Books in Spanish from the Philippines published between 1500-1900
Data files
Jan 16, 2026 version files 210.21 KB
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Appendix3modified.xlsx
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correctedFilipinoauthorswhowroteinspanishmodified.xlsx
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ONLYUSETHISSpanishBookPhilippines1500-1950UCBmodified.xlsx
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README.md
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Abstract
The colonization of the Philippines was a complex and lengthy process that led to the emergence of Spanish-language non-fiction and fiction literature in the archipelago. Filipino intellectuals, emerging from the Spanish-imposed education system, became a force against colonialism by producing Spanish fiction and non-fiction. Despite the shift to English during American colonization, Spanish-language literature continued to evolve, reflecting Filipino resilience. The Catholic Church significantly shaped Filipino society through the Spanish education system. This article focuses on themes of identity, colonialism, and aspirations for freedom found in Spanish-language works published in the Philippines or Spain, and the Filipino intellectuals who contributed to this narrative. Theoretical frameworks by Benedict Anderson and Partha Chatterjee provide insights into how Filipino authors used Spanish to articulate a collective identity, fostering a unique national consciousness even within the colonial power's language. The University of California, Berkeley’s location on the Pacific Rim has prompted the library to collect these works for scholars and students. The author provides insights into the subject matter of Spanish-language print books from the Philippines and demonstrates how digital humanities tools like Meta AI, ChatGPT, and Voyant can be utilized to offer additional insights from the Spanish-language narratives written by Filipino intellectuals in the 19th century, deepening our understanding of colonial-era literature.
https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q83bk3jt0
Description of the data and file structure
In the submitted datasets where additional information was not available or missing, I have added 'not available' (n/a) in each empty cell to avoid ambiguity. For example, in Appendix 3 that shows the authors who wrote in Spanish in the Philippines, but I could not locate copies of their works in the UC Berkeley Library's catalog, I have added n/a in those cells. In other instances, where I could not locate digitized publicly accessible copies of these items, I have added n/a to those cells.
The dataset includes the following three Excel files
Appendix3modified.xlsx
Appendix 3: This appendix includes list of authors from the Philippines whose publications were found in the UC Berkeley Library's catalog at the time of data extraction. This file includes following column names: Author, UC Berkeley Library Catalog Hyperlink, Title of the Work, Link to a digital copy in publicly available repositories like Hathi Trust, or Cervantes Virtual.
ONLYUSETHISSpanishBookPhilippines1500-1950UCBmodified.xlsx
OnlyusethisSpanishbookphilippines1500-1950UCB.xslx: This document includes data that I extracted using the Choreo Insights tool that was created by OCLC to aid librarians to provide bibliographic information about individual items that are contained in the collections at their specific institutions. Please see methodology section on how I have used this tool.
The excel file, tab ONLYUSETHISSpanishBookPhilippin includes the following fields: LC Call Number, Title, Author, Publisher, Publication Year, Edition, Format, LC Subclass, Primary Language, Secondary Languages, Place Of Publication, Government Document, Checkout Count, Last Checkout, WorldCat Holdings - Same Edition, WorldCat Holdings - Any Edition, WorldCat Retaining Libraries, Group Holdings - Same Edition, Group Holdings - Any Edition, Group Holding Libraries, Holding Locations, OCLC Work ID, WorldCat OCLC Number, ISBN, WorldCat URL
This file also include following tabs that I had to create to facilitate data analysis.
a. Distribution by subject (tags) distributionbysubjecttags and SubjectDistributionPivot. I had to assign general subject tags (categories) to this dataset such literature, grammar, etc. The same pivot table has a bar graph that graphically represents the data from distribution by subjects table.
b. Second pivot table Litdistryearpub. This pivot table indicates distribution by the year of publication of the literature that I analyzed.
c. The third tab in the same Excel file is titled Literature. This tab includes the following information: Subject Tags, LC Call Number, Title, Author, Publisher, Publication Year, Edition, Format, LC Subclass, Primary Language, Secondary Languages, Place Of Publication, Government Document, Checkout Count, Last Checkout, WorldCat Holdings - Same Edition, WorldCat Holdings - Any Edition, WorldCat Retaining Libraries, Group Holdings - Same Edition, Group Holdings - Any Edition, Group Holding Libraries, Holding Locations, OCLC Work ID, WorldCat OCLC Number, ISBN, WorldCat URL
d. The last tab (left to right) is sumpubyear. I tried to see if I can get distribution of publications by the year of publication by LC Call number ranges using pivot table using the followng two columns LC call numbers and year of publication. However I had to ignore this tab as the excel kept adding numbers automatically rendering this table of no use.
Notes on field abbreviations:
LC Call Number. Here LC stands for Library of Congress. A Library of Congress (LC) call number is a unique alphanumeric identifier used by most academic and research libraries as an "address" to organize and locate materials on the shelves. It groups items by subject, author, and publication date, allowing books on similar topics to be found together.
LC Subclass: A Library of Congress (LC) subclass is a more specific division within one of the 21 broad subject categories (main classes) of the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system. These subclasses are identified by a combination of two or sometimes three capital letters, and they help organize library materials into narrower, related subjects.
Worldcat OCLC Number: A WorldCat OCLC Number (OCN) is a unique, system-assigned identifier for a record within the WorldCat database. WorldCat is the largest network of library holdings in the world, allowing libraries to share resources and information
correctedFilipinoauthorswhowroteinspanishmodified.xlsx
This file contains information about the literary works of the Filipino authors that have digital counterparts. This file contains the following header fields: Author, UC Berkeley Catalog Hyperlink, Title, Link to a digital copy
For data collection, the author used purposive sampling using the Choreo Insights- a tool developed by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) to provide real-time information about the holdings in academic libraries to avoid potential duplication and collaborate to build sustainable collections moving forward, as many academic libraries face budgetary and space constraints. The Choreo Insights tool allows for comparing two academic libraries' collections to see the overlap or gap in collections. For this analysis, since the author wanted to establish the collections of the UC Berkeley library, the author deliberately chose the University of California-San Francisco (UCSF) as a library against which the analysis was run.
UCSF primarily collects items related to medicine and biological sciences; thus, the study showed no overlap in collections. For the format, the author only opted for printed books because these unlike the manuscripts formed the part of the general collections that was easily accessible to me. I used Spanish for the languages of the publications, and Philippines (ph) for place of publication to run the analysis. I purposefully used years of publication as a criterion due to the assumption that the number of books in the UC Berkeley Library’s collection published in Spanish in the Philippines could be relatively small. The author limited the publication date to the period between 1565 and 2024. The Philippines gained independence from the USA in 1946. However, the Spanish colonial period began in 1565 and ended in 1898. I chose 2024 as the date, as many Spanish language books by the Filipino authors were reprinted in the independent Philippines. The language of the publications was limited to Spanish (Sp) as indicated by the Library of Congress' language codes.
The analysis returned 255 individual titles on all subjects published in the Philippines. I then filtered these results by LC Call number ranges to limit them to LC Call numbers reserved for literature (PL and PQ) which resulted in 39 individual titles. I then narrowed the years of publication from 1500 to 1898, further reducing the number to 30 titles.
I utilized a virtual Spanish source, Literatura Filipina en español [Philippine literature in Spanish], maintained by Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes [Virtual Library of Miguel de Cervantes], to identify publications by authors of Philippine origin published in Spain during the colonial period. It collates 126 fiction items by Filipino authors. In addition to the virtual source, I consulted La Literatura Filipina en Castellano [The Philippine Literature in Castilian] by Luis Marinas Otero (1974). This helped me identify key authors from the Philippines who wrote in Spanish and had their works published in Spain.