Abstract:

In the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the properties of the Archbishop's Table embraced densely through the Portuguese regions of Minho and Trás-os-Montes, extending out of their religious domains, to the bishopric of Porto, reaching the region of Santarém, and also extending the borders of the kingdom towards Galicia (Spain). The inventory that was carried out in that century, known as "Book of Properties" or "Tombo da Mitra", records in its 1288 pages of size A3, with great detail and precision, its properties - lands and houses - in the Portuguese regions of Valença, Vila Real, Chaves and Braga, specifying the rents or payments that were owed to them by their commitment. This impressive and heavy codex, with remarkable and beautiful irons on both sides, also encloses a monumental content: an extensive and exhaustive relation of properties, as well as the rents of the Archbishop's Table. The manuscript is a clean copy of the inventory or “tombo” made by royal order of 1601, and displays dates between 15th and 16th centuries, corresponding to the titles of term that in each locality were being presented to the Mesa, made by several notaries and signed by different archbishops and their procurators. In the 644 large-size folios, compactly filled in Portuguese, are included detailed descriptions of different land types and other geographical references, such as names of streets, places, rivers, bridges, settlements, owners, houses and their characteristics, botanical species, cultivated products, just to name a few. In fact, an abundant and rich set of biographical, genealogical, and socio-economic aspects quite interesting for study and research. In this paper, we reveal the way in which we design and create a document database, as well as a glossary, from the transcription of the manuscript and its subsequent analysis and annotation. It is a database system containing all the terms used in the manuscript, including thousands of names of places, lands and their respective undertakers or cultivators, important for the genealogy of the Portuguese families. As such, it is an important educational instrument for studying geographic, socio-cultural, agricultural, economic, architectural, religious and linguistic aspects mainly of the northern regions, in the 17th century. We focused on conceiving and designing such an instrument as a computational tool especially oriented to linguistic students, professors and researchers but also for the public, providing, for this purpose, an actualised edition of the document and the translation of the user interface system in English and Spanish. The database system hosts the referred document database, making it available for access and analysis through the Web. In this paper we present the process of incorporating and annotating the referred manuscript in the system, as well as illustrating how its information can be explored, in order to the study, cross and analyse one or more socio-cultural, economic or architectural facets, concerning their linguistic aspects.

Keywords:

Pedagogical Methods and Innovations, Teaching Methodologies, Teaching and Learning Portuguese, Linguistic Databases, Document Databases, Web-Based Applications.