Father Miguel Saderra Masó (1865–1939) was a Jesuit scientist who in 1910, as Assistant Director of the Manila Weather Bureau, compiled a catalogue of earthquake events in the Philippines since 1599. Produced for Dr. Miriam Posner’s graduate class, DH201 – Introduction to the Digital Humanities, taken at UCLA in Winter Quarter 2021, this digital humanities project interrogates the data set using maps, data visualizations, and text analysis.
The data set analyzed is sourced from a text written by a Catalonian Jesuit Father, Miguel Saderra Masó, who was active in seismological scientific research in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in the Philippines.
Written in 1910, in the second decade of American occupation of the Philippines, Saderra Masó’s Catalogue of Violent and Destructive Earthquakes in the Philippines With an Appendix: Earthquakes in the Marianas Islands 1599-1909 contains various kinds of data on over 200 earthquakes in the islands over approximately three centuries.
