Popol Wujs: Culture, Complexity, and the Encoding of Maya Cosmovisión Rafael C. Alvarado, University of Virginia Aldo Ismael Barriente, University of Virginia Allison Margaret Bigelow, University of Virginia Abstract. The Popol Wuj is one of the most important, commonly studied, and widely circulated Indigenous literary works from colonial Mesoamerica. By some accounts, there are 1,200 editions of the work published in thirty world languages, all of which trace back to a single manuscript — itself a copy of an earlier Mayan work. To protect their work from being destroyed by colonial officials or Inquisitional authorities, the original K’iche’ authors of the Popol Wuj had to embed their ways of knowing in a language and narrative structure that could not be detected by Spanish readers. Each edition of the Popol Wuj therefore helps to uncover different elements of the cosmovisión that is embedded in the text. This article draws from recent collaborative efforts to prepare a digital critical edition of the Popol Wuj based on the editorial standards and scholarly conventions of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). By comparing and contrasting the advantages and drawbacks of this edition relative to printed works and digital editions, we suggest how methods from the digital humanities can shed new light on texts like the Popol Wuj. Keywords. Popol Wuj, Mayan literature, digital humanities, textual encoding Our understanding of the Popol Wuj depends on the edition that we con- sult. This is an obvious statement, and one that is true for every book that finds its way into a reader’ s hand. But in the case of the Popol Wuj, a text composed of multiple languages, chronologies, and an Indigenous cosmo- visión narrated in a style that could go undetected by colonial authorities, editorial decisions take on new dimensions. The Spanish-language term cosmovisión (cosmovision) is derived from German sociologist Wilhelm Ethnohistory 68:4 (October 2021) doi 10.1215/00141801-9157219 Copyright 2021 by American Society for Ethnohistory Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/article-pdf/68/4/493/1298864/493alvarado.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA user on 03 November 2021