Digital Futures for the Humanities in Latin America

Infrastructures and Linguistic Diversity

As Roopika Risam argues in her discussion on postcolonial digital humanities, the political dimensions of digital knowledge production include facilitating methods and epistemologies for expanding the digital cultural record of the Global South (9). In Colombia, as in most of the countries of Latin America, the allocation of computing resources is prioritized in areas of research such as those in STEM departments that guarantee a clearly applicable outcome. In most cases, the infrastructure is outsourced to established players in the technology sector at the global level, shaping a landscape of technological infrastructure that tends to ignore the needs of research-creation projects in the arts and humanities. Infrastructure for DH comprises not only computer hardware and network access but also “the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiry” (Morton and Price, Our Cultural Commonwealth). However, projects dedicated to creating and maintaining public cultural resources for research and education are mostly poorly funded by already limited budgets for culture. Because the promise of data mining and machine learning is unequal across the world, in the context of our MA program, we are leveraging the diversity of questions and disciplinary backgrounds of our students and professors (Crymble et al., “The Globally Unequal Promise”). Most of our students are not pursuing projects that employ text mining or perform algorithmic analysis of large amounts of cultural data, or when they do, they face substantial problems related to information access and the lack of digital skills and resources.

Cultural criticism in DH has become a backdrop to Latin American discussions about DH infrastructures, research, and programs. Hegemonic views about the field have tended to “constrain it and make invisible the work that is done in languages other than English and in latitudes other than the United States, Canada and Northern Europe” (Galina Russell, “Introducción,” 10). Within this discussion, the issues of multilingualism, geographical diversity, code hegemony, infrastructures, and North-South cooperation, among others, have opened a working and thinking space both in Latin America and in our MA program (Fiormonte, “Testo Tempo Verità”; Fiormonte et al., The Digital Humanist; Liu, “What is Cultural Criticism”; Galina Russell, “Geographical and Linguistic Diversity”; Ortega, “Multilinguism in DH”; Del Río Riande, “Humanidades Digitales”; Rojas Castro, “Sí!”). Besides the geopolitics of DH knowledge production, we grapple in our institutional context with the fact that few researchers have the interest, skills, or incentives to participate and work in the field.

Despite these challenges, our context affords the creative opportunities and freedoms needed to engage with interdisciplinary and interinstitutional conversations (Fiormonte, “¿Por qué las Humanidades Digitales necesitan del sur?”). We are building upon ongoing conversations on other computations concerned with how to “articulate other accounts of digital design and construction that do not place regions outside of the global North on the receiving end of technology and innovation” (Cardoso Llach and Burbano, “Other Computations”). Although the regional economy is tied to the transfer of already existing technologies, we see potential in the open source and open access models as pathways to bridge some of DH’s digital divides.2

One of the key conversations in the Global South is connected to the issue of Anglocentrism in DH. Resources, readings, and documentation for digital tools and scholarship are scarce in Spanish. To address this problem, our MA program hosted a DH writing workshop in Bogotá in 2018 in connection with the open-access online resource The Programming Historian and aligned with its diversity policy (Sichani et al., “Diversity and Inclusion in Digital Scholarship”).3 This initiative, which emerged from a North-South collaboration funded by the British Academy, led to the production of the first Spanish-language DH lessons written by native Spanish speakers for The Programming Historian, which sought to address the needs of researchers in the region (Crymble et al., “Digital Humanities Skills”). Twenty-two scholars from ten countries in North and South America attended the workshop, which led to the activation of a DH community across the region that continues to collaborate.4 Another outcome was the publication, so far, of thirteen original Spanish-language lessons, with more underway. These lessons have become a key documentation site that we use widely in our MA curriculum and regard as a valuable outcome given the scarcity of online Spanish-language DH resources.

The workshop also mobilized a conversation around the state of the art in Latin America regarding digital infrastructures for accessing and analyzing primary sources.5 As a result of the networks that were initiated at the Bogotá workshop, we organized another event in September 2019. This event, Abrir Colecciones en Latinoamérica (Opening Collections in Latin America), opened a space to reflect on digital infrastructures for libraries, archives, museums, and DH in Latin America. In our own institution, we also host an initiative to create a digital archive that preserves the work of Colombian artists and researchers. Banco de Archivos Digitales de Artes en Colombia (BADAC) is a faculty-level project that aims to digitize, preserve, and provide access to digitized works in the fields of visual arts, literature, film, music, and journalism. Because several projects in the archive are led by teachers with little experience in digital scholarship, the role of the team at BADAC is to help researchers realize the potential of the digital in their projects, thus helping to advance the adoption of DH among the faculty in general. We regard BADAC as a laboratory where this digital infrastructure is constantly under construction but also as a place where students, teachers, and researchers can experiment, learn, and create using digitized and born-digital materials described in Spanish and about local cultural production.

Interdisciplinarity, Experimentation, and Research-Creation

Our students come from multiple disciplinary backgrounds, including design, linguistics, computer science, arts, communications, and history, and they have disparate research and technical skills. This multiplicity of backgrounds and a flexible institutional setting and curriculum—the MA program operates across the school rather than being housed in a specific department—has allowed our students to constantly cross disciplinary boundaries. For instance, students can choose three courses outside of their school in any MA program across the university to support their projects. As a result, students have found in the program a space to develop a diverse array of forms, expressions, methods, and paths to explore research questions that are not necessarily inscribed in traditional humanities scholarship. Besides questions from art history, literature, and history, students’ projects address questions related to activism, law, maker culture, environmental studies, gender inequality, civic engagement, speculative design, and the digital divide, with some seeking solutions to social problems.6 At first, we were concerned that the diversity of these topics would cause us to drift from mainstream Global North DH curricula, but then we started listening to our context and enabling spaces for interdisciplinarity.

One of our student projects posed a research question relevant to both the fields of law and DH. In this interdisciplinary experiment, Maria Fernanda Guerrero (a lawyer) and Carlos Varón (a linguist) applied methods from computational linguistics to a corpus of legal texts to determine how its content related to fundamental rights defined in the Colombian National Constitution. They decided to tackle the problem of the selection of cases of guardianship action (in Spanish, acción de tutela) by the country’s supreme court.7 The court regularly selects guardianship action cases based on a review process assisted by undergraduate law students. Undergrads read through statements, sentences, evidence, and other documents and then select a case based on how it relates to or represents the defense of a fundamental right. Guerrero and Varón applied topic modeling techniques to the corpus and identified the relationship between individual sentences and an individual right. Along the way, the project encountered a series of challenges arising from poor archival practices in local courts and difficulties in information access and management, challenges faced broadly across public and memory institutions in Latin America. For example, local courts often store and add metadata to the sentences without following a standardized structure, file format, or markup schema for the documents. This experience revealed the obstacles that poor open access practices and the lack of digital infrastructures pose for digital research. However, it also made us, the teachers, realize that in extending critical methodologies to corpus creation and analysis, an interdisciplinary and critical humanistic approach helps lawyers, students, and researchers understand the problem in its ethical, political, and historical dimensions.

Our MA program is based on research-creation in which the production of knowledge is not only based on forms of academic writing and argumentation but also on the creation of artifacts that communicate and convey ideas. This model of research-creation is pursued in several arts and humanities schools across the country and responds to the need to validate the production of artists, designers, architects, curators, writers, and other cultural producers inside and outside academia. We have been able to propose and test a curriculum where digital research methodologies meet creative and experimental forms of creation and communication. Although this model poses methodological and epistemological challenges to argument-driven forms of scholarship, it is also an avenue for crossing disciplinary borders (Chapman and Sawchuk, “Research-Creation”).

One of the key affordances that led us to the adoption of the research-creation model is the recurrence of projects that are based on research problems and whose goal is to intervene in a specific context by creating digital artifacts that seek to act as a form of argumentation. Another student project proposed to develop digital tools and infrastructures to allow a community to store, share, and recover their traditional knowledge while simultaneously recognizing the relationships between plants, humans, and digital devices. In the early stages of the project, Maria Juana Espinosa Menéndez used tools like MediaWiki and the FOAF vocabulary to describe these relationships and the traditional medicinal and spiritual uses of plants held by the community.8 During this process, she realized that, in general, those tools and standards did not allow for an adequate representation of the traditional knowledge of the community and their relationships with plants (“El Lenguaje del Botsque”). Instead of uncritically applying dominant models, Espinosa turned to methodologies from the fields of critical and speculative design to develop a series of prototypes that explored questions related to the project. In her interactions with the community, she found that cell phones were more relevant devices for communication and information exchange than personal computers and tablets. Forms of communication based on narrative and orality were also more familiar to the community than technologies for data capture like web forms or spreadsheets. In the final prototype, Espinosa used a Telegram group to host the exchange of information and collective building of knowledge, and she developed a bot to assist in the recording and recovery of information based on conversational interactions with plants and the community. This project is an example of how students in our MA program can experiment with problem-based and prototype-based research and at the same time question the limits of Anglophone protocols and standards and the challenges of operating in a context characterized by digital divides.

As Isabel Galina Russell asserts, “The breadth of meaning embraced by the digital humanities inherently entails the existence of research and teaching experiences from various perspectives, no longer multidisciplinary, but more broadly cultural” (“Introducción,” 12). Our students’ questions and interests have compelled us to rethink the role of DH in local contexts, reflecting as it does the limitations and potentialities of the many places in the Global South. In a context characterized by rampant social inequality and the challenges of overcoming a long-lasting armed conflict, attaching academic efforts to civic engagement has allowed us to reimagine the role of the humanities for the twenty-first century and drawn us away from definitions of DH toward an acceptance of, and a desire to play with, its elusive nature. A core aim of our emerging interdisciplinary research-creation praxis is for DH scholarship in the form of textual or digital artifacts to contribute to the ongoing conversations on humanities research, infrastructures, cultural production, interdisciplinarity, and digital transformation more broadly in Latin America. We believe that having students connect their DH work with entities such as the publishing industry, design studios, hackerspaces, memory institutions, art collectives, software companies, and the public sector in general is a possible path to revamping the relevance of the humanities in the contemporary world.

Our advice to other emerging DH programs is to listen to their context and promote conversations about digital culture beyond academia. Building curricula that reflect a set of discipline-specific tools, methodologies, and workflows developed elsewhere is fine, but we also need to keep a “childlike sense of wonder” attitude while paying attention to and engaging in technology appropriation processes arising in Latin America (Baladrón, “Apropiación de Tecnologías”). We are aware that this process requires us to reimagine the ways we teach, guide, and assess digital projects, as well as to acknowledge the role of the academy and DH networks in fostering communities of practice in the region. We imagine a DH future for Latin America in which practitioners critically assess the institutional, cultural, technological, economic, and political dimensions of digital scholarship and work around an open definition of what digital scholarship can look like in the region. In this process, we must keep a self-critical stance to keep asking what must be taught, how, and what for.

Notes

1. 1. The first DH organization in the region was created in 2011 in Mexico as the Red de Humanidades Digitales: http://www.humanidadesdigitales.net/. In Argentina, the Asociación Argentina de Humanidades Digitales was created in 2013: http://aahd.net.ar/. Colombia followed with the creation of the Red Colombiana de Humanidades Digitales in 2016: http://www.rchd.com.co/. A couple of MA programs recently created in the region include Maestría en Humanidades Digitales, Tec de Monterrey in 2019, and Maestría en Comunicación y Humanidades Digitales, Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in 2017.

2. 2. A project involving our students and former participants of a DH writing workshop that we held in 2018 was the construction of a DIY scanner with open source designs, software, and hardware. The tutorial and guidance for this activity was provided by Matías Butelman, a participant in the workshop and a member of the Bibliohack project, an Argentinian initiative that develops designs, documentation, and community around the task of building and putting to work DIY open-source scanners for digitization projects. Neogranadina is another organization that works with DIY scanners for digitizing colonial records in Colombia.

3. 3. The Programming Historian is an online, peer-reviewed publication that publishes tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching. To date, it has published ninety-seven English-language tutorials, forty-seven translations into Spanish, and fifteen original Spanish-language lessons.

4. 4. The constitution of a Spanish-speaking community around The Programming Historian has also sparked key conversations about diversity within a global DH community. See Sichani et al., “Diversity and Inclusion.”

5. 5. Priani defines digital infrastructures as basic ecosystems where materials and the systems and processes necessary for research, teaching and the dissemination of culture can be accessed; see Priani, “¿Infraestructura de Cómputo para las Humanidades?”

6. 6. Examples of student projects include data modeling and textual analysis of topics such as femicide and the archival activism of LGBT communities; participatory digital archives of local neighborhood stories; storytelling around Colombian musical heritage; and textual analysis of newspaper accounts of Latin America’s armed conflict, among others. A sample list of MA projects can be found at https://humanidadesdigitales.uniandes.edu.co/.

7. 7. Guardianship action is the most widely used instrument of law to defend fundamental rights in Colombia such as healthcare access and fair labor conditions, among others. See Guerrero Mateus and Varón Castañeda, “¿Un Sistema Automatizado?”

8. 8. FOAF, or Friend of a Friend, is a machine-readable ontology used to describe people and their relationships with other people, objects, or organizations. It implements the RDF/XML syntax to share FOAF descriptions.

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