, and The People of Puerto Rico, the 1956 collective project that produced the already-catalogued Sidney Mintz). v1.15.0 added thirty works from a third systematic cross-check against the group’s bibliography folder, shifting the weight of the corpus more than any earlier round: it brought in the classics the atlas had been citing second-hand without holding them —Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery, Moreno Fraginals’s El ingenio, M. G. Smith’s plural society, Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished Black Metamorphosis, Edith Clarke’s My Mother Who Fathered Me and the essay Mintz and Price wrote together—, opened two new nodes, Costa Rica and Grenada, and seeded the Indian and Chinese indenture axis in one pass. Of its 159 relations, 149 carry a citation verified in the copy, raising the corroborated share of the corpus from 54% to 65%. v1.15.0 is the last deposited version, on August 10, 2026, and from that version the deposit also includes the two validators that check the corpus. v1.16.0 merged two entries that turned out to be the same 1956 book, The People of Puerto Rico, so the living corpus had one entry fewer than the deposited one; the retired identifier redirects to the surviving one so that already-cited links do not break. v1.17.0 added twenty-five works identified through a fourth systematic cross-check against the group’s bibliography folder, with twelve new relations verified by exact citation against the existing corpus and among the new works. 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: 20 of 614 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 inherited structure cannot systematically identify the many ethnographies in the corpus. Migration 2.0 will add “producing ethnography” as an epistemic operation, separate from entry type.
• Two phenomena remain thin relative to the rest: climate catastrophes (16 works) and violences (31). Targeted seeding continues there.
• 35.8% of the relations are pending verification against text.

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.