The Digital Humanities Line aims at developing a comprehensive dictionary of people, places, and institutions requires data mining techniques that involve identifying duplicates, name variations, and tracking name changes. Our team will also use association techniques to match titles and occupations, and extract relevant data such as birth and death dates, ethnic group, and historical occupations. To identify the semantic structure of large corpora, we will employ the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm and utilize visualization and statistical methods to analyze multivariate time series. Finally, we will apply methods of positional analysis, centrality measurement, and Exponential-family Random Graph Models to examine the evolution of governance in the Portuguese Empire through changes in the network roles of its officials. Our research combines quantitative analysis with a deep understanding of historical events and local processes.

The Historical Research Line examines qualitative categorization of documents from overseas possessions based on social, administrative, political, religious, and economic information. It also creates a timeline of Portuguese-Atlantic colonial history to identify important legal and institutional changes, and periodizes significant economic, political, or commercial events. Additionally, it analyzes the interests and demands of citizens in the Atlantic Portuguese Empire from 1640 to 1822, focusing on the interaction between global and local concepts in the transatlantic and regional processes of identity and state formation in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador da Bahia, and Luanda. The research also aims to understand how ordinary people reacted to changes in empire policies and used Portuguese institutions to advance their interests, critically reflecting on different ways people questioned and dealt with their colonial experience.