Webinar Schedule
Mapping Puerto Rico’s Hurricane History 1899-Present
Friday, April 21, 2 p.m EDT
Ian Seavey, PhD Candidate in the Department of History, Texas A&M University
Hurricanes are an important category of analysis in the study of the Greater Caribbean and specifically Puerto Rico. Most recently, in 2022, Hurricane Fiona and Hurricane Maria in 2017 reminded Puerto Ricans and U.S. government officials that storm preparedness and disaster relief represent a critical part of the colonial relationship. Since the United States acquired Puerto Rico from the Spanish in the War of 1898, 47 hurricanes have battered the island. This amounts to about one every two years, the most out of all the islands in the Greater Caribbean. However, after World War II, the number of hurricanes which hit Puerto Rico began increasing and from 1980 to the present, that number expanded out to at least one every year. The sheer volume and frequency of hurricanes has long warranted a study which visually represents these metrics. This digital environmental history project showcases how prominently hurricanes impacted Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. Using the program ArcGIS, this study maps each hurricane that hit Puerto Rico during the American period. Each pinpoint on the map, when clicked on, includes a brief description of the effects of storm, available pictures, and how each storm fits into the broader discussions of Puerto Rican history and U.S. imperial policy. Chronicling each storm in this way demonstrates in tangible ways that hurricanes as a category of analysis must be consulted when attempting to understand the political, economic, and social environments of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. This project also attracts a wide-ranging audience both inside and outside of academia in an approachable but rigorously researched manner.
Using Social Media to Explore Haitian History – Rendering Revolution
Friday, June 16, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Siobhan Meï, Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Amherst & Dr. Jonathan Square, Assistant Professor, The New School
“Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History” is a queer, bilingual, feminist experiment in digital interdisciplinary scholarship that uses the lens of fashion and material culture to trace the aesthetic, social, and political reverberations of the Haitian Revolution as a world-historical moment.
Launched in 2020, Rendering Revolution focuses on stories of self-fashioning that rarely receive attention in colonial archives and 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. The materials produced, curated, and translated for this project focus on the activities of occluded figures in history, including women and members of the LGBTQI+ community. Drawing on black feminist thought and transnational queer methodologies, Rendering Revolution generates a transhistorical, undisciplined digital archive that illustrates the importance of material culture in constructing diverse (and often competing) visions of freedom in the Atlantic world.
In this webinar, project founders Dr. Siobhan Meï and Dr. Jonathan Square will offer a brief overview of the project and will then focus on our approaches for publishing public-facing short-form content on proprietary social media platforms. While platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have allowed us to engage with a wide and diverse audience, there are also many concerns that arise when using a privately owned tool to curate a digital archive that explicitly addresses colonialism and its afterlives.
United Fronteras: A Transborder Digital and Public Repository
Friday, June 23, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Sylvia Fernández, Assistant Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, University of Texas at San Antonio & Dr. Laura Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Digital Writing and Cultural Rhetorics, University of Florida
In 2019, the project United Fronteras began with the intention of countering the official or hegemonic representation of the Mexico-United States border in the digital cultural record and to inspire the questioning and critical development of materials or projects that utilize digital technologies to represent the border from various perspectives. In this webinar I will touch on the process of how UF creates a digital registry through a transborder model of work between academics from various humanities disciplines and members of the community outside of academia to make use of de-postcolonial digital humanities and minimal computing practices and methodologies to generate a third digital space that demonstrates the multiplicity of (hi)stories from the border and to document the public memory of the materials and projects in this region. The use of minimal computing in this project is a fundamental part of this independent and autonomous projects dedicated to resist the structures of power and physical and digital vigilance in border regions because of its ability to provide autonomy, independence, accessibility, functionality, security, neutrality and material stability across borders.
Developing a Multilingual Repository of Open/(ish) Access Materials: A Case Study of the Haitian Studies Association’s Digital Initiatives
Friday, June 30, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Natália Marques da Silva, Digital fellow, Haitian Studies Association and Director of the Hand Art Center, Stetson University; Dr. Darlène Elizabeth Dubuisson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Laura Wagner, Independent scholar/Haitian Creole Team Lead, Respond Crisis Translation; & Dr. Petrouchka Moise, Assistant Professor / Cultural & Community-Based Digital Curator, Grinnell College Burling Library.
As part of its Decolonize Haitian Studies efforts, the Haitian Studies Association (HSA) is improving public access to Haiti-related materials. Economic and linguistic barriers in academic publishing, along with inequities of representation and authorship have had adverse effects on Haiti-based scholars and students as well as non-affiliated scholars in other locations. Despite leading knowledge production related to Haiti, such individuals have less access to resources and materials than peers associated with large North American or European universities (where facilitating high cost memberships to research databases is common). This duality is deeply concerning and requires ongoing attention, including by organizations like the HSA.
In this presentation, we outline an HSA initiative to aggregate and index Haiti-related publications, resources, and syllabi on a self-hosted repository. The goal of this repository is to support students, emerging scholars and the public with multilingual resources, like syllabi and Open/Open(ish) Access publications. We believe that the creation and dissemination of such repositories is crucial to decolonizing scholarship, particularly in relation to Digital Humanities. The presentation will address successes and challenges we’ve encountered during this project and initiate a group discussion on creatively addressing unethical barriers to knowledge.
Curaduría de datos y narrativas geoespaciales sobre redes de intercambio y comercio indígena en la región del Orinoco, siglos XV al XVIII
Friday, August 4, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Maria José Afanador-Llach, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities, Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
Este webinar presenta los resultados de un proyecto de investigación que busca reconstruir aspectos de la imaginación geográfica, formas de relación con la naturaleza y sus recursos, de al menos quince grupos indígenas que habitaron la región del Orinoco entre los siglos XV y XVIII. Pero el archivo histórico impone límites a aquello que podemos saber sobre las maneras en que diversos grupos indígenas habitaron y concibieron el territorio. El proyecto asume estos desbalances de poder proponiendo un proceso de curaduría, extracción de datos geoespaciales históricos y propuesta de narrativa cartográfica. La curaduría se hizo a partir del proyecto de humanidades digitales HGIS de las Indias, un Sistema de Información Geográfica histórica del imperio español entre 1700 y 1800. Se trabajó también con datos geoespaciales de investigaciones arqueológicas de los últimos 50 años para reconstruir parcialmente la localización de asentamientos de grupos indígenas, corredores de intercambios, formas de comercio entre los grupos de la cuenca y aspectos sobre su relación con la naturaleza y el comercio caracterizado por relaciones de reciprocidad.
Inclusividad, marcado TEl y filosofía en la Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano
Friday, August 11, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Ernesto Priani Saisó, Profesor de tiempo completo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Betsabé Castro Ruiz, FFyL UNAM; Zulema Flores Arellano, FFyL UNAM; Víctor Andrés Campos Chávez, FFyL UNAM, y Cristina Noemi Gonzalez Del Valle, FFyL UNAM
El propósito de esta presentación es exponer la relación que se construye entre estudiantes de filosofía y proyectos de humanidades digitales desde nuestra experiencia como estudiantes de filosofía en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y nuestra participación en el Proyecto PAPIIT “Colecciones digitales inclusivas. Análisis crítico de la creación de colecciones digitales mexicanas”, (IG400322). Este proyecto tiene por objetivo el análisis crítico de colecciones digitalizadas para formular una propuesta de lineamientos y criterios para hacer más incluyentes los proyectos de digitalización en términos de la representación de sujetos y objetos tradicionalmente marginados. Trabajar, además, en la aplicación concreta de estos en la Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano. En nuestra presentación nos interesa explorar cómo la filosofía ha sido de ayuda al trabajar en un proyecto digital y el modo en que esa labor nos hace repensar nuestro quehacer filosófico. En particular, hablaremos sobre cómo algunas habilidades de lógica formal han permitido tomar algunas decisiones en el marcado XML/TEI, y cómo la reflexión filosófica nos ha llevado a identificar algunos grupos comúnmente invisibilizados y debatir la forma de visibilizarlos a través de la codificación de textos. Igualmente, hablaremos del modo en que la codificación supone otra forma de acercarnos a las obras, para enriquecer la comprensión de las mismas. Por último, queremos pensar en las circunstancias que rodean los cursos, talleres y espacios en los que aprendemos y ponemos en práctica nuestros aprendizajes.
Recetas de las América: A bilingual digital publishing cookbook
Friday, August 18, 2 p.m EDT
Sarah Tew, Project Coordinator: US Caribbean & Florida Digital Newspaper Project, University of Florida & Melissa Jerome, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Latin American & Caribbean Collection, University of Florida
Recetas de las Américas 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. Recetas is a case study in using a static site generator, Oxygen XML editor, and basic web technologies to organize and publish historical collections in a bilingual website. This bilingual presentation will discuss the uses, pros, cons, and process of web publishing and static sites for historical collections-based humanities projects and propose further uses and developments beyond the current Recetas site.
Tracking Religious Racism in Brazil
Tuesday, September 12, 12 p.m EDT
Dr. Danielle N. Boaz, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte & Gustavo Melo Cerqueira, Babalorixá, Ilê Axé Omi Ogun siwajú and VP of the ICCRR
Religious racism is a form of religious discrimination that is rooted in racialized prejudices against a particular faith or faiths. The concept of religious racism comes from Brazil, where activists use the phrase “racismo religioso” to refer to discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. Our webinar would talk about the International Commission to Combat Religious Racism’s (ICCRR) digital resources on Brazil. On August 22, 2022, the ICCRR released its revised map, spreadsheet, and report on Religious Racism in Brazil. These materials analyze 500 cases of religious intolerance against Afro-Brazilian faiths that have taken place since 2000. This is an ongoing project that was started in 2019 and has taken more than 1000 hours to complete. The ICCRR plans to update these materials annually, adding and analyzing new cases. The report is designed to provide some insights about the patterns and statistics that can be observed from the cases. The spreadsheet database provides details on the cases such as the name of the victim, the name of the perpetrator, the type of intolerance, the location of the intolerance, and data about the victim and the perpetrator such as age and gender. The interactive maps track the cases that are listed in the database. Each entry on the map includes a summary of the incident and links to available photos and videos. Both maps contain the same data; however, one organizes the cases by year and the other organizes the cases by type of discrimination.
“Amigos de los Muelles.” Mapping how transatlantic solidarities shaped the Curaçaoan Radical Movement, 1900-1940
Friday, September 15, 2 p.m EDT
Thomas van Gaalen, PhD Candidate in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Radboud University (The Netherlands)
Towards the late 19th century, heightened patterns of exchange and interaction emerged between socialists across the world. The ideal of international solidarity, which had become increasingly important for socialists, attracted a wide variety of radicals from a wide variety of regions. Where historical scholarship has often treated socialism as, with Talbot Imlay, a “European phenomenon,” this presentation demonstrates how the socialist framework of international solidarity was adopted and adapted by diverse movements across the Atlantic. The presentation reframes the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao as a node in vivid transatlantic interactions between socialists and radicals. Using digital relational interface Nodegoat to visualize and map these interactions, the presentation shows how global exchanges that were made possible by the island’s connection to maritime networks encouraged Curaçaoan radicals to engage with the idea of international solidarity. Doing so allowed them to link their struggles to a broader cause, and to put new forms of solidarity into practice at harbor strikes, revolts and anticolonial campaigns. Synthesizing digital visualization and distant reading tools with non-digital archival research, this presentation brings these underexposed but influential Caribbean histories of emancipation into view. These render visible the rich history of transatlantic exchange on Curaçao, an island commonly framed as “isolated” in scholarship. By uncovering forgotten conceptions of international solidarity, the presentation furthermore invites vital discussions on formulating an international solidarity fit to tackle today’s increasingly global challenges.
Digital Archives as Decolonial Practice
Friday, September 29, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Ricia Anne Chansky, Professor and Director of the Oral History Lab, UPR Mayaguez; Jose Morales Benitez, Librarian, UPR Mayaguez & Christina Boyles, Assistant Professor of Culturally Engaged Digital Humanities, Michigan State University
Traditional academic research often relies on the violence of extraction—the taking of people, resources, goods, and ideas from the marginalized in order to serve the needs of those in power. Community-engaged research requires academics to reject extractive forms of knowledge acquisition and relegate authority and control of project processes and outcomes to the participating community members.
The collaboration between the Oral History Lab (OHL) at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM) and the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico (AREPR)—which includes teams at Michigan State University and UPR Río Piedras—has afforded us the opportunity to re-vision digital archives as spaces for communities to self-narrate their lived experiences with disaster and survival. Our proposed webinar traces the lines of community archiving as decolonial practice through our linked projects, including aspects of archives and pedagogy, access to archives, community archives, and collaborative archiving strategies.
Our working model leads to the creation of archival collections shaped by the community and characterized by a high degree of accessibility and immediate relevance, which can serve as tools for transformation by preserving and disseminating the perspectives, lived experiences, and work of individuals and community organizations who do not traditionally have access to public discourses.
Our presentation will include discussion of:
- The relevant courses at UPRM, which culminate in digitally archiving students’ oral history projects, a model that has demonstrated significant pedagogical value as it strengthens students’ sense of agency by placing them in the role of creators of new primary sources with enduring value while underscoring their connectivity to their home communities across the archipelago.
- The OHL “Speaking into Silences” project—funded by a Digital Justice Development grant from the ACLS—which brings together four mutual aid organizations from across the Puerto Rican archipelago to create onsite digital archives with mirror collections housed in the UPRM repository. Each local site will develop a public-facing digital output that bridges to the larger archive, such as a geospatial map, playlist, or calendar.
- How AREPR—a collaborative, multilingual oral history storytelling project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—utilizes methodologies grounded in community archiving and digital humanities to center community knowledges in active fieldwork; a process that both uplifts local experiences and has the potential to reshape the ways in which researchers envision their research projects as people-first, socially-conscious, and non-extractive.
Afro-Artivismo: Redefining Black Masculinity in São Paulo, Brazil
Friday, October 20, 2 p.m EDT
Eliseo Jacob, Master Instructor in the Department of World Languages & Cultures, Howard University
This webinar 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. I am currently developing a digital publication with Afro-PWW using the Scalar platform that will focus on the all male Afro-Brazilian theater group Terreiro Encantado and their use of theater as way to address the genocide of Black youth in the urban periphery. This digital publication will be the first in 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 in Brazil’s urban communities. I also intend to share how scholars can develop DH projects that involve community participation and feedback.
