Category: Project

Día de los muertos: Altar digital is an ArcGIS StoryMap journey through Hispanic literary heritage. It walks users through different authors, elements, and works that are placed on an ofrenda, created in 2020 by Roselia Bañuelos, Chris Flakus, Julio Antonio Molinete, Elías David Navarro, María Sánchez Carbajo, Alonzo Silavong, and Katerin Zapata at the University of Houston. From the introduction, which like the project, is in Spanish:

El Altar del Día de los muertos de Arte Público Press de la Universidad de Houston celebra y recuerda a sus autores. Todos los elementos están presentes, como se viene haciendo en México y otros países latinoamericanos desde tiempos ancestrales.

Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry, is a collaboration between Kate Elswit (University of London) and Harmony Bench (Ohio State University), and investigates problematizes the analysis and visualization of meaningful data in dance history. Through the case study of choreographer Katherine Dunham, the team has manually cataloged “daily itineraries of Dunham’s touring and travel from the 1930s-60s, the dancers, drummers, and singers in her employ during that time, and the repertory they performed. These curated datasets provide new means to understand the relationships between thousands of locations, and hundreds of performers and pieces across the decades of Dunham’s career, and ultimately elaborate how movement moves.”

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (University of Houston) announces the launch of a new digital project, The Latino Catskills, designed to “resituates the rural Catskills region, located 100 miles northwest of New York City, as a generative space of Latino culture and identities” by focusing on the “countless Spaniards, Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others of Latin American descent” who vacationed in the Catskills. From the announcement:

Generously funded by a 2021–2022 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-US Latino Digital Humanities (USLDH) Grant-in-Aid, our project seeks to illuminate this important, if understudied, aspect of New York Latino history by building a digitized archive of significant Latino Catskills sites with associated primary sources and material objects. A mapping interface will allow web visitors to plot their own virtual itineraries through the region and explore a trove of cultural materials, including advertisements, brochures, photographs, audio recordings, and relevant news coverage related to the scores of now-defunct resorts, hotels, restaurants, and villas that served as a summer vacation network for a Latino clientele. At a later stage of development, this digital map will also connect to a series of multimedia-rich, thematic “exhibits” that interpret and tell the stories of these sites, objects, and people, from everyday Latino holidaymakers to luminaries such as the Cuban patriot José Martí, the Mexican writer José Juan Tablada, and musical virtuosi like Tito Puente and El Gran Combo, who enlivened the remarkable summer music scene that boomed in the area during the 1950s and ’60s. The digital map and accompanying exhibits will render visible the historical and spatial extension, as well as the cultural richness, of the Latino Catskills, while also broadening Latino geographies beyond their dominant urbanscapes.

Ultimately, “the project aims to recover leisure, rest, and recreation as important social components of the Latino experience that enhance and complement dominant narratives of New York Latinidad, which have traditionally focused on the racialized experiences of urban poverty and toil. Latinos have long contributed to the economic and cultural richness of the Catskills. The Latino Catskills project rightfully reclaims the region’s rugged landscape as part of Latinos’ vibrant history and heritage.”

Keep an eye out for this project’s development and follow the work of Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage.

JSTOR Labs announced a new project, Juncture:

Juncture is a free-to-use, open source framework for converting simple text files into an engaging visual essay. A visual essay is an interactive and responsive web page that augments a text narrative with visual elements to provide depth and context.

With Juncture you can create a single essay or build a full website consisting of multiple visual essays with navigation, site info pages, contact form, logo, and other simple customizations.

Juncture essays “are linked open data aware texts augmented with engaging and interactive components, including annotated high-resolution images, network visualizations, interactive maps and other elements.”

Juncture is free/open source and adheres to minimal computing principles. Juncture requires a free GitHub account and “an interest in visual storytelling.” Learn more to explore the project showcase and documentation.

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage’s US Latino Digital Humanities program (USLDH) launched a new digital project, Printed Pathways in US Latino Periodicals. According to a recent news release, this “is a comprehensive authority list that contains robust bibliographic information about Latina/o authors and poets who published in US Latino periodicals. With over 4,800 records, “Printed Pathways” makes visible the complex network of Latina/o authors–who published where and who was mentioned in which newspapers. The records include data such as author name, nationality, gender, newspaper title and place of publication, genre, pseudonym and more.”

Led by Gabriela Baeza Ventura (co-founder of USLDH, Executive Editor of Arte Público Press, and Associate Professor of Hispanic Literature in the Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston), the project features a network visualization of Latinx writing “that enacts a powerful counter narrative to any belief that our community was inactive intellectually, that they did not write or publish.” Built on Graph Commons, the visualization, which was designed by Graduate Research Assistant, Isis Campos, “allows searches on the digital project and users can zoom in and out to explore the network. Purple dots represent authors, while red dots represent the periodicals.” Utilizing a Twitter bot, Filling the Gaps (@Fillingthe_gaps), Research Assistants extracted data about Latinx authors and the newspapers they publish in to build the visualization.

“Printed Pathways” was created by USLDH at the University of Houston with support from the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, which “awarded UH a grant to establish a first-of-its-kind US Latino Digital Humanities Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. The program gives scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinas/os and archived by the Recovery program and Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Hispanic authors from the United States.”

Printed Pathways Research and Data Team

Carolina Villarroel, PhD: research, data, project ideation
Isis Campos: digital platform research, project management
Roselia Bañuelos: data entry
María Borjas: data entry
Tanya Campos: data entry
Melanyn Cabrera (SER Bank of America Intern): data entry
Emily Deleon (SER Bank of America Intern): data entry
Sonia Del Hierro: data entry
Sylvia Fernández: data entry
Victoria Moreno: data entry
Elías David Navarro: data entry
Jose-Luis Quintero: data entry
María Sánchez Carbajo: data entry

USLDH Team
Gabriela Baeza Ventura, PhD (Co-Founder)
Carolina Villarroel, PhD, CA (Co-Founder)
Lorena Gauthereau, PhD (Digital Programs Manager)
Linda García Merchant, PhD (USLDH Postdoctoral Fellow)

 

Huber Digital has released PRISMS, or PRImary Source Materials & Scholarship, a collaborative and open scholarship tool for publishing, collaboration, and analysis of digital editions with primary source materials.

PRISMS is a flexible Open Scholarship platform, with the potential to aggregate all digitised primary source material, and the associated scholarship, in a semantic network. It is being launched with corpora from the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO-TCP), EVANS Early American Imprint Collection (EVANS-TCP), the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA) extended core corpus, and the Taylor Editions scholarly editions platform. In PRISMS you are able to contribute your own digitised texts (see digitisation training) and also add external texts and contextual resources to the network. For example, if a facsimile corresponding to an EEBO-TCP transcription has been digitised, then the link to the digital facsimile can be added to the network and the page images viewed, alongside the digital text, within PRISMS. […]

PRISMS was born out of the realization that digital editions do not break with the historicity or materiality of the sources they organize and present, but instead remediate and extend them in ways that enable new forms of access, engagement, presentation, and analysis. We subscribe to Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner’s view of “the digital as a frankly messy complex of extensions and extrusions of prior media and technologies”, a view that “does not posit a transcendental “digital” that somehow stands outside the historical and material legacies of other artifacts and phenomena” (Matthew Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, ‘Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: The State of the Discipline’. Book History 17 (2014), 406-458, here 408). As a publication and open scholarship platform, PRISMS hopes to participate in a collective effort to narrow rather than broaden the divide of the material and digital in this media continuum.

In PRISMS, we conceptualize digital editions as living entities that perform rather than merely document the remediation they engage in. The scholarship that underpins each digital edition provides the essential context for these remediation processes and collectively they sustain the knowledge network that supports all academic engagement with the texts from any disciplinary viewpoint. PRISMS is designed to allow for the collaborative and collective modelling of this continuum of digital editions and scholarship by placing digital editions, their material basis, and the resulting academic engagement in a linked context, building on the standards and tools provided by the Semantic Web.

This project serves as an innovative example of open scholarship in the digital humanities.

This project will no doubt become an integral resource for holistic and sustainable approaches supporting DH initiatives, both new and old, from inception to burial.

Launched in December 2020 through the University of Buffalo Libraries, Digital Humanities Net/Works is an online forum and journal that offers opportunities for the “the exchange of ideas among DH practitioners on the most significant questions or issues in our field and on ways to rethink technology and online structures in order to make them more responsive to issues of diversity and inclusion.” Further,

The DH Net/Works constitutes a digital experiment in networking, beyond the blog, more flexible than the journal, and oriented toward initiating structures of change. Like a journal, it has an editor and advisory board; like a blog, it allows relatively simple entry into the conversation, quick response turn-around, and strong encouragement to include a diversity and range of voices.

DH Net/Works takes as its platform and focus both the “net”/internet and the products and agency of our “works,” the activity of our research and digital productivity and what we hope may become a growing community of scholars thinking and working collaboratively to make digital systems, structures, and algorithms as open, accessible, and equitable as possible.

The premium in DH Net/Works editorial oversight (Editorial Principles) is on openness of scholarly exchange, adhering to principles of equity and diversity, and maintaining an atmosphere of respect, leading ideally toward possibilities for collaborative thinking and action. It constitutes a digital experiment in networking, beyond the blog, more flexible than the journal, and oriented toward initiating structures of change. Obviously, this includes openness to change and experimentation on the DHN/W site itself, which is continually in process.

DH Net/Works represents an important dynamic experiment not only in digital publishing, but also as an effort towards collectivity and open collaboration amongst DH practitioners. 

The Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum has announced the launch of a new digital platform for exploring “more than 1.2 million objects spanning 5,000 years of history in its collections of art, design and performance.” While the project has been in development for two years, its release compensates for the museum’s ongoing closure due to the global pandemic.

A far more immersive platform than the previous online catalog, this new platform features “autosuggested keywords in the search bar, the ability to filter and map objects that are currently on display in the museum’s physical locations, category tags and a ‘visual smorgasbord’ at the end of every page that links to related objects in the collection.”

Virtual museum goers can explore a range of collections, including: costumes, glass, underwear, photography, theatre & performance, postwar design, jewelry, books and manuscripts, paintings, and wallpaper, to name a few.