The Form of the Content: The Digital Archive Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America

The digital archive "Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America" (NECA) assembles and makes publicly available a growing corpus of Nahuan-language documents produced in Spanish Central America. Many are fragments within larger Spanish-language documents and difficult to locate in the archive. NECA has succeeded in bringing attention to this understudied corpus but has so far failed to attract users to its transcription and translation tool. We consider the reasons for this creative failure based on user data, and suggest that the specialized skills and distinct academic communities needed to move this project forward require other workspaces, including the non-digital, in advance of online collaboration.([1])