The University of Florida, the University of North Florida, and Universidad San Francisco de Quito will host their second Latin America & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium at Universidad San Francisco Quito in Quito, Ecuador from Thursday, July 4 – Saturday July 6, 2024. This symposium will offer a mix of in-person and virtual sessions.
Conference Venue:
All in-person sessions will take place at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ)
Universidad San Francisco de Quito
(Diego de Robles S/N y Pampite, Cumbayá)
Giulianna Zambrano, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Hélène Huet, University of Florida
Melissa Jerome, University of Florida
Clayton McCarl, University of North Florida
Anne Pfister, University of North Florida
Sarah Tew, University of Florida
Registration is now closed. We look forward to seeing attendees virtually or in person at USFQ.
The program for the symposium is found below, with more details provided in the session tabs. Please note, session formats will vary. The first day (July 4th) will be held in-person and offer some sessions virtually. Day two (July 5th) sessions will be held in-person. The sessions on the third/final day will be held virtually. Conference times are listed in GMT-5 (local time in Quito, Ecuador). We recommend using a time converter to confirm times for your local time zone, especially if you plan to attend virtually.
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Virtual & in-person sessions. All in-person sessions will be held at the Universidad de San Francisco de Quito (USFQ).
Friday, July 5, 2024
All sessions will be held in-person at USFQ.
Saturday, July 6, 2024
All sessions will be held virtually.
Moderator: Nadjah Ríos Villarini
1:00-2:00pm | Zoom
Stephanie Sahir Santiago, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective
English Translation: Digital Literacy in Education: Navigating teaching manuals in the digital age
Traditional textbooks and printed manuals have given way to digital resources, which has democratized access to information and fostered collaborative and enriching learning. In this context, digital literacy becomes crucial, especially to effectively navigate and use digital teaching manuals.
UPR Caribe Digital is a project dedicated to the support and development of digital humanities, collaborating closely with local community groups. The program has mentors who play a critical role in training students to apply digital resources in projects that address significant issues in society. On the other hand, we create digital teaching manuals that are valuable pedagogical tools in this educational paradigm. The manuals seek to offer detailed and practical guidance that allows anyone to create their own tools to research and learn, thus enriching their learning experience.
The process begins with the identification and exploration of the digital tool in question, followed by the creation of manuals that promote and disseminate these tools. The fundamental premise is that the explanations are clear and concise, supported by examples and practical exercises that facilitate their understanding and application. We focus on selecting useful, functional, open-access tools that are relevant to a wide range of applications in the digital humanities domain.
Despite technological advances and the availability of digital resources, we still face significant challenges, such as the digital divide. This gap is not just about ensuring access to technology, but also about providing opportunities for people to learn how to use it effectively. It is crucial to understand that having basic knowledge of technology is not the same as acquiring skills to apply it in a meaningful way and solve specific needs.
We believe that by empowering people to make the most of these resources, we are contributing to the advancement of knowledge and the democratization of learning in the digital age. Through this initiative, UPR Caribe Digital creates a bridge between the academic world and the needs of communities, allowing students to gain practical experience while contributing to the well-being of their environment.
Víctor Torres Rodríguez, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective
This panel presents a panoramic overview of the academic and community efforts that have been articulated through the UPR Caribe Digital initiative, a project that focuses its Digital Humanities practice on participation, community self-management, and sustainability. The participants will discuss how initiatives have been developed to identify best practices in the field of Digital Humanities to promote digital literacy in Spanish, accessibility to a diverse audience, and the management of sustainable digital preservation projects in collaboration with community groups in Puerto Rico.
One of the pillars of UPR Caribe Digital is the organization of a Digital Humanities community of practice within and outside the University. The collective focuses on promoting digital preservation practices that enable communities to tell their own stories in an accessible and sustainable way. Through the training of students, librarians, professors, and community leaders in open-access digital tools with low learning curves, the goal is for projects to continue beyond our direct collaborations with them. However, there are tensions between the ease of use of the tools and the ability of producers to adapt them to their needs. In this lightning round, I will explore these tensions in our projects concerning their sustainability in the face of social and environmental adversities that condition preservation work in Puerto Rico.
Adriana Morales-Diaz, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective
English Translation: Transforming the Digital Experience: Accessibility and Digital Humanities in Puerto Rico
UPR Caribe Digital prioritizes the creation of educational materials as part of its commitment to digital accessibility. The collective is dedicated to developing tools that enable individuals from academia and community organizations to be trained in producing digitally accessible works in Spanish, thus contributing to the development of projects for a diverse community. This commitment is reflected in the development of materials focusing on digital accessibility in both the front-end and back-end of these projects.
During this lightning round, I will share specific examples, such as considerations for typography, legible colors and images, the inclusion of alternative texts, and tags for screen reader interpretation and other devices that can access the material.
Moderator:
2:00-3:00pm | Zoom
Kleber Naula, University of Florida
As a college student, Kleber found a few tiny five-centimeter pictures, and this event was the start of looking for images of his mother. Twenty years later, Kleber discovered his mother´s photo, family, and thousands of photographs on the History of protestantism in Chimborazo, Ecuador. Through former Peace Corps Volunteers and the Gospel Missionary Union members, Kleber recovered most of the photos of the El Troje and other communities in the United States almost 70 years later. Even though Protestant missionaries started to preach in 1902 when Eloy Alfaro ruled the country during the Liberal Revolution era, the El Troje community (Kichwa-speakers) is where Indigenous Protestantism began an enormous awakening in 1954.
Exploring more than ten thousand pictures in Utah, Louisiana, and Arizona, Kleber worked in interviews and memory workshops and selected photographs for his analysis. The author discovered that his family were prominent weavers, which resulted in the title “From Weaver to Preachers.” From the perspective of Anthropology, Ethnography, and Photography, and the images taken in the fifties and sixties, Kleber, a member of the third generation, describes his family´s struggle between having a religious and a secular life. After collecting the photography and transforming the process of research, collection, categorization, analysis, and publication of the information, another debate began. What have been the moral implications of working with images of family members and people who passed away but are part of a society's memory?
Alba Comino Comino, Universidade Nova de Lisboa
English Translation:
The REWIND project (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101063220) proposes to explore the reception of European cultural heritage through the travel literature written by Latin American women authors who visited Europe in the early 20th century to make non-European women visible as cultural agents in historical narratives and thus break the existing Eurocentric, patriarchal and androcentric canon on this heritage. Furthermore, this approach allows us to observe the relationship between European cultural heritage and processes of otherness, as many of the monuments mentioned in these books are still part of the current urban landscape as materialisations of memory, and to reflect on how societies use the past to construct historical discourses in the present.
Daniela Serra & Bárbara Ossa, Ministerio de las Culturas, las Artes y el Patrimonio, Chile
In Chile, digital information on heritage is limited and scattered. A small amount of heritage collections and data are digitized and even less are available online to the general public, which constitutes an important access barrier to heritage. In addition to this, the recent pandemic has highlighted the need to create strategies for making these elements and expressions more accessible for people, through the modernization of heritage information systems.
Taking this into account, Chile Patrimonios is a platform that seeks to integrate in one place information on heritage in Chile, giving access to thousands of cultural elements, coming from the collections of heritage institutions, such as museums, libraries, and archives, and being a meeting place for heritage agents. Hence, this platform contributes to tackle the need of increasing digital access to and participation in heritage, thus facilitating its recognition, appreciation, and reuse.
To be launched in December 2023 and developed collaboratively by several institutions from the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage in Chile, the platform will also include contents developed by the people themselves. This is a great opportunity for both making digital heritage more accessible and usable, and creating new ways for people to engage with it. However, many challenges have come along the way, especially in terms of how to make this platform sustainable and an opportunity to articulate the heritage sector from a cultural democracy point of view. This means to move forward the proper representation of local particularities, and indigenous and underrepresented communities, traditionally excluded from the official heritage discourse.
Moderator: Rosa Inés Padilla (USFQ)
9:30-10:30am | USFQ
Katinina Tituaña, Radio COCOA
English Translation:
La Cosecha (The Harvest): Narrating the foods that make up the diet and the sociocultural, economic, political and identity dynamics of Ecuador. In contemporary societies, both established and emerging economies, nothing happens outside of globalization. Food, the processes involved and the people who make a dish possible are no exception. Consequently, in recent decades, food production and gastronomy have become exponentially internationalized, facilitating --among other things-- the expansion of markets and intercultural exchange. However, this has also put pressure on food systems, like in Ecuador, that rely heavily on agricultural sectors, which in turn, exacerbate existing problems such as inequality, inequity, and injustice in historically disadvantaged places. In light of such a complex prospect, local approaches to such challenges become crucial for proposing solutions. What food encapsulates the history of Ecuador more than the anthem and the flag? How might migration and time/aging change the landscape and the national diet? How are racism and classism expressed through diet and the habits of consumers? How do we crack indifference in the face of threats that predict a future without the most popular drink in the world? La Cosecha (The Harvest) takes a perspective that the local and the global are constantly mutually informed to narrate some of the foods that make up not just diet, but also the history, imaginaries and the sociocultural, economic, political dynamics and identities of Ecuador.
Nicolás Schvarzberg, Universidad de las Artes
English Translation:
A significant part of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, including its gastronomy and artistic practices, has not been documented beyond oral transmission passed down from generation to generation. Presently, urban lifestyles do not favor intergenerational dialogues, leading to their scarcity and hindering the transfer of knowledge. While digital technology has facilitated recording, these traditions still face challenges in dissemination and outreach. This has resulted in these practices struggling to find a way to reach other spaces, allowing them to counteract reductionist or folkloric representations. Hence, the project "Afro-Ecuadorian Cuisine and Cultural Heritage" aims to conduct an interdisciplinary research process through the arts, with the objective of documenting and compiling ancestral knowledge surrounding food, using various tools, both digital and traditional. Through collaborative work among grassroots social organizations, as well as faculty and students from the University of the Arts, multiple participatory artistic productions have been developed that depict culinary practices. These include short films, a children's recipe book, an autobiographical book about women, and a musical album, among others. This research process activates participatory methods to highlight traditional knowledge through its free dissemination in digital media. The proposed presentation will detail the co-creation process, as well as the management and on-site work, aiming to elucidate the methodology and its potential.
Sarah Tew and Melissa Jerome, University of Florida Libraries
Recetas de las Américas [https://recetas.domains.uflib.ufl.edu/] is a bilingual web project where users can view, browse, filter, and print recipes published between 1954 and 1960 in the Miami newspaper, Diario las Américas. Launched in October 2022, the project is currently undergoing an expansion to more than 300 recipes.
This presentation will primarily focus on the challenges faced and methods employed to scale recipe ingest and publication including data structuring and cleaning, translation, natural language processing, and ontology-based information extraction. We will also present preliminary findings and visualizations from an exploration of the recipe data and discuss future areas of research and growth.
Recetas is a valuable project that calls attention to communities and contributors who have been historically underrepresented by traditional historical narratives, namely the Latin American immigrant community in Florida, particularly the Latina community, and women editors who were excluded from the newsroom and relegated to so-called “soft news” sections including “Del Hogar” where these recipes were published.
The lightweight and mostly free and open-source technical infrastructures behind Recetas, for both data manipulation and website generation, follow minimal computing principles and have the potential to help facilitate digital publishing by underrepresented and under-resourced communities on historically marginalized topics.
Moderator: Elisa Sevilla (USFQ)
10:30-11:30am | USFQ
George Aaron Broadwell (University of Florida), Brook Lillehaugen, Felipe Lopez & Xochitl Flores-Marcial
Ticha is a digital text explorer for texts written in Zapotec during the colonial period in Mexico. The project links high quality digital images of documents with linguistic and ethnohistorical analysis through a publically available site: http://ticha.haverford.edu. One of the obectives of Ticha is to make these texts available to those interested in Zapotec languages and cultures. Because such documents are often difficult to access and understand, Ticha curates the expert knowledge necessary to understand these colonial texts. The project is fully accessible in both English and Spanish.
In this talk, we present the design philosophy and various decisions made in the evolution of this digital humanities project. In addition to showing the content of Ticha, we also discuss access to different levels of information. For example, figure 1 shows 50 manuscripts available, while figure 2 shows a detailed linguistic analysis of one important grammatical source on colonial Zapotec (Cordova 1578a).
Figure 1
Figure 2
One of the objectives of the Ticha project is to involve Zapotec communities in the understanding of and analysis of these documents. Thus we also detail a.) our ongoing workshops with Zapotec people in Mexico and the United States which give us feedback on the project design and b.) our recent bilingual textbook on Colonial Zapotec texts, Caseidyneën Saën.
Reference
Cordova, Fr. Juan de. 1578a. Arte del idioma zapoteco. México: En casa de Pedro Balli.
Clayton McCarl, University of North Florida
English Translation:
King Charles III proclaimed the Royal Pragmatic of Marriages in 1776 to curb the tendency of young people to marry without parental permission. Such a phenomenon, according to the king, resulted in unequal unions that caused “the disturbance of the good order of the State,” in addition to “continued discord” and “harm to families.” In St. Augustine, where there was a heterogeneous and transient population, couples frequently could not satisfy the demands of the Royal Pragmatic. In some cases, soldiers and foreigners could not obtain proof of family consent due to geographical distances, and in others, families were present but opposed the proposed unions for reasons that reflected religious, cultural, and economic tensions.
Couples who found themselves in such circumstances went to the governor to request special judicial permission, a process that left a wealth of documentation. In recent years I have worked with students on the digital edition of some of those cases within the framework of the project coloniaLab (colonialab.org). In this presentation I reflect on the value of publishing this documentation in an interactive online format. I propose that the digital dissemination of these stories highlights the demographic complexity of colonial Florida and the obsession with blood purity that was characteristic of Spanish society at this time. I also argue that the publication of these documents allows us to explore the Hispanic history of North Florida from a unique perspective, giving us a glimpse into the intimate lives of the couples and their families.
Jiayan Laurie Liu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
This project provides an in-depth study of the scientific expedition of Charles-Marie de La Condamine to Peru, with a focus on applying digital humanities methodologies. The study begins with the digital transcription and cleaning of historical texts, ensuring accuracy in the dataset for subsequent analysis. Then the program focuses on the letters within this corpus, using them to create a social network graph that illustrates La Condamine's connections and interactions. This network allows for the retrieval of specific letter contents, providing deeper insights into the context and significance of his correspondence. Additionally, the study leverages GIS technology to create a detailed map of the city of Quito, integrating his geographical and astronomical observations. This map not only traces La Condamine's life in Quito but also provides a visual perspective on how this scientist observed and recorded the city during his expedition. Through this multidimensional digital analysis, the article not only reinterprets La Condamine's scientific contributions, and his views on colonialism and universalism but also showcases the potent capabilities of digital humanities tools in historical research. Particularly, it highlights the power of these tools in understanding the complex motivations behind historical figures' thoughts and actions, offering a nuanced view of their engagements with the world.
Moderator: Sarah Tew (University of Florida)
11:45-1:00pm | USFQ
Cristian Alejandro Suárez Giraldo (Universidad de Salamanca)
English Translation:
Digital editions propose to problematize a range of projects, using digital annotation, like XML-TEI and HTML, and through this methodology the core of undergraduate coursework is built in a Colombian university whose primary feature is the limitation of time; and beginning with the short volume of texts we will call singular archives, which are selected to conform with the technical specifics of the marking tools, the edition, and the publication and adhered to in situ. In this way, the two conceptual and technical challenges have to do with the construction of a hermeneutic arc to select the target archives for a digital montage; the application of labels to mark the peculiarities within the text, usually literary (in nature?), thus redefining the editor’s role with respect to the interventions and the model of current publications. Even when the principles of the Digital Scholarly Editions (Ohge, 20121; Pierazzo, 2015) are followed, a notion of minimalist digital scholarly editions is constructed and this presents, from a systemization of the experience, a way to construct editions where the work of applying the minimal critical text, or of scaling the academic edition, applies perspectives of minimalistic style (Suárez-Giraldo, 2022) and of Minimal Computing (Calarco et al., 2021).
Almary Gutiérrez, Universidad de Antioquia
English Translation:
Today, the application of the digital has been accentuated in every area of our lives, something to which the works of the human and social sciences, as well as literature, cannot be foreign. In this sense, it is important to integrate digital humanities into the studies of traditional disciplines related to art, culture, and letters.
This paper aims to show how, in the design of a theoretical-methodological framework based on editorial studies, it is possible and necessary to consider methods and tools of the digital humanities, which will make it possible to broaden the scope of research in any of its phases: data collection and systematization, information analysis, and visualization and socialization of results.
Our research focuses on Tercer Mundo (Bogotá, 1961-1989), a publishing company that transformed the dynamics of book production and marketing in Colombia, because it emerged at a time of major social, political, and economic changes. This is how the catalogue allowed this publishing house in Bogota to build an intellectual project based on an understanding of the national reality with an academic, economic, political, and cultural approach that also promoted the Colombian book.
Being a work that is beginning, we want to show the processes developed in research, focused on the application of digital humanities to serve as an example in future editorial and literary studies.
Bernarda Troccoli y Anamaría Garzón, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
English Translation:
post(s) is an academic journal of critical perspectives on art, media, and culture by the College of Communication and Contemporary Arts of Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Since its first edition (2015), post(s) offers spaces for experimental, rare, and performative writings and promotes creative forms of knowledge production.
We think of post(s) not only as a set of academic texts published annually as a digital and printed archive but also as a social actor which participates in constructing knowledge communities in the different phases of its editorial processes. To analyze post(s) from this approach, we recognize digital materiality and mediation as constitutive aspects of the journal but also of the set of digital media and tools through which we exist. Beyond describing the technical characteristics of our editorial processes in a digital environment, we are interested in understanding what transformations, practices, and relationships emerge in these online interactions. Within these processes, we build our definitions as an academic platform, and construct the meanings of each edition.
In the Latin American & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium we seek to reflect on the social worlds and communities that an academic journal builds with the technological mediation of a set of tools. This analysis includes a recognition of the relationships and interactions of a network of heterogeneous actors who participate since the calls for papers, intervene in the different phases of the editorial production process, and construct meanings with the journal in the divulgation activities through the platform, social networks and face-to-face and digital meetings of this community.
Eduardo Febres, Notre Dame University
ALAWiT is a resource for readers, writers, publishers, students and teachers interested in Afro-American and Latin American culture in general, and Afro-Latin American culture in particular. It gathers book covers, excerpts, bibliographic clues and digital downloads of works by black Latin American authors in original language and in translation.
The collection is developed to promote Afro-Latin American Writers in Translation: a series of critical editions of celebrated works in translation coordinated by professor Mark A. Sanders and aimed to advance research and academic reflection on the Black presence in Latin America and its influence across the Americas.
ALAWiT is organized by dynamic lists, which group the works according to common characteristics (authors, city of publication, imprint or publisher, nationality of authors, edition date and digital repository). But it also has a search engine that allows you to find works directly.
ALAWiT is a scalable platform. And as the amount of metadata being stored grows, and new functionalities are developed, it will allow us to know relevant data about this literary corpus.
By making Afro-Latin American writers more readily available to a North American audience, the works in the series and the website will deepen our understanding of writing and race in New World History. They will further provide a complementary critical history of the literary lives and the ever-evolving print cultures found across Afro-Latin American history and culture.
Moderator: Giulianna Zambrano Murillo (USFQ)
2:30-3:45pm | USFQ
Paul Sebastián Rosero Contreras, Elisa Sevilla y María Patricia Ordoñez, Universidad San Francisco de Quito
Museums preserve remains of the present world; their placement is always an act that decontextualizes these remains and transforms them in order to preserve them. Subsequently, with scientific research guided by questions and in the proposal of scripts, they are given new meanings within a narrative or fragmentary history. In this movement, we question two functions of the museum: the importance of implicit questions in the construction of narratives, and how the possible answers to them change throughout the life of the museum. With the project "The implosion of time" we seek to approach the notions of biography of museum objects and museum archeology from a critical perspective, influenced by the thought of Arjun Appadurai and the idea of continuous homogenization of culture. Likewise, we intend to rethink the collections as spaces where immutable mobiles are built, where the museum functions as a center of calculation where theories about the natural world are compared and studied, as mentioned by Bruno Latour. Finally we assume, as in art, that the status of a museum piece and its validity was established by the fact of being exhibited, radically illustrated by Marcel Duchamp. In this line, an art installation is proposed where 3D scanned and modeled objects are made to represent multiple museum narratives in AI generated scenarios. This narratives and objects are there placed inside a structure that uses as a simile the representation of the wormhole theory. That is, an object that presents two opposing cones that symbolize the passage from one state to another, through a digital filter in the middle, connecting disparate points in space-time, those that distance the object and its museum narrative; it is a speculative journey towards the environmental conditions of museum objects or a biographical reconstruction in the key of science fiction. How is knowledge produced? How subjective and humanized is the process? How does the intermediate filter articulate the dynamics of power and the colonial vision of culture?
Anamaría Garzón (USFQ), Sofía Acosta y Francisco Hurtado
English Translation:
Estado Fósil is a multimedia and polyphonic editorial project that starts from a question: Is there something in our lives that escapes petroleum derivatives? In 2022, Ecuador commemorated 50 years of the beginning of large-scale oil extraction in the Amazon and for us, who were born in the 80s, it is important to ask ourselves how our generation has been affected and benefited by this resource.
To think about this question, we invited twenty people, including artists, writers and activists, so that from their different places of enunciation they can analyze their relationship with petroleum. We commissioned essays, artwork and a podcast. Additionally, we collected files, documentaries about the country's oil history, presented in a timeline and in photographic and audiovisual works.
Aware of the undeniable violence that extractivism generates and also of the organization and resistance of the Amazonian peoples and communities, we proposed resignify oil extraction, to explore the human and the non-human, the peripheries and the centers, utopia and dystopia, limits that coexist facing each other in a permanent dialectical relationship that makes up the Fossil State we inhabit. In this presentation We want to talk about the editorial process carried out in the printed version and in the web version of the project, to think about how different types of files and materials allow us to create a flow of information and specific content for each platform.
Brenda Vega, University of Texas, Dallas
In 2008, curator and artist Marisa Olson coined a very suggestive term for human-machine coexistence: the "post-internet" (Olson, 2008, as cited in López, 2019). In the first instance, this term refers to the art made after the Internet, not about the Internet or in it. In this sense, the images surrounding the digital environment (which become viral in this scenario) are selfies.
The selfie belongs to the Internet; as Grant Tyler says, "the body of Post Internet was the Internet" (2023), and "its sensibility a response to a moment of digital culture" would argue Orit Gat (2023). The face of the Internet is, undoubtedly, the selfie. This image made a ubiquitous appearance in 2013, just the year that the post-Internet was starting to lose grip and feel old. In a way, the selfie was the future of the post-Internet as its most famous image. The selfie, a complex and multifaceted object/image, has challenged traditional aesthetic norms.
The existence of the selfie holds deeper implications. The author posits that it is first a philosophical object and, second, a technological representation of the self, transgressing established beauty norms that have persisted since Kant. In the analysis, the author draws on an interplay of two schools of thought: Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman) and post/transhumanist philosophy (Braido`, Ferrando). The first interpretation underscores how the selfie eludes easy categorization, resisting reduction to human understanding due to its mul1ple meanings, diverse relationships, and intricate representational ethics, thereby contributing to the multifaceted nature of the selfie.
This paper is aligned with the post/transhumanist philosophy. It emphasizes how the selfie broadens the concept of humanity, stemming from the premise that human identity is subject to multiple interpretations from various perspectives. For instance, this image can alter or enhance a person's appearance through an array of filters and effects available on mobile phones, signifying one of its objectives as self-modification.
The essay traces the lineage of the selfie from traditional self-portraiture to contemporary manifestations, offering a brief trajectory from Renaissance artists' self-portraits to twentieth-century women photographers. These artists elevated self-portraiture to a culture of the self, wherein the selfie became an iconic image forging a digital identity. This phenomenon is exemplified by figures like the Kardashians, who amassed a staggering number of followers on social media through the idealization and modification of facial and bodily features, utilizing filters, and even resorting to plastic surgery, transcending natural appearances.
Ernesto Salazar (PUCE)
The presentation of SOY YO, ME AUTOMATICÉ, VALIÓ LA PIEL, proposes to narrate the process of research and artistic creation of my latest work, which consisted of an installation of seven electronic mechanisms that put into practice notions of weight, gravity, struggle, redundancy, absurdity and effort based on philosophical references or myths such as Sisyphus and that at the same time, takes a poetic text that I gave to its Artificial Intelligence, to search in an indefinite and indeterminate way for its name (the title of the exhibition, its name as a work), emphasizing that by naming things or beings, we condemn them to perform in a certain way, cutting off possibilities, as an echo of my personal experiences from my queer identity. I consider that this work addresses digital humanities by trying to propose other ways of generating Artificial Intelligences, from empathy, resistance, error and malfunction as valuable human experiences with which machines can be trained. In my work practice, I often look to create or imagine supersensitive machines, far from effective or destructive ones.
The title SOY YO, ME AUTOMATICÉ, VALIÓ LA PIEL, loosely translated as I AM MYSELF, I AUTOMATED, IT WAS WORTH THE SKIN, is one of several and ongoing phrases that my custom made A.I. produced from the decision to let itself look for its name. As enigmatic as this title may sound, as an artist, I look forward to seeing future machines devoted to caring and questioning themselves and the world as it is.
Moderator: Clayton McCarl (University of North Florida)
4:00-5:15pm | USFQ
Andrew Maginn, The University of the South - Sewanee
Marlene Daut’s 2019 article “Haiti @ the Digital Crossroads” was a boon for Latin American and Caribbean scholars. It highlighted the struggles that researchers of nineteenth-century Haiti were facing and promised a new future of accessibility through digital humanities. Daut’s review of digital projects that document Haitian black sovereignty assisted scholars in discovering the breadth of this innovation. While this was an exciting step, at the time of the article’s release, most researchers did not have the ability to create an extensive digital project, as the field was primarily carried by individuals who were self-sponsored or aided by limited institutional or grant resources.
This presentation will review the growth of Haitian digital humanities since Daut’s article, focusing on projects that utilize mapping software. Since 2019, the technology to create digital maps has become more vast, accessible, and affordable, resulting in a greater number of historians and their home institutions embracing digital humanities. While some of the projects reviewed are solely mapping sites that utilize Googlemaps, QGIS, Knightlab, or ArcGIS, others have found new, inventive ways to document Haitian Art, architecture, literature, and migration. The discussion will close with a review of the presenter's site, the Haitians Abroad Digital Archive. This project documents the unique Haitian migration narrative during the long nineteenth century (1791-1900) and utilizes interactive maps combined with other digital tools to document Haitian history, including interactive timelines, exhibits on Haitian migration, and profiles of Haitian actors neglected by the historiography.
Hannah Toombs, Olin Library, Cornell University
Increasingly, digitization of community archives, histories, and other forms of cultural knowledge has become a strategy through which Indigenous communities and researchers can collaboratively work towards cultural heritage preservation. Digital humanities tools focused on building websites, virtual exhibitions, minimal computing, or other functions, have become a medium through which cultural knowledge is preserved, shared, and taught. However, digitizing Indigenous knowledge can risk distancing communities from their own heritage, especially when issues of technology access and local cultural context are disregarded. This project explores these issues through a case study of Indigenous Lenca pottery tradition and its promotion in local tourism networks in western Honduras. Pottery production is a historically important practice in Lenca communities, and potters rely on tourism to sell their crafts today. Yet, they struggle to access regional craft markets due to competition with commercial vendors, mobility issues, lacking development support, and limited technology access. These barriers prevent Indigenous artisans from managing the promotion of their own heritage in the tourism industry, and disconnect them from national and global craft markets where their traditions are often misrepresented in digital spaces. This work presents results from an ongoing community PhotoVoice project where Lenca artisans visually document their own craft practices, and digitize this cultural knowledge to create tourism promotional materials and a community WordPress site. This project highlights benefits and challenges of incorporating digital humanities tools in community research, and takes a critical lens to how researchers define “decolonial” or “collaborative” methods in their work.
Fernando Astudillo & Paul Rosero (USFQ)
English Translation:
During World War II, the United States Army and Navy built military bases near the Panama Canal to protect this infrastructure from possible attacks from the west. In this region of the Pacific called the Canal Zone, bases were built in coastal and island regions of several Latin American countries. In Ecuador, the Galapagos Islands and the Santa Elena peninsula were chosen as sites to build two military bases. Between 1941 and 1943, the US Army built an air and naval base on Baltra Island, three radar stations on Isabela Island, and an air base in Salinas.
In this work we present the methodology and preliminary results of the digital archaeological investigation in one of the radar stations that operated in the Galapagos Islands, the Cerro Orchilla station. This base was active for a few years and vacated in 1946, when it was reoccupied and transformed into a Penal Colony administered by the Ecuadorian government. In this project, we analyze LiDAR data to explore the layout and material remains of the station, define activity zones, and explore possible ecological impacts on the site. Additionally, we use virtual reality and augmented reality software to digitally model the physical structures of the radar station. Today, this historic site is known as the Wall of Tears, materializes evidence of the time of conflict, suffering and confinement in the Galapagos.
Randall Beaver, Florida International University
This talk will briefly highlight elements drawn from a series of projects aimed at mapping and “re-filming” a travelogue that was originally filmed in the late 1970s at and around archaeological sites in Quintana Roo, Mexico. From a digital humanities perspective, the presenter will demonstrate the use of a few theories and method/ologies and how various tools and technologies can be integrated into research and learning experiences that address issues around the imperial gaze (and its adjunct forms) in Latin America. Topics to be addressed include the use of mapping, spatial audio, and 360 video--and how these can be used to create layers of experience to promote attentiveness to space and place in formal and informal learning contexts. Using the Mexican state of Quintana Roo as a setting positions a series of particular, complex conversations including issues of colonial power, various views of Indigeneity, and the rhizomatic influence of heritage tourism in Latin America from multiple perspectives.
Moderator: Anamaría Garzón (USFQ)
5:30-6:45pm | USFQ
Sylvia Fernández, University of Texas, San Antonio
Borderland communities have learned how to navigate nation-states in the face of foreign and domestic policies, living under conditions of resistance and survival from impositions of assimilation, marginalization, and fragmentation derived from geopolitical conflict. There is a need and urgency to pay attention to how these borderlands dynamics are being manifested and documented in the digital cultural record by their own communities or third parties. Through postcolonial digital humanities there is a focus on the development of the digital cultural record by paying attention to colonial and neocolonial dynamics, re-examining the past and present, and offering possibilities to better understand the intersections between politics, imperialisms, and technology (Risam 2019). This presentation examines community engaged and digital activism approaches to critically center knowledge production and the multiple layers of meaning represented in the public and digital record of U.S.-Mexico border digital production. The analysis derived from United Fronteras first phase, led by a group, mostly women of color that have experienced the border region in different ways, who co-created a bilingual (Spanish-English) registry of digital projects that address questions of concern to the communities on both sides of that largely arbitrary and imaginary borderlands before colonial times to the present. The presenter discusses the innovative practices of using minimal computing and other forms to engage with matters of cultural history, political and gender violence, and other topics to reveal the complexities of a human space so often portrayed in simplistic and negative terms.
Constanza López, University of North Florida
English Translation:
This paper focuses on two digital humanities projects at the University of North Florida that create community and occupy both physical and digital spaces. The first is Voces y Caras: Hispanic Communities of North Florida, an oral history project involving students of Hispanic heritage who interview family members and others in our community to document their experiences as immigrants. Voces y Caras has collected more than 200 interviews since 2012. I am interested, on the one hand, in highlighting the importance of this project for a community that has become a target of politicians in the state of Florida and, on the other, reflecting about the importance of recognizing the people who contribute to our society.
The second, Embroidering for Peace and Memory, is a digital archive that celebrates diversity and human rights through collective embroidery activism. Embroidery becomes one of the few occasions that students have to take advantage of university spaces and express themselves freely. By digitizing the images of the embroidery, alternative narratives are created in an educational system that increasingly resorts to censorship and the erasure of history by implementing discriminatory policies against minority groups such as youth, women, Latinos and African Americans, and LGBTIQ+ communities.
The two projects aim to build artivist communities inside and outside the university campus and are true examples of how digital humanities should make visible populations that have not been sufficiently represented.
Daniela Dávila, Colegio Alemán, Quito
English Translation:
Crónicas al borde is a podcast of non-fiction and sound interventions. We combine narrative and sound to document the lives of people on the verge of transformation. The stories approach contemporary social debates and human rights as they sound in Latin America. For this symposium we want to reflect on the question: How do we listen as visitors the stories we tell? In Crónicas al borde, active and affective listening is a central practice when making an episode. To think of ourselves as listening visitors in these stories is to know that we are outsiders, but at the same time we’ve been invited to be there.
Likewise, we feel the privilege we have of being able to listen deeply, to understand the sound that narrates, the voices, the pauses, the silences, the tiny sounds, the musicality. Then we also think about the act of recording, of thinking about sound, the collective listening to teamwork: our transition from being an audience to interpreters. For this occasion, we have chosen two episodes whose common thread towards the stories has been the music of their protagonists and its relationship with their life experiences. The proposal is to decompose our process of listening, from the spark that leads us to a story, to the assembly of the complete episode, and likewise the ways of listening of its protagonists related to music as a vital connector with sound. Thus, to review, how through these practices a language is collectivized, a way of listening is collectivized.
Elisa Sevilla (USFQ), Karina Barragán (USFQ) & Paúl Narváez (Sindicato Audiovisual)
English Translation:
In Quito, an interdisciplinary team developed, in interaction with a group of high school students, a multimedia platform to teach about the different dimensions of disaster risk to young audiences. In this presentation, we will discuss the role of digital humanities as a space that allowed history, science and creative arts to come together to collaboratively elaborate the character of the "Andesita" and her travels in time and space that explore the historical development of the city of Quito, the volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides and floods that have affected it in the past. Also, we will reflect on the use of digital tools to explore databases in the form of timelines and historical maps on the recurrence of these disaster events in an interactive way, both for research and for the dissemination of this information. Finally, we will discuss how narratives in audio and song formats allowed us to bring these historical situations or projections of future situations based on historical data and scientific models to life and reality.
Moderator:
10:00-11:15am | Zoom
César Andrés Casas Murillo, Jhonnatan Romero Huertas, USFQ
English Translation:
This presentation focuses on the implementation of Digital Humanities as a research methodology for the State to analyze national culture in Colombia. To this end, it will address the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), understanding that the mission of this institution is to create national identity through academic research. In a context of growing interest in understanding cultural diversity and promoting reconciliation in a country marked by historical conflicts, this proposal seeks to outline a framework for state-backed cultural research.
The methodology of Digital Humanities offers advanced tools for data analysis and visualization that can enrich anthropological and historical research. Various techniques such as analysis of large data sets, georeferencing of cultural heritage, and creation of digital repositories accessible to the public will be explored.
Additionally, the importance of collaboration among academics, cultural institutions, and local communities in the construction of knowledge will be addressed through dialogues among them. All of this will contribute to the strengthening of Colombian cultural identity, the preservation of heritage, and the promotion of reconciliation, through understanding and valuing the country's cultural diversity.
This presentation will provide a clear vision of how Digital Humanities can be a powerful tool in state-backed cultural research, offering significant opportunities for peacebuilding and the consolidation of cultural identity in Colombia.
Maria José Afanador-Llach, Universidad de los Andes
English Translation:
Academic modes of knowledge production are no longer focused solely on academic articles and books. In the field of digital humanities (HD), researchers combine humanistic research and digital technologies. Many projects build digital artifacts that often inhabit the web. Reviews in DH, for example, is dedicated to reviewing projects that combine humanities research with technical inquiry and build digital archives, exhibits, data visualizations, and tools, among others. In this paper I discuss the state of the art on the subject, and then analyze some of the practices, principles, values related to the production of knowledge for the digital medium. I analyze the challenges of ensuring the rigor of these emerging academic modalities and present a model of valuation of digital research products proposed by the Master in Digital Humanities of the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).
Mila Aponte-González, UPR–Río Piedras
English Translation:
The current landscape of intense climate events, fiscal crisis, and the pandemic pose a real, tangible challenge to preserving and providing access to cultural heritage collections in Puerto Rico. Many cultural memory workers lack the experience and/or training to manage the growing backlog of unprocessed collections under these conditions. With the goal of addressing this issue, UPR–Río Piedras recently started offering the course (Co)Laboratorio de Humanidades Digitales: Procesamiento Mínimo de Colecciones Especiales de Patrimonio Cultural, designed and taught by Prof. Mila Aponte-González. The course invites graduate-level students from various disciplines to co-investigate and co-elaborate innovative, ethical and æffective strategies for processing special collections of cultural documents and artifacts. From a post-custodial standpoint and confronting archival studies’ best practices with field-work praxis, the participants identify minimum conservation needs to preserve a special collection of cultural artifacts, articulate interactive digital tools to facilitate access to key information about the collection, and propose a roadmap for processing similar collections in Puerto Rico. This talk presents key takeaways and deliverables from the first semester-long DH (co)laboratory and reflects on the potentiality of the (co)laboratorio as a critical pedagogy model for interdisciplinary research on core aspects of responsible preservation and equitable access, to foster research, education, creation, and enjoyment of cultural heritage in the Caribbean.
Maria Victoria Muñoz Cortizo, University of Florida
English Translation:
In the province where I was born, Mendoza, Argentina, there has been in the last years a confrontation between the government and private companies, on the one hand, and ordinary citizens on the other, over a project supported by the former: open-pit mining. Such a project would imply the contamination of underground water (in a land which is desertic by definition, and which has undergone water scarcity for over a decade). That situation would endanger not just the economic activity but the everyday life of the population.
My interest for this presentation is to work with the artistic manifestation and the social media presence which sprung from this confrontation, with the hashtag #laley7722nosetoca (7722 Act won’t be touched) and the documentary “History of Water in Mendoza” (HAM for its name in Spanish) which is being shown in several places around Mendoza and Argentina. This symposium would give me the opportunity to bring this reality beyond the local scene, and beyond the borders of Argentina for a discussion which includes the presence of various representations in digital humanities.
Moderator:
11:30-1:00pm | Zoom
Jessica Mack, Rowan University
Aerial photography has historically been used as a technology of war, surveillance, and, later, the promotion of large development projects. Despite these original purposes, however, archival aerial imagery and digital mapping methods can also allow us to document historical processes that have been omitted from traditional archival sources, such as migrations, displacement, development, and land use patterns. This bilingual digital history project applies digital mapping and spatial history methods to aerial imagery of 1950s Mexico City to better understand the process of building a campus for the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). The project’s spatial approach illuminates the institution's shifting role in Mexico’s developing revolutionary state and demonstrates the ways in which new national priorities were inscribed upon the campus environment and its surroundings. Visualizing the campus building project from above allows users to explore the construction process and understand negotiations over campus space and the accelerated urban development of southern Mexico City catalyzed by the university. Georectification and mapping visualizations reveal the stories of communities that lived in this region before the campus was built. This presentation will discuss the use of digital methods and archival aerial images to build historical campus tours of universities using digital storytelling to highlight the social landscape of construction and the many publics both within and outside of the institution. The project provides tools for other researchers and students to study other universities in Latin America and elsewhere and reckon with questions of exclusion, displacement, and memorialization that are central to debates on many campuses today.
Amparo De Urbina, Universidad Externado de Colombia
English Translation:
The purpose of this presentation is to explain how accessing Panoramio, a Big Data source, allowed developing a social evaluation of urban heritage in the center of Bogotá, from the perspective of landscape. This platform belonged to a particular type of social network. It was a pioneer in georeferencing images taken by users based on their experiences in the area. It was in use until 2016 through Google Earth (Pardo, 2015; Gutiérrez-Puebla, García-Palomares, & Salas-Olmedo, 2016).
This is the result of the dissertation "Urban scenario networks based on digital traces in downtown Bogotá. A methodology for the capture of perception and appreciation of territory". The aim of the project is an approach to the urban heritage of the center of Bogotá, with the emphasis on the network of scenarios preferred by a group of visitors between 2007 and 2014 (De Urbina, 2022).
The analysis of more than 6000 images shared by more than 600 visitors of downtown Bogotá between 2007 and 2014 has allowed the answer to a current question, which has been asked from urbanism and cognitive sciences since the mid-20th century: how to understand the city from the urban landscape. This is a proposal that would not have been possible 10 or 15 years ago.
Works Cited
De Urbina, A. (2022). Redes de escenarios urbanos y rastros digitales. Preferencias del patrimonio percibido en el Centro de Bogotá. Universidad Externado de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas. Doctorado en Estudios Sociales. Bogotá: Sin publicar.
Gutiérrez-Puebla, J., García-Palomares, J. C., & Salas-Olmedo, M. H. (2016). Big (Geo) Data en Ciencias Sociales: Retos y Oportunidades. Revista de Estudios Andaluces (REA), 33(1), 1 a 23. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/rea.2016.i33.01
Pardo, S. (2015). Las vistas panorámicas de núcleos urbanos: propuesta para su análisis y aplicación al caso de Andalucía. Universidad de Málaga, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Departamento de Geografía. Málaga: Sin publicar. Recuperado el diciembre de 2016, de http://riuma.uma.es/xmlui/handle/10630/10762
Fernando Amador II, Stony Brook University
My presentation will discuss my “Mexican Migrantscape” digital history project which maps the effects of emigration on the Mexican rurality using the town of Temacapulín as a case study. Temacapulín is located in the Greater Bajío region, the historic emigration zone of Mexico. Between 1950-1990, declining wages, landlessness, and population growth in the countryside resulted in a rural exodus from the Greater Bajío. Yet, many emigrants remained connected to their hometowns. In fact, they became instrumental in supporting, shaping, and expanding it. This project shows the emigrant-hometown connection by mapping Temacapulín’s infrastructural growth while undergoing depopulation via emigration. After reaching its zenith of 800 residents in 1960, the town’s population decreased to 300 by 1990. At the same time, the townscape expanded as returning migrants, remittances, and residential resourcefulness raised public infrastructure, an altar, a water park, and houses. This project makes several contributions to Mexican migration studies: it proves the homeland’s survival in the face of state-influenced emigration; shows how migrants shaped their origins as much as their new residences through private and communal remittances; and contributes to the few historical GIS studies that examine the rurality as most prefer cityscapes due to their abundance of data. I will discuss in detail how I used GIS to create three map-sets: a map tracking the expansion of the townscape over time; one that demonstrates whether dollars or pesos funded specific spaces; and another that labels the destination of each migrant house.
Theresa Edwards, University of California, Los Angeles
This study looks at the intersection of tourism and historical memory in the eastern Paraiba Valley of Brazil. Once the world's leading producer of coffee, the region known as the “Vale do Cafe” (“Valley of Coffee”) is now a hub for heritage tourism based on preserved fazendas (plantations) and other sites related to the 19th-century coffee boom. Inspired by existing scholarship on plantation tourism in the United States, this study seeks to understand whether and how slavery is represented to visitors at historical coffee plantations in Rio de Janeiro state. Specifically, to what extent are stories about slavery and the enslaved present in the narration of history at these sites? Which/whose stories are reflected in the landscapes and material culture of these sites, and which/whose have been hidden or erased? To answer these questions, I employ a mix of ethnographically-informed research methods to document and analyze my experiences of participating in the guided tours of two fazendas in Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro. I examine how three major elements of the plantation tour–the physical landscape, material culture, and tour guide–interact to present a romanticized narrative of the “Coffee cycle” era that highlights the wealth and achievements of the planter class while invisibilizing the lives and labor of the enslaved. Building on the work of previous scholars in geography, history, and the digital humanities, this research seeks to contribute to broader discussions regarding the public memory of slavery and possibilities for reparative justice at plantation tourism sites.
Celiany Rivera Velazquez, CUNY Center for Puerto Rican Studies
English Translation:
De un Pájaro, las Dos Patas is a research-based comparative LGBTQIA+/queer/cuir timeline of Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic and San Juan, Puerto Rico. It emphasizes late-20th and 21st century media, culture and activism. It includes from happenings and accomplishments, to acts of violence, and rare or unique occurrences that have happened mostly in or around the capital cities, Santo Domingo and San Juan, of both Caribbean countries.
Its construction has been built in collaboration with initiatives such as DR Queer Memories, Draguéalo, Archivo Queer LGBTQ de Puerto Rico, and the Puerto Rican Queer Film Fest to supplement evidence on a number of the events cited across both timelines. The leading goals behind creating these two timelines is to aid comparative research around intermingled Dominican and Puertorrican pasts, presents and futures by tracing momentums in queer media and performance as well as LGBTQIA+ activism in both Caribbean contexts. While the emphasis is to observe the abundance of cultural events, discussions and media after the year 2000, the timelines include sparse information of key news clippings and historical findings from events ranging from the 17th-20th century to point out how queer sexuality was shaped and experienced given the sociopolitical and cultural landscape before the turn of the 21st century. The review of these key epiphanic moments leads us to identify key generational shifts in the growing expression of irreverence and detachment from cisheteropatriarchal norms or those norms that center and benefit male-, heterosexual- and cisgender-centered systems of power.
Moderator:
2:00-3:30pm | Zoom
Siobhan Meï, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History is a digital public humanities project and educational tool that documents the significant role that fashion and clothing played in constructing visions of freedom before, during, and after the Haitian Revolution. By focusing on stories of self-fashioning that rarely receive attention in colonial archives, "Rendering Revolution" explores the many ways in which modern identities (and concepts such as human rights) were formed in relation to the legacy of slavery in the Americas. Launched in 2020, "Rendering Revolution" is a curated platform on Instagram and Facebook that celebrates the sartorial ingenuity of Haitians and people of Haitian descent.
Modeled after digital humanities projects like "Fictions of the Haitian Revolution" and "A Colony in Crisis," "Rendering Revolution" takes the Haitian Revolution as a point of departure for exploring the history of Haiti through the lens of fashion. In particular, narratives of women in Haiti and the Haitian Diaspora who used (and use) self-presentation and adornment as forms of political agency are foregrounded on "Rendering Revolution". Key to our exploration is the role of fashion and material culture in the self-styling of prominent Revolution-era women actors like Marie-Louise Christophe and Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité. Through analyses of portraits, travel narratives, and other archival sources such as runaway slave advertisements, "Rendering Revolution" illustrates the importance of material culture in constructing diverse (and often competing) visions of freedom in the Atlantic world.
Andrea Adhara Gaytán Cuesta, University of North Florida
English Translation:
In Latin America, from the late 1990s until now, we have participated in what Mónica Delgado calls a “glitch culture.” This is because most of our cinema consumption, from Mexico to Argentina, has been from the informal market, starting with Betamax and VHS videos, compact discs, cloned DVDs and USB sticks, as well as reproductions of illegal sites and downloads from the Internet. Real or provoked, the ghostly and surreal nature of the glitch can represent the pain of memory as in Los Rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003) or the crisis of the techno-apocalypse as in Videofilia and other viral syndromes (Juan Daniel Molero, Peru, 2015 ), or the use of virtual reality as in the short Dreams of the Jaguar's Daughter (Alfredo Salazar Caro, 2019). More than destruction, the language of glitch invites the viewer to appreciate the aesthetics of error, producing a decolonial discourse of protest, resistance and expression.
In this presentation I explain the process of creating the Latin American Glitch Encyclopedia, which will be an interactive and bilingual online site, a digital archive of glitch art, an open space for connecting digital communities and a means of dissemination, creation and pedagogy of this experimental device. My intention is to make visible a powerfully provocative contemporary art form that draws a direct line with decolonial discourse.
Eliseo Jacob, Howard University
This presentation will focus on a DH Project I have been developing on artist activist communities in the urban periphery of São Paulo, Brazil. This project came about as a result of the research I conducted in São Paulo in 2022 through a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. I participated and observed different writing collectives, music groups, and performance artists in the working-class communities located in the outskirts of Latin America’s largest city. The digital humanities component of this project started with my collaboration with the Black Book Interactive Project (BBIP), a Black DH initiative housed at the University of Kansas, in their Digital Scholars Program in 2019. Since then, I have participated in other BBIP programs, including their Digital Publishing Program that works closely with Afro-Publishing Without Walls (Afro-PWW), a digital publishing initiative at the University of Illinois. This digital publication will be the one of a series of Scalar sites on Black artists from the urban periphery that will be published by Afro-PWW that will be framed by the notion of Afro-Artivismo (Afro art activism) in Brazil’s urban communities.
Liliana París Borda, Universidad de Los Andes & Juan Sebastián Méndez, Università degli Studi di Milano
EtnoDJ is a project of experimentation and creation that arises from a database and sound archive, which aims to promote Colombian cultural diversity and the construction of social fabric from its sound contexts. Through a digital sound console, created to generate interaction between the sounds of the archive, we seek to involve Colombians, especially those interested in music, composition, culture and Colombian memory in the creation of musical compositions. This is how this project bets on the creation of creative social fabric with a view to blur spatial and territorial barriers that we have as diverse regions.
We have compiled, structured and curated sound archives of practices, artifacts, species, landscapes, people, among others, that forge and build the country's culture, in order to consolidate the audio database for the design and development of the console and its activation with the population. This project proposes new ways of understanding Colombian reality through sound, emphasizing the importance of musical composition to contribute to the construction of the country's social fabric. We believe that this is a replicable and scalable project that can be used by educational and memory institutions, allowing an immersive and interactive experience that promotes new digital spaces in the construction of Colombian identity.
Marco Polo Juarez Cruz, University of Maryland
English Translation: Abstract Muralism in Mexico: Reflections from the digital reconstruction of extinct projects
Across the 1960s, the Mexican cultural scene witnessed an ideological and artistic debate between the ‘Mexican Muralism’ and a new avant-garde that—using nonfigurative languages—attempted to position a new meaning of Mexican art. At the dichotomy between abstraction and Muralism, the latter dominated the narrative of using the public space to communicate its message with the local audience. By allegedly being confined to the physical limits of private galleries, abstract artists experimented with alternatives to show their work and message to larger publics.
This presentation analyzes digital reconstructions made by the author of two abstract murals projects: Canto al Océano—made by Manuel Felguérez in 1963—and the murals created by eleven artists for the Mexican pavilion in the 1970 Osaka World Fair. Both projects reformulated the relation of an audience with abstract art: Canto al Océano, created with seashells, mother of pearl, and iron rods, was installed facing the swimming pools of the Bahia Sports Center to produce a visual effect between water and the discarded materials. The Osaka murals’ installation proposed a ‘plastic unit’ that warned visitors about the dehumanization provoked by technology.
The video reconstructions of the murals—created with architectural design software (AutoCAD, SketchUp, VRay)—allow us not only to learn about projects that do not exist anymore. It also helps us to reconsider the relation between abstraction and Muralism, by visualizing artworks that favored scale and sensorial experience as a new understanding of nonfigurative Mexican art.
Pabellón de México en Osaka 1970. Digital rendering made by the author, 2022 (Video clip at 3:00 minutes).
Moderator:
3:45-5:15pm | Zoom
Andreina Soto, Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective
This talk will explain the history of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC), the complexities of creating multi-institutional programming for the Caribbean and its diasporas, the ethical questions behind our joint efforts to address digital scholarship training, and the expected results. The CDSC assembles a team of scholars and educators, in partnership with community groups and academic institutions, to nurture digital scholarship in and about the Caribbean. Thanks to a generous Mellon Foundation grant, the CDSC has set out to establish a collaborative model that implements training and mentorship programs that cater to the particular needs of Caribbean scholars and practitioners. As experienced Digital Humanities professionals, the members of the Collective formed to tackle specific questions: How can we cultivate producers of quality digital scholarship? How can we encourage collaboration and access to resources so as to narrow the gap between Caribbeanist researchers, especially those in the North Atlantic academy, and the communities we are committed to serving? What sustainable, long-term solutions can we implement to prepare the next cohorts of digital Caribbeanist practitioners, especially with many of us operating in uneven terrain? The members of our Collective, based in the continental US, Puerto Rico, Dominica, and Jamaica, have designed and implemented diverse training and outreach programs to meet our common goals while addressing local needs. As a Collective, we mean for these strategies to function in dialogue with one another, fostering a community of trained Caribbeanist DH practitioners with a standard set of skills, ethical principles, and long-term objectives.
Jeison Oviedo, Sandra Milena Londono Ardila, Ana Maria Bidegain, Florida International University
English Translation:
The purpose of this session is to provide an overview of the first collection of Digital Archive of Religions in Latin America and the Caribbean (DARLAC) and its contribution to research on Latin America and the Caribbean. DARLAC has been crucial for the Interdisciplinary Initiative on Religions in Latin America (LACIIR) at Florida International University and its commitment to preserving diverse and varied documents at risk.
The session is aimed at researchers interested in the influence of religiosity on the history of Latin America and the Caribbean. It also aims to establish a model for digital humanities projects.
The documents in the DARLAC collection depict the spiritual and religious experience of various communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. This collection of documents has its roots in the social movements and Catholic organizations of Latin America and the Caribbean that contributed to shaping the region's history from 1960 to 1985. The collection includes articles, books, newspapers, and other materials that evidence significant processes in the region. During the session, we will address the challenges and offer insights that have emerged in managing an extensive collection of documents.
Rômulo Lima, Instituto Iberoamericano de Berlín (Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, IAI-Berlin)
LACARred is part of an ongoing project to expand the digital information services of the library of the Ibero-American Institute (IAI) in Berlin, which has the largest collection of publications on Latin America, the Caribbean and the Iberian Peninsula in Europe. The expansion project, hosted on the project website LACARinfo, is designed to meet the specific needs of researchers working on topics related to Latin America, the Caribbean and Latino Studies.
Within the project website, an international digital network of researchers associated with the regions and the project thematic areas is under development: the LACARred (acronym for Latin American and Caribbean Network). This network aims to facilitate the connection between researchers and institutions, allowing a quick visualization of academic links, CVs, research areas, as well as links to electronic repositories or lists of publications. In addition to being an interactive registry of researchers, LACARred may in the future allow direct contact between registered members, forming a wide international network of contacts. The platform will be available in open source for other interested organizations and projects.
The paper presents the context in which LACARred emerged, the efforts for its implementation as well as the difficulties and opportunities in the construction of an international digital network of researchers associated with Latin America and the Caribbean.
Maria Fernanda Algarra Chavez, Tecnológico de Monterrey
English Translation:
"Revolución Morada: Mujeres Investigadoras" represents a digital narrative project that aims to establish supportive networks among female academics belonging to the Interinstitutional Postgraduate Program in Human Rights (PIDH) at the Autonomous University of Tlaxcala. Its primary objective is to reduce the gender gap and promote the visibility of these women's research while encouraging the expansion and strengthening of their professional connections. This project is framed within a transmedia approach, currently in the process of developing a website derived from the official domain associated with the postgraduate program, with prospects for expansion to other platforms intended for the general public in the near future.
The structure of the digital proposal is based on the classification of various digital elements, both specifically created for the project and carefully selected, intertwining around a narrative that encompasses multiple facets. It begins with a timeline-style video that pays tribute to the historical struggle of women for their rights. Then, interviews with female teachers, students, and graduates of the postgraduate program are shown, followed by a repository of relevant documents. Finally, the project will conclude with a form to feed a collaboration network intended for women within the postgraduate program and possibly others interested in participating in this network, along with a documentary-style video to record the process that has taken place throughout the project.
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