e Persistence of Early-Modern Metadata in Online Environments and the Endurance of Imperial Discourse*

: Metadata informs our interaction with visual objects (images) found within digital contexts (websites) and has enduring, transhistorical impact on how we understand the world around us, but few attempts to critically study the impacts of metadata have been undertaken, particularly with respect to the ways it can gender and racialize the represented subject. is article seeks to explore how metadata functions, and deals with early modern images that have been digitized and that serve to generate metadata. By using the example of the visual culture associated with Bartolomé de Las Casas, this article traces the way metadata shapes the representation of Native Americans in online environments while critically reecting on the consequences of existing metadata and the platforms that allow users to nd information online.


Resumo:
Os metadados informam da nossa interação com os objetos visuais (imagens) encontrados em contextos digitais (sites) e têm impacto duradouro e trans-histórico na forma em que entendemos o mundo ao nosso redor, mas poucos tentativas foram realizadas para estudar criticamente os impactos dos metadados, em particular em relação às formas em que podem gênero e racializar o sujeito representado. Este artigo visa explorar o funcionamento dos metadados e sua relação com as imagens da Idade Moderna que foram digitalizadas e para as quais foram gerados metadados. Usando o exemplo da cultura visual associada a Bartolomé de Las Casas, este artigo rasteja o modo em que os metadados dão forma à representação dos nativos americanos nos ambientes online, enquanto reete criticamente sobre as consequências dos metadados existentes e as plataformas que permitem aos usuários encontrar informação em linha. Palavras-chave: metadados, cultura visual, modernidade precoce, Las Casas, nativos americanos. In 1552, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474-1566 published his infamous treatise decrying Spanish violence in the Americas and proposing remedies that would improve the lives of Indigenous peoples throughout the Spanish realm (Las Casas, 1552). It quickly became translated across Europe and serves as one of the earliest Author notes a Corresponding author. E-mail: lbeck@mta.ca published best-sellers on record. Foreign publishers furthermore invested into these volumes by providing visualizations of the text's claims in ways designed to attract the gaze of potential consumers outside of Spain (Andermann & Rowe, 2005;Beck, 2011, pp. 494-533;Lefèvre et al., 2012;Mitchell, 1994;Mitchell, 2002, pp. 165-184). Scholars later credited Brevísima relación as one of the founding texts for the disciplines of international law and international relations, and thus scholars continue to esteem both the text and its author as signicantly impacting both the past and our present (Alker, 1992, pp. 347-371;Skinner, 1978;Skinner 2002;Todorov, 1992). While desiring to defend Indigenous peoples and improve their circumstances, Las Casas's text also sublimated them as weak, less capable, infantile, and strengthened the foundation for a custodial relationship with Europeans and later settler governments.
Scholars, authors, and artists, both past and present, characterise Las Casas as a saviour of Indigenous peoples because he argues against their enslavement while emphasising their gentle and docile nature (Brunstetter, 2012). It is in this context that we reframe Las Casas and his work, particularly because centuries of paintings, sculptures, engravings, and illustrations that depict the man presiding above Native Americans, who supplicate themselves before him on bended knee, appear in online results when we search for his name (Assimina & Wallace, 2009;Bryson, 2001;Bryson et al., 1994;Bucher, 1977;Bucher 1981). is visual culture associated with Las Casas, and with early-modern representations of race and gender, must be studied more closely, particularly once they become transubstantiated from the physical realm to the digital realm through the instrument of metadata. e use of metadata in this way resonates with what Walter Ong (1982) characterizes as the "technologizing of the word". In his case, however, it was the printing press and not online culture that gave the word signicant power (Manguel, 2000), and the subject must be revisited today in terms of the increasing power of metadata to constrain and shape information.
Metadata informs our interaction with visual objects (images) found within digital contexts (websites) and it can powerfully operationalize racializing and gendered discourses in unexpected ways (Attig et al., 2004;Martinec & Salway, 2005;Smith, 2009;Staum, 2003). e historical complexity underlying this problem and its global and contemporary reaches requires our attention, particularly because content creators transgure early modern descriptions of Native Americans into metadata used to dene an image online. e saturation of such images from early print culture in contemporary digital culture has helped to ensure that Indigenous peoples in today's mass media appear as helpless victims, weak or blemished in comparison to the western settler-colonizer, which has helped, in turn, to maintain the same power relations throughout the Americas (Dyson et al., 2006;Hobart & Schiffman, 2000). Signicantly, keyword searches in Google Image for terms including Indians and Natives in English, French, and Spanish retrieve images created for Las Casas' text where they are portrayed as being dominated by Europeans; these search results were indexed using the aforementioned key terms as metadata linking text to image. Lascasian images have also been extracted from their early-modern editions and reproduced online in order to visualize completely unrelated contexts, and we have yet to attempt to understand the consequences of metadata linking otherwise distinct content by way of a single image or word.
is connection between text and image is a technological problem of our time because metadata is responsible for transubstantiating physical objects such as illustrations and paintings into the virtual domain. us, platforms such as Google Image and other nodes of visual information, such as Alamy and Shutterstock, demonstrate the extent to how early modern constructions of indigeneity and gender remain today powerful signiers of Native Americans. Scholars are only recently critically engaging with the structure and scope of metadata in the way attempted in this article (Gray, 2009;Green & Courtney, 2015, pp. 690-707). By exposing the cultural networks that quietly maintain and legitimate imperial discourses expressed by metadata from the past in today's world, we hope to build upon a considerable body of scholarship concerned with imperial discourse exampled by the work of Edward Said (1993), among others (John, 2001). Using the example of how metadata represents Nahua women, we will then consider Lascasian visual culture, and aerward circle back to women in order to problematize and ask some important questions about how metadata privileges white, primarily male supremacy, at the expense of women and people of colour.

Metadata at Work
To understand how metadata inuences our ability to nd content online, let us turn to one of the most commonly used platforms for visually locating information online. Google Image explains that its search console provides "a way to visually discover information on the web", and in ways that allows the user to also locate adjacent information in either textual or visual form (Google, 2019a). Viewed from the perspective of identity and identity assignment, all search queries relating to people ascribe and dene characteristics of their identity; search results will be different for "Indian woman" than for "Indigenous woman" (Coulthard, 2014;Forte, 2013;Harris, 2003;Matthews, 2008;Palmater, 2011), and search query data is also aggregated and sometimes converted into metadata. us, we need to be aware that the structure of our search queries may reinforce and reproduce imperialist, racist, and sexist discourse and constrain the breadth of information displayed in the results (Nakamura, 2008). If the user desires to have "Nahua woman" dened for them in either textual or visual form, Google's search infrastructure provides the user with both textual and visual options and, of course, the user can toggle or tab between Web and Image results, as desired ( Fig. 1) (Google, 2019b). In this way, the user can seek visually-dened information rather than textually-dened information, and consuming the visual source may save the user considerable time, depending on their level of textual or visual literacy, and also in a language when website contents appear in languages unfamiliar to the user. It must be noted that search results constantly evolve, and as this article demonstrates, thematic trends in the results across image platforms exhibit extraordinary consistency with respect to the representation of women and people of colour. While the search results discussed herein, completed in November 2019, will vary ifattempted today, the overall tone of the results will remain the same for the foreseeable future. Google Web search results for "Nahua Woman" pretty, Aztec tribe, and traditional dress. None of the top categories refers to Malintzín or to betrayal, yet this contextual metadata has become associated with "Nahua woman".
With this variety of ways through which an image may be described, a Google Image search results page makes use of an image's metadata but is also informed by a title generated automatically by Google extracted from the image title and from meta tags found on the image's source page. Called "snippets", Google additionally pulls upon content located on unrelated webpages and which might have some relationship to the metadata found on the image's source page (Google, 2019d). is practice undergirds the character of the "Related questions" section of Google's web results page for "Nahua woman". e precise method employed by Google has not been transparently shared by the corporation, but one presumes that at the least unrelated pages possess textual or visual content that appears to match the inferred subject matter of the image based on its metadata. While Google claims that it cannot manually adjust these descriptive titles, it does encourage content creators to think about the quality of their descriptive metadata in the rst place, as this will impact the quality of the snippets that Google generates for each image.
In this way, we can understand the quality of metadata to be fundamentally linked to and informed by humans who must provide basic categories of information in order for Google to make use of the data and hence for it to appear in a query's search results. Google specically addresses this point "Because the meta descriptions aren't displayed in the pages the user sees", which points to terms such as traitor, Malinche, and dead language being converted into snippets that later become associated with images that share some other meta descriptor-for instance, Nahua-and for this reason "it's easy to let this content slide" by not giving it careful consideration (Google, 2019d).
Identifying and analysing metadata is a straight-forward exercise, although in scholarly contexts it can be challenging to fully esh out arguments when they rely upon the complex networks of a search console such as Google, as documenting one's search pathways quickly grows onerous and these pathways constantly shi and evolve. It is even more difficult to understand how content becomes positioned in search results by providers such as Google, particularly if there are gendered or racial implications for this content. As our exploration of "Nahua woman" has demonstrated, characteristics have become associated with Indigenous women that did not explicitly form part of the image set's metadata, in what can be characterized as an extraneous form of metadata embedded into the platforms we use to nd information online. Furthermore, if content creators are not subject-matter specialists or conversant in suitable vocabularies for describing women and people of colour, they may reproduce descriptors that have problematic consequences for our ability to visualize humanity online. is outcome is particularly likely if content creators extract their metadata for an earlymodern image from the original text that described the image, which might dene a Nahua woman as an "Indian", a "natural", or even a "savage".
is brief exploration of Indigenous women and metadata will inform our assessment of the representation of race and gender in metadata describing Las Casas' seminal work, Brevísima relación. We will also return to the subject of using authentic references, for instance to Nahua rather than Native American, to describe Indigenous identity as a means of possibly overcoming the surrogate descriptors imposed in the western world upon Native Americans. is approach is informed by a critical body of work on ways to make space for Indigenous people within a settler-colonial milieu (Bell, 2014;Byrd, 2011). It is also worthwhile to consider how settlers in the Americas "play Indian" and exert their presence in the visual and textual realms, including through the instrument of metadata where Indigenous people exist contemporaneously (Banivanua Mar & Edmonds, 2010; Barbour, 2015, pp. 269-284;Deloria, 2004;Poulter, 2009).
Two metadata sets, which will also comprise search queries, will help us to reach an understanding of the visual culture associated with Las Casas and the reception of his most famous work: "Bartolomé de las Casas" (Fig. 2) and "Brevísima relación" (Fig. 3). Remarkably, the web search results for both queries when entered into English-or Spanish-language search engines point rst to English-language resources such as Wikipedia, which demonstrates the popularity of this corpus among Anglophone audiences and foreshadows the shaping of Lascasian visual culture, as well as its metadata, by non-Hispanophone audiences. e Google Image results, however, emphasise Spanish-language webpages so that if one searched for textual results, information is rst presented in English, whereas the visual results offer information rst in Spanish. ese different language preferences highlight another way that information online is shaped by metadata based on the language in which it was created.  Both Google Image search queries produce a contrasting range of sub-collections. Whereas "Brevísima relación" has been tagged with alternate terms frequently found in the book's metadata (year of publication, other words frequently found in the book's title in editions produced over the centuries, as well as the genre of book)-that comprises the information that a library would use to catalogue the work in Spanish-"Bartolomé de las Casas" attracts a more complex array of collection terms in both English and Spanish, and that would not be used to catalogue the book. "Cartoon", "route", "quote", "citas [quotations]", and "statue" are unrelated to the book's metadata and their association with Las Casas requires further consideration, particularly the two terms that explicitly refer to visuality.
e "cartoon" sub-collection broadens the eld of metadata associated with Las Casas to include illustrated images of white men harming or saving Native Americans, with explicit references to Christianity (Fig. 4). e collection's tags also include Christopher Columbus (1451-1506), the encomienda system, and eodore de Bry (1528-1598)-to whom we will return later on. e sources of these illustrations grow more complex upon closer examination, particularly when they come from image aggregators such as Alamy.com (the third search result), a company that sells stock images for various purposes, including to national and international media outlets (Alamy, 2019). Captioned "Old engravings. Depicted Bartolome de las Casas. e book 'History of the Church,' 1880 -Image ID: C95E5C", Alamy offers it for sale from $19.99-$365 Canadian Dollars for a range of purposes, including personal use, newsletters, websites, marketing, and a royalty-free license. When we search Google for the image caption, we discover that the same image and metadata can be found on other commercial image aggregators, including Shutterstock where it appears as the fourth result in a collection called "Bartolome", with the rst three images featuring photographs of cities. ese aggregators offer the image for different prices (Shutterstock, 2019). is instance demonstrates how metadata becomes reproduced on a larger scale as well as moored to completely distinct concepts, as Las Casas had not any relationship with any of the cities or the islands named San Bartolomé and St. Barthélemy located in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Spain. Google Image search results for "Bartolomé de las Casas" limited to the "cartoon" sub-collection of this data set as captured Source: Google Chrome, 2019, November 28 A closer inspection of Alamy's stock of images that mention Las Casas in their metadata reveals the sort of visual material that the company pursues-rights-managed or royalty-free images. Early-modern subject matter thus comprises an important revenue stream for Alamy because woodcut, copperplate, and lithograph engravings such as the one captioned "Old engravings" oen come from already published books that are no longer in copyright and may or may not be cited as the source of the illustration. Alamy, like most stock image rms, instead credits the image's contributor, and this information makes its way into the image's metadata set, sometimes displacing that of the image's original creator, place of publication, and even subject-matter 1 .
e use of visual material produced in other eras, and the nancial incentive to avoid paying copyright and royalty fees, also means that platforms where we consume visual material can be rife with ethical and values-related problems that do not necessarily reect cultural and social norms of today's world. Yet, these illustrations are being used to characterize information for today's readerships (Kratz, 2011, pp. 21-48). Of the 122 stock images relating to Las Casas at Alamy, only 23 are not reproductions of engravings, statues, and books that are out of copyright. 17 of those illustrations depict Native Americans expressing thanks and appreciation for Las Casas's interventions on their behalf, and 28 of them reproduce or imitate a famous portrait of Las Casas. Another commercial image site, Getty Images, offers a portrait of Las Casas in its search results for his name; and while citing the source of its portrait of Las Casas as coming from the 1791 illustrated book, Retratos de los españoles ilustres, it nonetheless offers the image for up to $575 Canadian Dollars without any compelling reason for why it should earn this revenue when a high-quality digitized copy of the image can be easily found online for free (Getty Images, 2019).
e visual culture of early modernity, and certainly of Las Casas, should prompt scholars to investigate how metadata may also be reinforcing sexist and racist discourses that as a collective maintain a patriarchal, imperialising vision of western society, particularly in the for-prot marketplace where early-modern metadata is being colonized by "contributors" and concepts such as licencing and rights management. As some scholars have recently noted, the structure of metadata used to catalogue information for a library or archive categorically limits the presence of Indigenous peoples, which we can extend to other traditionally marginalized groups, including women, people of colour, and the economically challenged (Falzetti, 2015, pp. 128-144;Hunt, 2016, pp. 25-42;Kam, 2007, pp. 18-22). Some scholars have referred to this phenomenon as a form of globalized knowledge whereby we can understand that western knowledge-whose architecture traditionally has supported white patriarchy-is becoming increasingly globalized in its scope (Crowley 2011;Renn, 2012;Schreffler, 2007;Sha, 2002, pp. 73-100).
Returning to our Google Image results for Las Casas in the sub-collection Cartoon, we observe that the top twenty results feature objects and referents, as well as postures, in common with the Alamy results. Nearly every result features a white man in some position of authority, whether in the act of writing, evangelizing, educating, or soldiering. is authority is also expressed beyond these vocations in the form of positioning the white man above Native Americans. Meanwhile, Native Americans are portrayed less consistently-their racial and cultural features (for example, regalia) can be exaggerated cultural signiers of their indigeneity or victimhood, and more than one search result portrays them as white or replaces these cultural signiers with a reference to violence. us, Lascasian visual culture trends in two directions: one vein of representation presents the man and his work in a positive light that might enshrine or celebrate his Christian values and arguments against the enslavement of Native Americans, whereas the other vein of representation uses references to Spanish violence as a means of iterating Las Casas's work. Several search results point to educational sources such as Apprend.io and the Universidad de Guadalajara where lessons outline the man's accomplishments and celebrate, in the latter case, his birthday, characterizing him as a "cronista y defensor de los indígenas"; he wears a cross and is depicting writing (Universidad de Guadalajara, 2018). Several of the results feature or imitate a famous portrait of Las Casas that shows him in prole from the 1791 Retratos de los españoles ilustres.
ese images must be considered in terms of how our values evolve over the centuries. Twenty-rst century readers tend to value war and violence differently than our predecessors hundreds of years ago. Rather than a conquest, we usually refer to the arrival of Europeans to the Americas as an invasion, a change that exemplies how values shi over time and therefore how readers and viewers' assessment of information also changes. More than one search result problematizes European presence in ways that also refer to Las Casas. e fourth result, from e Feminist Wire, relates to an article criticizing Columbus Day. It features a book cover portraying a white religious man beneath whom a kneeling Native American in prayer, and Native children, can be found. It originates from the Biblioteca del Niño Mexicano's Fray Bartolomé de las Casas o la protección de los Indios (Mexico: Maucci Hermanos, 1900), which ironically does not make its way into the image's metadata, although the information itself is metadata for the book as an object. Similarly, another post from the social media platform for hosting images, imgur.com, accompanies a post critical of Columbus Day; it features emblematic representations of the Spanish as a European soldier and of Native Americans as a dead person with a sword sticking out of his back (imgur, 2015). is post includes several illustrations published by De Bry, and these examples also show us one of the data pathways linking Columbus-whose presence in the Americas initiates a centuries-long invasion causing extreme cultural violence-with Las Casas, who argued for better conditions and treatment of Native Americans, on the occasion of the holiday commemorating the former man (Las Casas, 1598;Dittmar, 2011Dittmar, , pp. 1133Dittmar, -1172Sáenz-López Pérez, 2011, pp. 463-481) ese results also highlight the ways that violence against Native Americans has become a signier of both the Spanish invasion and Las Casas's arguments in favour of Indigenous welfare. Mexico Desconocido comprises a history and culture resource for the general public, and its search result features a white man cutting Native Americans and grabbing one by his hair. e image does not illustrate Las Casas or even Native Americans from the region of Mexico where he spent time; rather, it is from the c. 1550 Codex Kingsborough-Tepetlaoztoc (British Museum, London, Add. Ms. 13964) and the abusive gure is labelled Luys Baca (Luis Vaca). Alianza Editorial's 2018 edition of Brevísima relación exemplies this practice in a slightly different fashion; its cover nds its way into the top 20 search results as well. e illustration itself was created by a an Indigenous man, Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala (1534-1615, to illustrate the sorts of abuses his people were experiencing in Peru, in this case the execution of Tupac Amaru Inka (Guamán Poma, 1615, p. 451). Again, we see white people higher in the image's register than Native Americans, who clamour and cry out in protest from below the scene of murder, and this order should be viewed as an essential element of the grammar of Lascasian visual culture (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). e association of violence against Native Americas with Las Casas is not a surprise, and several of the search results explicitly point to images created for De Bry's 1598 edition of Las Casas' Brevísima relación. is work is responsible for solidifying the visualization of violence against Native Americans with Spaniards; scholars usually refer to the framing of Spain's activities in Europe and in its colonies as the Black Legend (Greer et al., 2007). Today any scene of violence iterates Spanish abuses in the New World in ways that can be referential to Las Casas and certainly informs Lascasian visual culture. A quarter of the top search results features images from De Bry's 1598 edition.
An analysis of the "Brevísima relación" search results reinforces these observations that Lascasian visual culture has been shaped so that Spanish violence characterizes the book in ways not intended by its author, as there has never been a Spanish-or Latin-language edition of the work that became illustrated before the twentieth century. e search results nonetheless favour the frontispiece of the 1552 edition and this data is housed on a distinct array of websites compared to the search results for the book's author. Whereas Las Casas attracts primary commercial websites that make use of related metadata to sell or position information for the consumer, the book is either positioned as a consumable product in and of itself on websites such as Amazon or as a source of knowledge on websites such as Wikipedia and Cervantes Virtual. Nearly all top results feature title pages or frontispieces from various editions of the book, and several of the De Bry illustrations from his 1598 edition are shared between the two search results, which suggests a high degree of common metadata. e use of early-modern engravings, moreover, allows modern publishers to reproduce visual content cheaply and without paying royalties. e modernity of the book is emphasized by the subcollection tags, which include three references to electronic books as well as the notion of making a "rst purchase". e presence of this content suggests that the book's metadata has grown to include the format in which the data is made available-in this case, as a branded form of electronic book-and the web browser or reader herself becomes implicated in the metadata with the notion of purchasing the book.
A general observation about this brief assessment of Lascasian visual culture through its metadata can be made concerning the absence of any Native American-focused material beyond their presence as either victims of Spanish violence or thankful recipients of Las Casas' goodwill and of Christianity. e search results under study exhibit a conation between scenes of conversion where a missionary converts Native Americans to Christianity, who gaze upward at the missionary in thanks and reverence for God-such as the one captioned "Old engravings"-and Indigenous people in the same posture gratefully gazing upon Las Casas as the defender of their rights and freedoms. is representational trend converts Indigenous peoples into either perennial victims or the recipients of western grace. Signicantly, Lascasian visual culture layers referents for Christian evangelization upon those for human rights and freedoms. From a different perspective, the expression of metadata in textual form allows us to problematize metadata in terms of textual culture in the Americas. Textuality has for centuries been viewed by Indigenous peoples as an instrument of violent colonialism, and it cannot surprise us to nd metadata performing a similar function when it comes to the representation of Indigenous peoples online (Arnold & Dios Yapita, 2006;Ashcro, 2014;Boone & Mignolo, 1994;Calloway, 2013;Cheytz, 1997;Gonzalbo Aizpuru, 1990;Niño-Murcia & Salomon, 2011;O'Brien, 2010;Robertson, 2005).
Finally, throughout the image results, Indigenous woman were rarely portrayed in this data set's collective metadata, which leaves us questioning whether women as victims of physical violence or as thankful subjects possess distinct meanings than when men full these roles. Indeed, when we search simultaneously for "Nahua Woman" and "Bartolomé de las Casas", the top search results transform into illustrations from the Mexican codices, such as the Florentine Codex, which were illustrated by Native Americans (some of whom were women). Scenes of violence become displaced for the most part by representations of Indigenous customs and history. And unlike the separate searches for "Nahua woman" and for "Bartolomé de Las Casas", when their metadata is joined the stereotypical referents become replaced with a critical mass of Indigenous self-representation (Muehlebach, 2003, pp. 241-268). In contrast, the same exercise repeated for "Nahua man" and "Bartolomé de las Casas" offers the frontispieces of Brevísima relación, references to La Malinche, and to Pocahontas, women viewed throughout the western world as essentialized emblems of Indigenous femininity (Fig. 5) (Jager, 2016). ere thus seems to be a gendered aspect to metadata that scholars need to better understand. Source: Google Chrome, 2019, November 30 Conclusion: Imperial Persistence e different qualities of information emerging from a gendered framing of Lascasian visual culture expose relationships between masculinity and the dataset under consideration whereby an explicit mention of masculinity ("Nahua man") resulted in many of the same results that appeared when searching for Lascasian material without this gendered framing. In fact, by adding this masculine referent, problematic representations of women emerge that are entirely absent when the framing is feminine in nature ("Nahua woman") or when no gendered frame is used. Masculinity for this dataset becomes not only a projection and characteristic of Las Casas, which one expects to a degree because he is male, but also it appears to be linked to imperial discourse in ways that femininity is not.
Scholars of imperialism have observed that patriarchy comprises a central element to the colonial project, whose actors also tend to be idealized examples of masculinity, whether in the form of conquistadors, missionaries, princes and kings, pioneers, pilgrims, and settlers on the frontier, or in terms of the respected historians who chronicled or studied the past, most of whom were men before the twentieth century. is reality implies that textual culture has been primarily manufactured and used by white men as well, which builds upon Walter Ong's view that the word became technologized much in the way that metadata has become today, and dovetails with Ruth Oldenziel's observation that technology has grown increasingly masculine in the modern era (Oldenziel, 1999;Ong, 1982). Viewing textuality this way allows us to see the visceral connection it shares with technological endeavours as mutually masculine domains. Our knowledge of the past cannot escape patriarchal ways of knowing and seeing the world, which evidently impacts early modern metadata, whose creators and target audiences were male and includes captions or explanations of book illustrations, and book frontispieces and title language in addition to the subject-matter featured in visual form. Today, early modern metadata also includes the entire document, if relating to a book because technology allows us to scan the contents of the book and to leverage them as metadata in search consoles such as Google. In this light, early modern metadata remains more available today than it was in the past when the contents of a book could not be machine read.
Because our knowledge of the past is colonized by this form of information imperialism, it may prove impossible to overcome the persistence of imperialism that privileges white male experiences and ways of knowing without some deliberate intervention into the metadata proles such as the one we have explored for Lascasian visual culture. Based on this study, changing its character might be achieved through the assertion of a female and authentic Indigenous presence in the metadata. Taking this step should allow other aspects of Las Casas' work to take prominence over images of Native Americans subjugated and abused, as these images reinforce imperial discourse and could possibly show some idealized outcome of the Lascasian project -namely, Indigenous people possessing human rights and freedoms.
By creating datasets that explicitly include women and Indigenous people-beyond the white heteronormative man-we may nd ways of accessing the early modern period that help overcome the fact that our sources are imperialist, patriarchal, and the knowledge contained in them colonized by the white male gaze. is action would effectively build new pathways that connect metadata nodes in ways that better reect our values today.