There is a rich corpus of texts written in Zapotec during the Mexican colonial period that remains relatively understudied. The nature of the corpus poses significant challenges to would-be readers; for example, the texts were written using the Roman alphabet with few standardized spelling conventions, resulting in a large number of homographs and a wide range of variation in the spelling of any particular lexical item. To facilitate access to the corpus we developed an interrelated database of Colonial Valley Zapotec texts and morphemes using Fieldworks Language Explorer (FLEx). Here we describe the issues involved in creating this database and summarize the current results, evaluating the benefits and challenges of using FLEx for this type of corpus in order to contribute to a growing conversation in methodologies in
digital philology.