Intersecting Frames of Legibility in Conversion de Piritu (1690): A Remodeling of Paratexts in the Digital Setting

Introduction The arrival of digital technologies has made it possible for scholars to access sources of information (maps, books and manuscripts) that would otherwise have remained unknown, forgotten or ignored on library shelves. In this chapter, digitalization stands for “the way in which many domains of social life are restructured around digital communication and media infrastructures,” and encloses the digitization material process “of converting individual analog streams of information into digital bits” (Kreiss and Brennen 1). The digitalization of institutional archives and private collections has led to a so-called democratization of access to historical materials by enlarging its audience to a broader circle of readers. The enhanced online digital exposure of texts written in the Americas has generated a significant body of scholarship in the last decades, focusing on texts produced in the period of colonial conquest and expansion. Open databases and online libraries, such as the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, have contributed to unraveling the historical and cultural threads of Spanish American literature.2 The reframing of this literature within digital reading structures has led to the rediscovery of Spanish American literature in the twenty-first century.3 Importantly, the digital materialization of Spanish American colonial texts brings both benefits for and challenges to their readers. For example, paratextual elements take new