I have more to say about this later, but I find this image pretty interesting. When doing a box-by-box comparison of 12 different series finding guides from the Archivo Nacional del Ecuador, you get an image like this:
(Click to make it bigger, which you’ll need to do!)
The graph represents a normalized-compression-distance comparison of 950 boxes described by the contents of their manuscripts. (Which to 22 hours of CPU time to accomplish.) Given the nature of the documents, it is a somewhat artificial comparison. But, you’ll notice that the clusters are almost always within series. That’s what we’d expect from institutional documents. But, I need to chart the years from the various series clusters and see if they come from roughly the same decades.
Associate Professor of Early Latin America Department of History University of Tennessee-Knoxville
parezco y digo 
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