Chapter 17
Developing New Literacy Skills and Digital Scholarship Infrastructures in the Global South
A Case Study
María José Afanador-Llach and Andres Lombana-Bermudez
When Pedro Rodríguez-García, a young Colombian historian from Bogotá, joined the Fundación Histórica Neogranadina (FHN) as paleography expert in January 2018, he had read and cataloged 650 pages of sixteenth-century legal documents produced by the Spanish Empire during the Colonial Era in South America.1 Over the previous seven months, Pedro had become one of the most active volunteers in a digital humanities project in which more than fifty participants, distributed across Colombia and the world, helped to catalog the Regional Historical Archive of Boyacá (Archivo Histórico Regional de Boyacá, AHRB), leveraging digital tools and networks. This historical archive consisted of a collection of more than 108,212 notarial documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that had recently been digitized by FHN using low-cost scanning technologies. Like Pedro, all participants of the project, including both volunteers and leaders from FHN, came together as a virtual community of historians and paleographers in order to catalog a historical archive that had recently been digitized. While collaborating in the cataloging project, participants developed a range of skills that included not only domain-specific competencies such as paleography but also new literacies related to networking and virtual teamwork. Eventually Pedro left his position at the FHN to accept a job as an assistant in a historical archive. Recently, he reflected on the benefits of having participated in the Catalogación colaborativa (Collaborative Cataloging) project: “It was very useful because I was able to focus my career on the disciplines of paleography and the study of archives.”
Editing the entries of an encyclopedia, identifying the craters of Mars, building a city in a multiplayer virtual game world, and cataloging digital archives are some of the most salient examples of the online collaborative activities that people are doing while leveraging digital tools and networks. From small teams of a few dozen players to massive communities of thousands of editors, the new communication environment has enabled forms of collaborative production and distribution of information, knowledge, and culture that are peer-based and networked (Benkler, Wealth of Networks; Varnelis, Networked Publics). This new communication environment has facilitated the emergence of a more participatory culture with “relatively low barriers of expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship” (Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges, xi).
It is precisely by leveraging the resources of the networked communication environment, appropriating existing web services and platforms, and exploiting the potential of participatory culture that the FHN collaborative cataloging project has developed. Empowered by the ethos of the DIY movement and participatory cultures, project leaders and volunteers joined forces to collaborate in a complex cataloging process. Their goal, since the start of the project, has been to build the digital archive of a collection that remained hidden in Tunja, the capital of the province of Boyacá, three hours away from Bogotá, in the middle of the Colombian Andean highlands.
In this chapter we present a case study of the first stage of the collaborative cataloging project of the FHN. After providing some background information about the particular Global South context in which the project originated, we review the methods and data used in our analysis, describe the characteristics of the participants, and introduce our main research questions. We then discuss how the project motivated volunteers to join in the cataloging process and how project leaders assembled a particular kind of “makeshift” digital research infrastructure that allowed participants to develop new literacy skills such as collective intelligence and distributed cognition. Finally, we reflect on the outcomes of the project and the challenges and opportunities it opened up in bridging digital divides and developing digital humanities projects in Global South situations.
Situating the Project
The Evolving Contours of Digital Divides in Colombia
Located in the north of South America with coasts on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, traversed by the Andes mountain chain, and with a population of approximately forty-nine million people, Colombia is a country of paradoxes. Its rich biological, cultural, and geographical diversity contrasts with its high levels of socioeconomic inequality and poverty, the systematic violence of a long-lasting armed conflict, and a pronounced rural–urban gap.2
Since 2010, Colombia has developed one of the most ambitious technology policies in order to strengthen the digital ecosystem. Through Vive Digital (live digital), as this policy strategy came to be known, the Colombian government has tried to make the internet ubiquitous in the country with the goal of creating new jobs, improving economic growth and development, and reducing poverty (Meltzer and Pérez, “Digital Colombia”; Molano Vega, “Colombia’s Digital Agenda,” “Colombia’s Internet Advantage”). According to the most recent data from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies (Ministerio de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones, MINTIC), eight years after deploying Vive Digital, the country has increased internet penetration by 70 percent, covering most of the towns (98 percent), and connecting 61.4 percent of the population (MINTIC, Boletín Trimestral). However, connection speed has remained low. According to the “State of the Internet Report” (Akamai, State of the Internet), the country has an average speed of 5.5 Mbps—below the global average of 7.2 Mbps—and ranks ninety-ninth.
Despite the improvement in connectivity and internet penetration, the first-level digital divide remains wide. Physical access to computers and the internet continues to be a problem in several regions, particularly in rural areas, reflecting the big urban–rural gap. Boyacá, the province (departamento) where the AHRB is located, has traditionally been a rural region, with an economy based on agriculture. According to the last national census, 47.7 percent of the population lived in rural and 52.3 percent in urban areas (DANE, “Boletín Censo General 2005”). The province and its capital, Tunja, are lagging behind in information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure. In 2016, internet penetration was only 10.80 percent in the Boyacá, and 16.80 percent in Tunja, the biggest urban area (MINTIC, Boletín Trimestral).
Moreover, the second-level digital divide, understood as the gap in ICT competencies and skills, and the third-level divide of disparities in the benefits of ICT usage (van Deursen and Helsper, “Third-Level Digital Divide”; Lombana-Bermudez, “La evolución”; Scheerder et al., “Determinants of Internet Skills”), are perhaps even wider in Colombia. As researchers have pointed out, the government strategy had initially focused on providing material infrastructure, overlooking the importance of ICT skills and capacity, ICT usage, motivation, and trust (Meltzer and Pérez, “Digital Colombia”; Peña Gil et al., “Brecha digital en Colombia”; Velasquez, “Digital Divide in Colombia”).3
In a more general way, educational standards and attainments are low in Colombia and, as some researchers have stated, they are directly related to ICT skills and motivations (Hargittai and Walejko, “Participation Divide”; Peña Gil et al., “Brecha digital en Colombia”). According to the World Economic Forum Networked Readiness Index 2016, Colombia ranks 102nd in terms of quality education and 117th in the quality of its math and science instruction (Meltzer and Pérez, “Digital Colombia”). Likewise, according to data from PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) tests (2012, 2009), Colombians’ performance in reading, science, and math is below the OECD average (OECD, Education in Colombia).
This distinctive Colombian context of social inequalities and low educational achievement contributes to determining a precarious digital infrastructure for research and development. Compared to other countries from the Latin American and Caribbean region, Colombia lags behind in research and development, with a low ratio of researchers to inhabitants (Meltzer and Pérez, “Digital Colombia”; OECD, Reviews of Innovation Policy).4 Although some efforts to build public digital infrastructure have recently been developed by the government in the areas of digital citizenship, fields such as humanities, arts, and sciences have not been addressed. By contrast, countries in the Global North have well-defined digital infrastructure policies for the humanities, often referred to as “an integrated layer of digital instruments,” for tasks such as text mining and algorithmic analysis of large amounts of cultural material (Kaltenbrunner, “Digital Infrastructure for the Humanities,” 276). Tools for data-driven computational analysis in humanities research seem to be becoming a defining feature of digital humanities practice in Europe and the United States.
In Colombia, a national digital infrastructure policy for research in the humanities is nonexistent, and the digital humanities as a field of research has only recently started to form part of library missions and university curricula. As the collaborative cataloging project illustrates, digital infrastructure is best understood in this context not as a set of specific tools or systems but as a basic environment that enables access to materials and to necessary systems and processes for research, teaching, and the dissemination of culture (Priani, “Infraestructura de cómputo”).
Given this context of social inequalities and low educational attainments, the gaps in ICT competencies and skills, and disparities in the benefits of ICT usage, should be addressed when discussing what it means to build infrastructure for digital research in the humanities in the Global South. These issues are crucial in the light of Domenico Fiormonte’s important question in another volume of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series: “Is there a non-Anglo-American digital humanities, and if so, what are its characteristics?” (Fiormonte, “Toward a Cultural Critique,” 438).
The Collaborative Cataloging Project
Many regional historical archives in Colombia have been characterized by a lack of systematic organization; they are therefore underutilized by researchers and the general public (Marín, “Elementos de la archivística colombiana”). Digitization presents an opportunity not only to preserve the archives but to catalog them and create quality metadata that will guarantee future access and usability. This was among the aims of the General Archives Law (Law 594 of 2000). Furthermore, these processes can contribute to building basic infrastructure for digital humanities scholarship. However, many archives lack access to resources for digitizing and cataloging, and to internet connectivity. Such is the case of the AHRB in Tunja, which holds colonial documents from between 1539 and 1850.
In 2016, the nonprofit Fundación Histórica Neogranadina,5 in collaboration with the archive, began to digitize the colonial manuscripts and early printed books in the AHRB. As the president of the foundation explained, “The most immediate obstacle to digitization was the often prohibitive cost of the equipment and technology involved.”6 Neogranadina developed its own low-cost document scanners based on open-source designs and software, and installed them in two cities, Tunja and Popayán.
The next major problem was the lack of a serviceable catalog.7 As a result, the hundreds of thousands of digitized images remained as inaccessible as the paper originals. With little human and financial resources, the project leaders turned to “design and technology” to find a solution.8 The cataloging project focused on 161 volumes of notarial documents containing 108,212 images, dating from 1549 to 1700, from a portion of the Spanish Empire called the Kingdom of New Granada. The task was split into four parts, conducted by volunteers who captured information from the notarial volumes in a spreadsheet. The first task comprised quality control of the digitized images. The next was to separate each notarial file into individual documents, in order to allow future users access to specific notarial records rather than entire files. For this reason, catalogers were asked to record the range of sheet numbers so as to identify where a particular document began and where it ended. To aid this task, the catalogers allotted an identification number to each document. In addition, they captured date and place data, and provided a short title to describe each document. Each task required a different level of skill, the most challenging being knowledge of paleography.
The team organized a small-scale community-based digital cataloging project, recognizing that cataloging is a slow, labor-intensive, and costly process in which the general public is rarely engaged, especially in Latin America. The idea bore fruit after new members joined the team in 2015–2016 (Cobo, “Reflexiones”). The planning of the project included research on digital platforms for online collaborative work, as well as the management of volunteer-led projects. In January 2017, after the workflow had been designed and tested, the project leaders made an open call on their website, in social media, and in academic events across Bogotá. They invited researchers, paleographers, and students to join the project. So far, the output has been the description of 1,200 notarial documents, a guide to the types of notarial documents and bureaucratic posts in the Spanish Empire, and a classification of notarial volumes according to the level of difficulty of the handwriting. Another output was a number of paleography workshops, conducted by a group of volunteers.
Study Methods, Data, and Participants
In tune with the DIY and participatory ethos of the collaborative cataloging project, the analysis presented in this chapter developed organically in its conception. Project leaders, including one of this chapter’s authors, started to monitor and analyze the cataloging process in order to improve the workflow, review its quality, and help build up an archival community. Through methods such as online surveys and forums, the leaders collected quantitative and qualitative data that they used to sustain community engagement, support the digital cataloging process, and identify flaws.9 It is precisely a sample of this data that we have used to answer our main research question: How can experts and amateurs leverage digital tools and networks for DH research in a scenario of low connectivity, limited tech access, and incipient development of new literacies?
In specific terms, we analyzed the following data: one registration form, two surveys, one semistructured interview, messages from an online forum (Facebook group), and guides and learning resources developed by project participants to support the cataloging process. Approximately eighty participants (equal numbers of women and men) took part in the study, including all the volunteers and project leaders from the first eighteen months of the project. Around sixty participants came from different cities across Colombia, and twenty from elsewhere in South, Central, and North America, as well as Europe. The volunteers ranged from undergraduate and graduate students to professional archivists, independent researchers, and professors working on colonial history, chiefly of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Obviously, this varied group had different levels of paleographic skills. Moreover, a team of four project leaders from the Fundación Neogranadina were actively involved in the project in different management and community roles.
Challenges and Opportunities of Digital Humanities Projects in Global South Contexts
As some scholars have argued, the proliferation, development, and adoption of digital tools, networks, and practices have given rise to an environment of networked communication that is interactive, connected, and participatory (Benkler, Wealth of Networks; Ito et al., Hanging Out, Messing Around; Jenkins, Convergence Culture; Varnelis, Networked Publics). In such a culture, “members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another” (Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges, 3), thereby developing a range of new sociocultural practices or literacies. These new literacies are the competences that allow people to meaningfully interact with the flows of information, collectivities, and machines in a networked and mediated world (Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges). They foster a new “ethos”: that is, a new mindset and way of doing things, of being deeply involved in processes, of building peer-to-peer relationships and distributed communities (Lankshear and Knobel, “Sampling ‘the New’”).
The potential to generate participatory cultures and new literacies has resonated in crowdsourcing projects in libraries, museums, and archives. Crowdsourced operations in the humanities can include transcription, recording and creating content, tagging, correcting or modifying content, contextualization, cataloging, commenting, developing critical responses, or stating preferences, georeferencing, linking, crowdfunding, and mapping (Hedges and Dunn, “AHRC Crowd Sourcing Study”). These initiatives address the problem faced by memory institutions around the world, which have digitized collections and made them available online, but not optimally for lack of enriched metadata to make them searchable and discoverable (McKinley, “Motivations to Crowdsource”). Usually led by libraries in the Global North, these projects have relied on networked and peer-based modes of knowledge production, whereby anonymous participants perform specific and granular tasks following straightforward instructions to tag, transcribe, or annotate digital objects among others. The main objectives have been to accelerate research processes and improve the discoverability of the digital collections. In contrast to the crowdsourced humanities projects of the Zooniverse platform or Metadata Games, the FHN collaborative cataloging project was on a smaller scale. It employed a community of volunteers rather than a “crowd” (Haythornthwaite, “Crowds and Communities”). As Causer and Wallace explain, such communities “tend to be smaller in number, to be less anonymous, and to respond to more complex tasks and detailed guidelines” (Causer and Wallace, “Building a Volunteer Community,” 8).
A “Makeshift” Digital Infrastructure
Creating the digital catalog was a small-scale collective effort that required the assembly of an ad hoc sociotechnical system composed of digital tools, networks, and humans (historians, archivists, and paleographers): Leveraging resources, platforms, and services freely available in the networked communication environment, project leaders set up a temporary digital research infrastructure that could support the complex process of cataloging, collaborating with a group of volunteers, and building a community. Such a system availed of new sociocultural practices fostering collaborative forms of cultural and knowledge production, networked communication and teamwork, and peer-to-peer learning.
Because of its temporary, ad hoc quality, the digital research infrastructure for the FHN collaborative cataloging project can be understood as a “makeshift” ensemble. Building it in a Global South context of precarity and deep digital divides involved a process of “makeshift creativity.” According to de Certeau (Practice of Everyday Life, xiv), such processes are developed by ordinary people in order to adapt the conditions of the dominant order to their own ends. Empowered by a participatory culture and DIY ethos, members of the project, particularly the team leaders, reappropriated web services and platforms like Google applications and Facebook to create ad hoc tools for coordinating the cataloging work, communicating, networking, and solving paleographical problems in a collaborative fashion. Despite lacking the technical and financial capacity to develop a centralized digital cataloging platform, the team leaders could thus put together a system composed of several tools that, despite being scattered across multiple web services and platforms (developed in the Global North), worked well together and could be appropriated for a DH project in the Global South.10 Although this makeshift digital infrastructure lacked automated interoperability across tools, human users made the connections and actively switched data across platforms to complete the cataloging tasks and communicate with each other.
New Literacy Skills: Collective Intelligence and Distributed Cognition
Participants in the FHN collaborative cataloging project developed a range of new literacy skills as they used the tools of the temporary digital research infrastructure. In particular, our analysis reveals that while communicating with each other, exchanging ideas and working together to solve paleographic and cataloging problems, team leaders and volunteers developed the new literacy skills of “collective intelligence” and “distributed cognition.”
“Collective intelligence,” understood as “the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal” (Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges, 39), was regularly practiced by the collaborative cataloging project Facebook group, one of the tools in the makeshift digital infrastructure. Team leaders initially set up this group on the popular social networking site in order to open up a space where project participants could easily, without any knowledge of programming or website development, share information, images, and links, ask questions, and exchange ideas in public. The practice of sharing such resources was promoted by the team leaders, who regularly posted links to websites and digital humanities projects (for instance, paleographic resources, paleography blogs, and papers about notary documents) on the Facebook group even when nobody had raised a question or asked for help.
Participants also had the opportunity to practice “distributed cognition,” a new literacy skill that consisted of “the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities” (Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges, 37). Information and communication resources such as databases, online spreadsheets, and wikis, for instance, enable the expansion of human cognitive capacities, allowing the production and sharing of knowledge across distributed teams. In the collaborative cataloging project, participants had the opportunity to develop this new literacy skill as they interacted with the tools of the makeshift digital infrastructure, particularly when they used online spreadsheets to carry out the different cataloging tasks. These spreadsheets, designed by project leaders leveraging Google web services, were powerful collaborative databases that facilitated teamwork management and helped participants to complete their tasks in a distributed manner. For instance, the cataloging instruction spreadsheet allowed each participant to extract data, follow a sequence, transcribe, and translate the documents into data.11
Sustaining Motivation
Sustaining the members’ engagement in collaborative DH projects is a challenge that should be addressed by understanding the motivations of online volunteers (Causer and Wallace, “Building a Volunteer Community”). At the time of joining, participants in the FHN collaborative cataloging project declared a diverse range of motives, like acquiring skills, building networks, and learning about history and digital humanities. Some wished to hone their skills in paleography and historical research or expand their professional network. One participant said: “I would like to put into practice the little knowledge that I have about paleography, as well as belong to a network of paleographers.” There were also altruistic interests such as helping to preserve the national cultural heritage, and contributing to the development of digital humanities in Colombia.
However, as the project evolved, it proved a challenge to maintain the initial level of engagement, given the demands on people’s time, the complexity of the tasks, and the other commitments of the participants. A year into the project, more than half the participants had stopped contributing actively: even the project leaders reduced the time they spent on emails and Facebook posts. In a follow-up survey in July 2018, most participants agreed that the cataloging tasks, particularly those involving paleography, were overwhelming. Many also complained of the amount of time needed to catalog large documents, ranging in volume from 700 to 1,000 pages.
One of the major challenges of the project, therefore, was to address the lack of paleographic skills, despite the learning resources available. The scarcity of human and financial resources made the project rely completely on voluntary work. But only a few volunteers who were already experienced paleographers could cope with the pace without losing their impetus. Even project leaders struggled to maintain their commitment, given their other professional responsibilities. The time they had to commit to the project could perhaps have been reduced with a more sophisticated and robust infrastructure of digital scholarship that did not require participants to jump across platforms, enter data manually in different spreadsheets, and ask questions from different channels of inquiry. The project leaders, too, could have reduced the time spent in monitoring different tools and platforms, and reviewing the quality of the cataloging data.
Human Capacity in the Digital Humanities
When we first completed this chapter in August 2018, the first stage of the collaborative cataloging project was in standby mode. The number of volunteer catalogers had decreased, and several of them, including Pedro Rodríguez-García, had not been able to maintain the pace they had achieved in the first seven months. Nor had the project leaders, all working full-time in academic institutions, been able to continue steering the community and managing the tasks with the same energy and commitment. Although the online tools were still functional, and thousands of digitized documents remained to be cataloged, the AHRB cataloging community seemed to be waiting for a boost to reactivate the human input. As one project leader said in an interview, “We have a very long way to go. . . . [T]he pace of digitization far outstrips that of cataloging and even quality control.”12 However, by 2020, the leaders of the project were able to launch a second stage of the project, funded by the University of California, Santa Barbara (FHN).
This case study reveals the opportunities and challenges that confront digital humanities in the Global South. As suggested above, this kind of project can potentially bridge the technological divide in terms of access, skills, and ICT usage. However, it also faces the realities of precarious digital infrastructures and deep social, economic, and educational inequalities. Interventions like the creation of a “makeshift” infrastructure of digital resources for collaborative cataloging can help to appropriate ICTs and develop new literacy skills; but they call for human resources and motivations that are hard to sustain in the long term. The makeshift ensembles remain fragile, and highly dependent on humans.
Nonetheless, such projects in the Global South create synergies between the digital humanities, the information sciences, and the DIY communities that are crucial for bridging the multiple digital divides. While embracing the ethos of participatory cultures and experimenting with new forms of collaborative and peer-based knowledge production, DH projects can open up spaces for learner communities to thrive. This project demonstrated how volunteer historians and paleographers, with varying levels of expertise and different geographic locations, could come together as a community and, appropriating the range of tools within a makeshift digital infrastructure, collectively catalog more than 1,200 documents, share their knowledge and experience of paleography, and create learning resources about cataloging. They developed not only new literacy skills such as collective intelligence and distributed cognition, but also domain-specific skills in paleography, cataloging, and the legal history of the Spanish Empire in northern South America. The most active participants benefited directly from the knowledge and skills they acquired, which they could employ to find jobs and improve their profiles as historians and paleographers.
Moreover, in terms of bridging knowledge and skill gaps, such initiatives in the Global South can have an impact on a broader community of learners and researchers as well as on the national digital infrastructure, enriching available learning resources and expanding the corpus of digitized archival data. As one of the project leaders observed in an interview, the project “proved to be an amazing pedagogical opportunity. Having access to thousands of images of early modern materials of different kinds provided instructors with an invaluable resource to train new generations of scholars in the archival skills they need to work with them.”13 This potential of DH projects, however, depends on the ability to socialize the output and make it broadly accessible. That calls for articulating private and public interinstitutional alliances to support DH initiatives, promote the use of various tools and learning resources, and share content across different academic, cultural, and research organizations. Properly developed and utilized, the digitized content of such archives become invaluable assets, whose data and tools can expedite educational and innovational processes beyond the specific benefits of a single project.
Notes
We want to thank specially the leaders of Neogranadina, Juan Cobo Betancourt, Natalie Cobo, and Santiago Muñoz; the lead cataloger Samir Pinzón; and the team of volunteers who participated in the first stage of the project.
All names are pseudonyms to protect the participants’ privacy.
Colombia ranks as the second most unequal country in the Latin American and Caribbean region, and the seventh in the world, using the Gini index (World Bank, World Development Indicators). Moreover, according to the ICT Development Index (IDI) which measures technology access, use, and skills, Colombia occupies position 85 with an IDI of 5.36, 0.35 points over the average IDI value among 176 economies (ITU, Measuring the Information Society).
A 2016 study revealed that 43 percent of Colombians who connect to the internet use digital tools mainly for entertainment. In contrast, 27 percent participate in educational processes and interact in online communities, and only 4 percent have made transactions or generate income from ICTs (CNC, “Centro Nacional de Consultoría revela estudio”).
In 2014, there were 8.2 PhDs per million inhabitants in Colombia (“¿Cuántos doctores gradúa Colombia?”).
“Neogranadina was established in 2015 to carry out large-scale but low-cost digitization projects in Colombian archives and libraries, and make the results freely available to everyone.” Personal interview with the project leader, Juan Cobo Betancourt, August 2018.
Juan Cobo Betancourt interview.
As a project leader put it: “A notable handful [of items] have detailed descriptions in the form of spreadsheets, a few more have ad hoc, if often incomplete, paper catalogues (some not updated since the 1920s), and many more have none at all” (Juan Cobo Betancourt interview).
Juan Cobo Betancourt interview.
Participants were notified that this data was used for evaluating and improving the project, and could be used for research purposes. Their names were anonymized in the data set to protect their privacy.
One project leader had studied previous crowdsourcing efforts like Transcribe Bentham, and established a dialogue with the Medici Archive Project, which had built tools to enable user submissions of document transcriptions and other metadata to their digital archive platform, BIA. However, this possibility proved hard to implement (Juan Cobo Betancourt interview).
The cataloging spreadsheet was structured to capture information about quality control of the digitized images and then basic metadata for each document: ID number, date, title, and place.
Juan Cobo Betancourt interview.
Juan Cobo Betancourt interview.
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