Analytics Dashboard
Bibliotheca Macaonensis — Collection insights
Collection Composition
Document Types
The overwhelming majority are Manuscripts — handwritten letters, reports, and registers from diocesan archives. Documents are official typed or printed papers (decrees, synod records). Books and Articles are published secondary sources. Rarer types like Maps, Theses, and Artworks reflect the breadth of the Diocese's intellectual and cultural production.
Top Languages
Topics & Subjects
By Document Count
Distribution
What this tells us
Subject headings are drawn from Library of Congress and other standardised vocabularies assigned during cataloguing. The ranked list shows which themes dominate the collection — subjects such as Catholic Church history, missions in Asia, Chinese Christianity, and colonial administration frequently rise to the top. The distribution chart visualises the relative weight of each subject across the collection. For researchers, this is a thematic map: a historian studying Jesuit missions in China can quickly gauge how much material exists under that heading, while the long tail of less-frequent subjects may reveal niche topics with rich but overlooked primary sources. Clicking any subject links directly to all records tagged with it.
Archives & Libraries
By Archive / Library
Ranked
What this tells us
Each record in the catalogue is tagged with its holding institution — the archive or library where the physical or digital source is located. This chart shows the contribution of each participating institution to the overall catalogue. The ranking helps historians identify which archives hold the largest clusters of relevant material, informing research travel plans and inter-library loan requests. Institutions with smaller holdings may specialise in particular periods or document types, making them disproportionately valuable for targeted research. The geographic spread of these institutions, visible on the Geographic Flows tab, further contextualises the collection's provenance.
Named Entities extracted from English translations via spaCy NER
Top 15 People
Top 15 Places
People Ranked
Places Ranked
Organizations Ranked
What this tells us
Named Entity Recognition (NER) was applied to the full-text English translations in the collection using the spaCy natural language processing library, supplemented by a custom gazetteer of historical names specific to the Diocese of Macau. The People chart surfaces the most frequently mentioned individuals — popes, bishops, Jesuit missionaries, colonial officials, and local converts. The Places chart highlights the geographic network of the Diocese: Macau, Goa, Lisbon, Canton, and Rome dominate, but smaller nodes like Malacca, Nagasaki, and Mozambique reveal the global reach of Macanese ecclesiastical connections. The Organizations chart tracks religious orders, government bodies, and institutions. For historians, these entity rankings serve as a quick index: they point to the key actors and locations in the collection without requiring manual full-text reading. Each name links to a full-text search across all documents mentioning it.
Entity Co-occurrence Network entities that appear together in the same documents
Strongest Co-occurrences
What this tells us
This network graph visualises which named entities — people, places, and organisations — appear together within the same documents. Each node represents an entity; its size reflects how often it is mentioned across the collection. Lines connect entities that co-occur, with thicker lines indicating stronger associations. Blue nodes are people, green are places, and gold are organisations. The force-directed layout naturally clusters related entities: you may notice a Macau-Goa-Lisbon triangle reflecting the Portugal–India–China missionary corridor, or groupings around specific popes or bishops. For historians, this graph is a hypothesis generator: an unexpectedly strong link between two entities may indicate an undocumented correspondence, a shared administrative jurisdiction, or a common involvement in a specific event. Clicking any entity searches for all documents where it appears.
Geographic Flows connections between places that co-occur in documents
What this tells us
This map plots the geographic connections embedded in the collection. When two place names appear together in the same document — whether in a letter, a report, or a diary entry — a line is drawn between them on the map. Thicker, more opaque lines indicate stronger co-occurrence. Circle markers are sized by the total number of connections each place has across the collection. The map immediately reveals the Diocese of Macau's global footprint: strong arcs connect Macau to Lisbon, Goa, Canton, and Rome, while thinner lines extend to Manila, Nagasaki, Batavia, and Mozambique. For historians, this map is a spatial index of the collection. A researcher studying Portuguese missionary networks in Southeast Asia can trace the Macau–Malacca–Ternate corridor, while someone interested in the European end can follow the Lisbon–Rome–Paris connections. The map also surfaces unexpected links: if two places appear together frequently but are not obviously connected, the underlying documents may contain unexplored administrative, commercial, or personal ties.
What this tells us
The Document Types chart reveals the genre profile of the Diocese of Macau's archival holdings. The distribution of monographs, serials, archival materials, and other formats reflects how ecclesiastical knowledge was produced and preserved: official correspondence and administrative records dominate, supplemented by published treatises and reference works. The Languages chart maps the multilingual character of the Diocese — Latin, Portuguese, English, and Chinese appear prominently, with smaller representations of French, Spanish, and other European and Asian languages. This linguistic diversity reflects the Diocese's position as a crossroads between European missionary activity and East Asian cultures, where documents were routinely produced in the language of both the sender and the local community. For historians, this breakdown is a starting point for identifying underrepresented language groups and potential gaps in the digitised collection.