Hannah Alpert-Abrams is a program specialist in digital humanities. She has written on the use of technology to circulate and provide access to multilingual documents from colonial Latin America and is the former director of the
Clayton McCarl is an associate professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities at the University of North Florida (UNF). He leads coloniaLab, a workshop for the collaborative edition of colonial Latin American manuscripts and rare print books, as well as the North Florida Editorial Workshop (NFEW), a project that focuses on the digital transmission of archival materials related to local history.
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This is the introduction to a special issue on Digital Humanities and Colonial Latin American Studies.
This special issue of
The project was motivated by the recognition of three realities. First, digital practice has become fundamental to how scholarly work is conducted in the study of the colonial world. Second, scholarship being carried out today demonstrates that digital methods have the potential to significantly enhance the field going forward. Third, in order to realize that potential, the diverse community of practitioners engaged in such work needs to better articulate how digital scholarship is conceptualized and conducted within CLAS.
In this introduction, we briefly provide context for understanding the two areas of inquiry at the center of this discussion. To do so, we first consider in broad strokes the central concerns of each, proposing ways we believe the two overlap in terms of objectives and methods. We then step back to examine the evolution of digital work within CLAS, arguing that such scholarship has followed a different path than in digital humanities communities based in the United States and Europe. We propose that legacies of colonialism have shaped this development by obliging scholars to confront material realities and theoretical problems that are often distinct from those that drive digital humanities practice elsewhere.
Working from this premise, we then suggest parameters for identifying a set of
tendencies that can define the field we term digital colonial
Latin American studies (DCLAS). To do so, we analyze trends in digital
scholarship within the field, examining, in particular, how those ideas and
concerns inform the articles in this special collection. We conclude by
reflecting on the challenges that the broader community of scholars who work on
colonial Latin America must face before being able to more fully harness digital
methods to transform research and teaching about the colonial world.
This project brings together two areas of study that are both broadly and capaciously defined. We offer our working definitions here with the purpose of better orienting readers towards the content of this special issue.
Defining DH in precise terms has long presented a challenge. Certainly, there is
a sense in which we are all, as researchers and teachers who use computers,
participants in DH, whether we are conducting our research through online
databases and search engines, composing scholarly monographs using word
processing software, or teaching with digital images or remote learning
technologies.
Even calling DH a
One basic defining tension within DH in recent years has been a struggle for
diversity and inclusion. DH as a field of study has been marked by the
predominance of European and U.S.-based institutions, scholars, and languages.
Uneven access to digital technologies has contributed to this outcome, but other
factors are also involved, such as differing levels of institutional support and
access to the financing needed to support large-scale DH endeavors. In part to
counter this tendency, the global and multilingual movements within DH have
worked to make the field more expansive and diverse by actively engaging with
questions of access and equity, and by drawing on critical frameworks including
feminist and decolonial studies
Latin America is one of the areas that traditionally has been underrepresented within DH. It is a vast and diverse region in geographical, linguistic, cultural, religious, racial and ethnic terms, as well as in other ways. Scholars of Latin America carry out their work within disciplinary areas across the humanities and social sciences, but many also identify with the broad interdisciplinary field known as Latin American studies (LAS), whose presence is most visibly marked each year by the international congress of the Latin American Studies Association.
CLAS can be understood, if imperfectly, as a chronologically demarcated subfield
of LAS. While most scholarly activity within LAS today is concerned with the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, CLAS focuses on the lesser studied period
that spans from the arrival of European settlers at various points starting in
the fifteenth century to the disruption of European colonial rule in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. CLAS is also set apart by its
theoretical and methodological approaches. CLAS shares certain characteristics
with LAS more broadly — such as an emphasis on alterity, inequality, and the
vindication of historical injustices — and scholars in the field, as in LAS more
broadly, engage with interdisciplinary areas including ethnic studies,
Indigenous studies, African diasporic studies, and post-colonial and decolonial
studies. At the same time, CLAS does so in the context of different historical
and cultural realities, working often from distinct types of evidence. Like
scholars of the Early Modern period elsewhere, those who work in CLAS rely on
primary sources that include notarial records, printed books, correspondence,
sacred objects, works of art, artifacts, and archaeological
data.
Brought together, DH and CLAS represent two areas of scholarly practice that are, in many ways, highly compatible. Both are fundamentally and self-consciously interdisciplinary, thriving on the interaction of scholars across traditional boundaries. Both embrace broad possibilities for engaging with and understanding textual and visual material, as well as historical and geographical processes. DH, like CLAS, places emphasis on rethinking dynamics of power, dismantling outdated stereotypes, and decolonizing knowledge. Important currents in both CLAS and DH have been concerned with the ownership and preservation of cultural heritage, and the accessibility of such material to both academic and general audiences. Scholars in CLAS, as in DH, recognize the need for cross-institutional initiatives and partnerships between researchers, archives, and others.
In what follows, we argue that DH is a particularly propitious space in which scholars of the colonial period can operate, due to the inherent compatibilities we identify here. The experimental nature of digital humanities research can free scholars of the colonial world to formulate new types of questions, and more fully realize the goals of interdisciplinarity and theoretical innovation that underlie the field. Promoting and supporting digital work within the study of the colonial world can also allow us to draw in new types of scholars who can renovate and re-energize the field in ways that we may not be able to envision.
The digital humanities as practiced within CLAS have followed a unique evolution.
In the United States, Canada, and Europe, among other places, DH is generally
understood to have emerged out of corpus linguistics, with early practitioners
focused on the application of computer technology to conduct systematic analysis
of textual material
In Latin America, in contrast, the origins of much of today’s digital practice
can be traced to the facsimiles, scholarly editions, and recovery projects
produced in the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Mercedes
Salómon Salazar references in this special issue, one consequence of colonial
rule in the Americas has been the broad dispersal of the primary sources of
colonial and pre-Columbian history, from Indigenous texts and works of art to
notarial records and printed books. In the wake of independence from European
colonial rule, gaining and sharing access to these records became a task of
primary importance for scholars based in the Americas
This led to a proliferation of manual transcriptions, printed editions,
photo-reproductions, plaster replicas, dictionaries, and bibliographies, many
produced by and for researchers in the Americas and the Caribbean el
esfuerzo por fabricar una historia patria en el gran proceso de construcción
de la nación
The effort to create a
history of the homeland in the great process of constructing the
nation.
Translation ours.
The spread of digital technology has accelerated these processes, with consequences for how CLAS is practiced. Projects that were made digital in the 1990s and the early 2000s, such as the
Many of these early projects started on paper or began off-line. Rolena Adorno’s edition of Guaman Poma began as a hand transcription in 1977 and appeared first as a printed volume in 1987, while
Thanks to the visionary work of historians of the African diaspora based in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, as well substantial funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities,
While diverse in terms of materials and methodologies, the work being carried out today within DCLAS is characterized broadly by a set of common features. Much of this work focuses on the recovery of and access to cultural heritage, seeks to uncover hidden narratives and geographies, poses questions about labor and pedagogy, and emphasizes problems of theory and praxis. While these concerns are not unique to DCLAS, the ways they across the field support the idea of a clearly identifiable area of digital practice. This convergence of theoretical and practical concerns across DCLAS is, in many ways, a result of the special circumstances of CLAS and the challenges that scholars face, and indeed, many of the dynamics we outline here are also central to non–digital work within CLAS.
Recovery projects are initiatives that aim to locate,
preserve and disseminate
historical records that have been
devalued, dispersed, and destroyed through historical processes such as
colonialism
Three articles in this special issue address the challenges of recovery work. In her article on the
George Allen Broadwell et al. address the particular challenges of recovering Indigenous materials in collaboration with scholarly, student, and Indigenous communities. They reflect upon Ticha, a digital text explorer for writings in Colonial Zapotec. They explain how Ticha provides access to little-known archival materials, enabling modern-day speakers of Zapotec to connect with the history of their language and communities. The authors also examine Ticha as a model for partnering with Indigenous stakeholders in the production of knowledge and the design of digital humanities endeavors.
In a similar fashion, Laura Matthew and Michael Bannister consider Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America (NECA), a project focused on recovering and making accessible Nahuan-language texts written during the colonial period in Central America. They explore the reasons for prioritizing this corpus and explain the history of the project and its technical evolution. By looking in part at site analytics, they also analyze the challenges that this project has faced, and formulate a model for moving forward.
We would also like to note here one additional project focused on recovery that we were, in the end, unable to feature in this issue.
dedicated to the life and work of José Antonio Aponte, a free man of color, carpenter, artist, and alleged leader of a massive antislavery conspiracy and rebellion in colonial Cuba in 1811-1812.
Thinking critically about representations of place and space has been
fundamental to CLAS, which has a long history of engaging with and
disrupting the interaction between Indigenous boundaries and colonial
borders. These areas of study benefit from new digital methodologies, which
bring together what Thomas Padilla has named collections-as-data
with technologies for geospatial
representation
In this special issue, Patricia Murrieta-Flores et al. approach these questions by examining how computational approaches can expedite and facilitate the identification, analysis, and cross-referencing of vast amounts of historical, anthropological, and archaeological information available in sixteenth-century sources. Murrieta-Flores et al. consider the the experiences of the
Emma Slayton draws on archaeological data about Indigenous Caribbean settlements to model hypothetical canoe routes between Trinidad and the mainland coast of South America, exploring how possible avenues of travel were changed or interrupted during the early colonial period. Her work shows how data-driven analysis can complement the written record to better describe the impact of colonization on Indigenous communities.
By extending beyond the practice of close reading to explore cultural
analytics and extratextual evidence, these projects allow us to find new
ways of knowing that extend beyond the narrow perspective inscribed in the
colonial text. This can allow us to locate new information left out of the
historical record, as Slayton writes. It can also, in the words of Murrieta
et al., facilitate the discovery and analysis of
geographies not immediately apprehended with normal reading.
Questions surrounding labor and pedagogy — separate categories which are nonetheless closely intertwined — are central to DCLAS. Like the Ticha and Nahuatl/Nawatl projects described by Broadwell et al. and Matthews and Bannister in this issue, much current work in DCLAS involves envisioning new models for accomplishing scholarly work. This often entails imagining ways to achieve more equitable relationships across national boundaries, among scholarly institutions, and with groups that have been historically marginalized within academic settings, including Black and Indigenous scholars, language activists, and knowledge and heritage communities. Examples of such projects would be the digitization of the Fondo Real de Cholula, a collaboration between scholars and librarians at the University of Texas and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza developed by the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia (Mexico),
Current work in digital colonial Latin American Studies pushes us to think
critically about what it means to teach about the colonial world in the
digital age. Projects like Ticha and coloniaLab involve students as
participants or primary collaborators, and include reflection on that
student involvement as a central component of their work
In this special issue, Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank explores the merits and
drawbacks of using digital visual materials, both scholarly and
pedagogically, for understanding and analyzing colonial Latin American art.
She demonstrates how instructors can use digital methods in teaching to
reveal how the digital frames or reframes our
understanding of visual culture and to effectively critique it.
In one example, Kilroy-Ewbank discusses how an active role in the creation
of metadata — a process often overlooked or regarded as acritical — can
alter students’ understanding of the objects we study and the biases
inherent in scholarly work.
One commonality across projects in DCLAS, as is often the case in DH more generally, is an attention to the bringing together of theory and practice.
won’t stand stillor an
Similarly, in their survey of digital research on visual culture in Spanish
America, Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn describe a field of scholarship
that reconfigures ways of knowing, seeing, and working together, even as it
works with and through digital tools nos enfrentamos a procesos de producción de conocimiento mediados por
el pensamiento computacional, el software y las interfaces
digitales
We are faced with processes of knowledge
construction mediated by computational thinking, software, and
digital interfaces.
Translation ours.
The questions of theory and praxis that emerge from the articles in this
special issue open new ways of theorizing DCLAS. These largely collaborative
projects aim to produce through an ongoing
conversation with user communities
democratize[s] access to materials and
resources.
As Matthew and Bannister add, however, these projects
also introduce new problems as we think through their relationship with
colonial and neoliberal politics, the technology industry, and institutions
of higher education in the United States and Latin America.
This collection points to various possibilities for CLAS. The articles gathered here illustrate ways that digital scholarship can provide new pathways to conducting scholarship in a collaborative fashion. They suggest innovative means for representing the heterogeneous and incomplete nature of the colonial archive. They demonstrate how the curation of colonial data sets can enable new ways of understanding Latin American history. Likewise, they show how digital pedagogy, or critical approaches to the selective use of digital tools and resources in teaching and learning, offers new ways for students to engage with colonial material and textual history.
This is not to say that DCLAS does not continue to face challenges, many of them made explicit by this special issue, both through its content and the circumstance surrounding its publication. Foremost among these challenges are issues related to peer review, the precarious professional circumstances of many within DCLAS, as well as the need we face, as a field, to think critically about how we engage digitally with colonial-era materials.
Like many scholarly projects, this special issue faced significant challenges during the process of peer review. We originally intended to publish these pieces in a more traditional humanities journal, but after careful consideration, the editors determined that review and revision of these project- and pedagogy-oriented initiatives was too far out of scope of that publication. This problem was exacerbated by the professional diversity of those involved, who include not only research/teaching faculty, but also faculty members, librarians, programmers, students, and language activists — voices not often included in many conventional humanities forums. A DH journal turned out to be a more appropriate home, but identifying reviewers who could speak to these articles as work sitting at the intersection of DH and CLAS proved to be another challenge.
All of these circumstances reflect the broader difficulty that digital humanists have in demonstrating the value of their work, with real consequences for hiring, tenure, and promotion, as well as for the sustainability of projects themselves. Such dynamics play out in CLAS in ways that are common across the humanities, with many of the scholars who are engaged in digital work within CLAS not emerging from, or entirely identifying with, the disciplinary routes that traditionally have fed into the field. As a consequence, such scholars do not have a clear path into a professional existence within the very area of inquiry that they are best positioned to help transform. Higher education in the United States and many other parts of the world continues to rely for administrative purposes on the notions of disciplines, and many scholars themselves, particularly in the face of financial cuts to vulnerable areas, defend such disciplinary lines. In an extremely tight job market, those who might identify first-and-foremost as practitioners of DCLAS face a difficult challenge in selling their broadly focused skills to disciplinary departments who are often searching for candidates with more traditional profiles who can teach more conventional coursework. The lines that have long separated librarianship from the labor of research/teaching faculty exacerbate the problem, as practitioners of DCLAS might naturally fit into a professional sphere that could span both areas, but at the present, that space is extremely limited.
On a conceptual level, practitioners of DCLAS face a need to imagine the
common questions that should be asked about how we interact digitally with
colonial-era objects. This is a topic that arose during a panel at DH2018 in
Mexico City, and was one of the objectives of the first meeting of the
Association for Digital Research in Early Latin America (ADRELA), held at
the annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association in Boston the
following year.
In gathering together the articles in this collection, we seek to advance the emerging conversation about the role of digital scholarship within CLAS and contribute to the formation of a more coherent digital humanities community in the field. We also seek to understand how articles like those collected here help CLAS connect with larger conversations about scholarship in the twenty-first century, and consider how digital methods can expand the ways we study, understand, and interact with the colonial period in Latin America. Perhaps most importantly, we hope to emphasize DH as a point of entry for a new generation of scholars in our field, which — like DH itself — is inherently interdisciplinary, and built upon an enthusiasm for innovation and collaboration.
Much of the work in this special issue has been touched by local and global crises, including climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. immigration policy, and the defunding of humanities programs at academic institutions in the United States. During the three years that this collection was developed, contributors were directly and indirectly impacted by multiple health crises, wildfires, travel bans, and campus closures, while one editor of this volume no longer works in academia. These events draw attention to the precarious conditions of our histories, our communities, and our industries, even as they make the values of openness, access, collaboration, and virtual connection that underlie these projects more essential than ever. Likewise, in the current moment of instability, crisis, and misinformation, the value of using digital technologies to preserve and provide access to culture has never been greater, particularly when those tools can empower us to recover stories that have been lost or erased.