Fisqua: A Digital Infrastructure to Trace Lives and Movements

This paper presents Fisqua, a proposed digital infrastructure for collaborative collection of historical data focused on tracing individuals across fragmentary archival records. Named after the Muisca term for "gathering scattered things," Fisqua addresses key challenges in digital humanities: lack of person-centered data collection tools, over-reliance on spreadsheets, and unsustainable bespoke solutions. The proposal offers a middle-ground between generalist platforms and custom solutions, providing a focused, modular platform for structured registration of historical individuals and their relationships. Grounded in experience from the TrayectoriasAfro project and informed by minimal computing principles, Fisqua emphasizes sustainability without sacrificing relational structure. Key features include ambiguity-aware data capture, flexible metadata models, visual data entry interfaces, controlled vocabulary integration, and robust export capabilities. The technical approach envisions an open-source platform with Python/FastAPI backend, containerized deployment, and plugin architecture. This work contributes to digital humanities infrastructure discussions around tools that respect historical ambiguity, enable collaboration, and remain sustainable for resource-constrained environments.