Compartir lo que nos une. Digitizing and Curating Colonial Records from the Caribbean and Central and South America for Public Outreach
Overview
When digitizing and curating the colonial past, digital objects are not simply surrogates, but also ways of seeing and interpreting the world: slavery, colonization, and transculturation are embedded in any document, and if interrogated, their digital representations can become tools for understanding the impact of imperialism and colonialism in the present.
Consequently, digitization and curation of nineteenth-century Caribbean and Central American collections give rise to new questions and challenges in the field of DH: How can we preserve endangered documents while keeping in mind their present-day needs & concerns? How can we digitize and give access to documents dispersed across international institutions to create meaningful collections around slavery? How can we curate data to imagine and visualize space beyond--often artificially imposed--geographical and temporal constraints? Or how can create digital records about oppressed people that transcend their oppressors?
This panel brings together a diverse group of researchers from the Caribbean, South America, Central America, and Europe in order to place digitization and curatorial practices within the analytic framework of cultural encounter described as “post-colonial computing” (Dourish, 2010: 91) and of the post-custodial institutional partnership model (Kelleher, 2017; Alpert-Abrams, Bliss, & Carbajal, 2019). While these encounters and partnerships enable new and exciting collaborations, their processes, epistemological conditions, and products should be critically examined in order not to replicate neo-colonial attitudes often ingrained in digital technologies, and instead support local communities and promote public outreach.
The panel addresses one of the main themes of the conference--“the historical and continued impacts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and hegemony”--and talks will be both in English (Hubert and Levi) and Spanish (Rojas Castro, Kraft and Kraller, and Afanador-Llach); presenters will provide translations to facilitate dialogue between participants and audience.
Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiatives at the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC)
Hadassah St. Hubert
CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow
Digital Library of the Caribbean at Florida International University hsthuber@fiu.edu
How can we protect and preserve endangered archives in Haiti? In 2010, Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) launched the Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative, which builds on strong, existing long term partnerships, with an emphasis on accountability and transparency. This talk will focus on the numerous digitization projects, digital exhibits created since the launch of the initiative, and how dLOC engages the public.
dLOC built Haiti: An Island Luminous, a tri-lingual website to help readers learn about Haiti’s history. “Haiti: An Island Luminous” combines rare books, manuscripts, and photos scanned by archives and libraries in Haiti and the United States with commentary by over one hundred (100) authors from universities around the world. “Haiti: An Island Luminous” contextualizes hundreds of historical books, documents and photos digitally preserved by dLOC’s partners, including the National Archives of Haiti, the National Library of Haiti, Haitian Library of the Fathers of the Holy Spirit (Pères du St-Esprit), Haitian Library of the Brothers of Christian Instruction (Frères de l’Instruction Chrètienne), University of Florida, Brown University, and University of Central Florida.
dLOC currently hosts over 40,000 titles with more than four million pages of content, much of which is accessible content related to Haiti. Since the launch of “Haiti: An Island Luminous”, exhibit stations were placed in the Little Haiti Cultural Center, Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art, Sant La Haitian Neighborhood Center and more recently at North Miami Public Library in an effort to reach an even larger audience.
dLOC partners in Haiti have been able to contribute more digital content due to the efforts of many scholars that have collaborated to apply for Endangered Archive Programme grants, as well as support from the World Bank, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, and the Haitian Studies Association. All of these efforts have made dLOC the largest open access repository of Caribbean content and a significant resource for finding materials from and about the Caribbean for use in teaching, research, cultural and community life.
Reconstruyendo la huella de Humboldt en Cuba. Retos y oportunidades de la digitalización del patrimonio documental cubano-alemán del siglo XIX
Antonio Rojas Castro, Tobias Kraft y Kathrin Kraller
Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
antonio.rojas-castro@bbaw.de
kraft@bbaw.de
kathrin.kraller@bbaw.de
Grisel Terrón, Eritk Guerra y Alaina Solernou
Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana
grisel@patrimonio.ohc.cu
eritk@dic.ohc.cu
alaina@patrimonio.ohc.cu
Con esta comunicación pretendemos debatir sobre los principales retos y oportunidades que supone la cooperación, en el marco del Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD), entre la Academia de las Ciencias y las Humanidades de Berlín (BBAW) y la Casa Humboldt de la Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana (OHCH). En concreto, nos gustaría responder a la siguiente pregunta: ¿cómo podemos cooperar para el beneficio mutuo (Sennett, 2012)? A continuación, analizaremos el estado actual de la digitalización y las Humanidades Digitales en Cuba. Por último, expondremos los primeros avances orientados hacia la construcción de un repositorio digital y la edición de documentos.
El futuro repositorio digital de ProHD tiene por objetivo preservar y dar acceso en línea a varias colecciones de documentos de naturaleza transnacional y multilingüe (español, francés y alemán), que permitan reconstruir no solo la “huella” del científico prusiano, sino también el pensamiento de muchos intelectuales y políticos locales, como Francisco Arango y Parreño, y las condiciones en que se producía el negocio esclavista, por ejemplo, mediante la digitalización de facturas de compra y venta. De esta manera, al poner la figura de Alexander von Humboldt en su contexto histórico, los usuarios obtendrán una mirada nueva y completa al problema de la esclavitud y al funcionamiento del sistema colonial, que condenaba a Cuba al monocultivo y a importar bienes de primera necesidad procedentes de la Metrópolis.
A fin de obtener digitalizaciones y ediciones académicas digitales fáciles de encontrar, accesibles, interoperables y sostenibles, se han planeado tres medidas principales, que están implementándose desde junio de 2019: en primer lugar, se ha adquirido equipamiento para reforzar la infraestructura tecnológica (ordenadores, escáneres de alta resolución, servidor, impresora, mobiliario, etc.) de la Casa Humboldt en La Habana en donde se llevará a cabo la digitalización de los documentos; en segundo lugar, se ha formado a los miembros del equipo mediante cursos (en línea, sobre todo a partir del confinamiento provocado por la COVID-19) sobre el proceso de digitalización, la creación de metadatos y la gestión de repositorios digitales. Por último, se han definido de manera conjunta unos criterios de selección de documentos, una política de digitalización y un flujo de trabajo compartido.
Inventar el virreinato de la Nueva Granada: curaduría crítica de fuentes primarias y la construcción de conjuntos de datos espaciales, 1739-1810
María José Afanador-Llach
Universidad de los Andes, Colombia
mj.afanador28@uniandes.edu.co
La invención del virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada (hoy Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador y Panamá) en 1739 respondió a un proyecto económico de la monarquía española para proteger el norte de Suramérica de incursiones extranjeras y extraer mayores recursos para la corona. Dicho proyecto de búsqueda de unidad administrativa y geográfica se nutrió de la producción de conocimiento sobre economía política, es decir, sobre cómo crear riqueza en contextos de competencia. En fuentes primarias como mapas, textos sobre economía y descripciones geográficas creados por burócratas, naturalistas y militares en la colonia, se evidencian las dificultades de integrar un territorio montañoso y extenso y la importancia de la imaginación geográfica en este proceso.
El proyecto de integración territorial del virreinato se rompió con la crisis monárquica de 1808 cuando el reino se fragmentó en más de una docena de provincias autónomas. La crisis representó una oportunidad para que pueblos y ciudades avanzaran sus proyectos económicos locales y se imaginaran espacios económicos post-coloniales. La pregunta central que guía este proyecto es: ¿cómo se puede visualizar la relación entre la búsqueda de unidad territorial en el norte de Suramérica y la diversidad de paisajes y economías políticas en tensión en una interfaz de archivo y un mapa digital?
Esta ponencia explora los avances de este proyecto en sus dos primeras fases. La primera fase consiste en la curaduría crítica de fuentes primarias entre 1739 y 1810. Esta curaduría consiste en la selección de documentos, de fragmentos dentro de los documentos y de mapas del periodo, para organizarlos, enriquecer sus metadatos y disponerlos alrededor de un argumento y una narrativa histórica. Algunos de estos documentos se encuentran disponibles en libros editados, otros están digitalizados y un número pequeño se digitalizará. La segunda fase consiste la formulación de un proceso metodológico para extraer datos sobre las dimensiones espaciales y de economía política de este conjunto curado de fuentes primarias. Se trata de generar conjuntos de datos relacionales que permitan visualizar, analizar e interpretar transformaciones históricas-espaciales de la invención y crisis del virreinato de la Nueva Granada y los actores involucrados en este proceso. El proyecto busca que tanto la curaduría de fuentes primarias como los conjuntos de datos sean recursos abiertos en español para la investigación y docencia sobre el periodo. La ponencia discutirá los retos a los que se ha enfrentado el proyecto hasta el momento en términos de la curaduría de documentos y la definición metodológica para la extracción de datos.
Beyond digitization: Engaging the Community to Decolonize the Archival Record for the Enslaved
Amalia S. Levi
Archivist, Chair
The HeritEdge Connection, Barbados
amalia@heritedge.foundation
During 2018 and 2019, two historic newspapers, The Barbados Mercury Gazette (1783-1848) and The Barbadian (1822-1861), housed in the Barbados Department of Archives, were digitized through Endangered Archives Programme grants. As primary sources, they offer a detailed view of every aspect of the dystopian life in a British colony in the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Digitization offers unparalleled access to these colonial newspapers that were previously largely inaccessible due to their fragility.
The presentation goes beyond digitization to discuss what happens after digitization is completed. Considering that the newspapers were part of the colonial information apparatus, how do we read against the grain to locate and reveal marginalized voices hidden in the digitized pages?
If our aim is to “lift” the voices of the enslaved from the pages, and retrospectively create a body of archival records, we need to provide access to the digitized pages as data. Such information however exists “locked” in digitized images that due to the deterioration of the paper and the discoloration of the pages are impossible to OCR. Finding and transcribing these ads is necessarily a manual process, at present.
Among the wealth of information appearing regularly in the newspapers, of particular importance are the “runaway slaves” ads. Archives usually preserve very little descriptive information about the enslaved, because their lived experiences were rarely recorded. When they appear in the archival record, they are enumerated or appraised as commodities. Thus these ads offer a rich trove of information about individual people, including name, age, physical appearance, skin color, clothing, accent, distinguishing features (such as body modifications from their country of origin or bodily harm, the result of violence), friends, relatives, and skills.
Digitization does not solve the gaps, silences, and omissions inherent in the archival record and the colonial epistemologies they contain. Colonial newspapers reflect the voices of the white class of planters, merchants, and colonial authorities. Simply digitizing and putting online risks elevating and amplifying the very colonial worldviews we mean to avoid.
To decolonize the record about the enslaved, digitization is only the starting point for further projects and initiatives to engage the community with its own history. Recent scholarship and public humanities efforts have shown that it is possible to challenge the erasure of colonial archival sources and read between the lines to tease out information that is not readily visible.
Our aim is to create a collection of material by clipping “runaway slaves” ads from the digitized newspapers, transcribing the text, and enriching the human stories in each ad with additional contextual information. More specifically, the first part of the presentation will focus on work to develop the “Barbados Runaway Slaves Digital Collection,” a partnership between the Barbados Archives, the local non-profit HeritEdge Connection, and the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) at Northeastern University (Boston).
This digital collection aims to foreground the centrality of enslaved voices by ‘lifting’ ads of individuals who chose to escape slavery from the pages of the newspapers, and turning them into individual, standalone archival records previously unrecorded in the archives. When completed, the “Runaway Slaves Digital Collection” will provide a central location for collecting and presenting these ads, and other opportunities for the public, especially students, both in Barbados, as well as abroad, to interact with the material in creative ways.
By ‘reading’ these ads in various ways and being able to ‘see’ them collectively, we can start seeing patterns and coping mechanisms. At the same time, the availability of this information points to what is not there, and invites us to be sensitive to gaps and silences.
The second part of the presentation will discuss public outreach initiatives. Material digitized through generous grants by institutions in the Global North are eventually hosted in digital platforms in those institutions. While praiseworthy, digitization through such grants ends up benefiting scholars in the Global North. Usually local people are unaware of these platforms, and often unable to access them, either due to bandwidth issues or simply to interfaces that might not be intuitive to use. We have tried to remedy this by focusing on public history work we are doing to increase awareness of and engagement with these digitized colonial records.
During the fall of 2019, we conducted a series of workshops aimed to familiarize the public with accessing the newspapers online and to transcribe ads. The workshops also provided a platform for the public to discuss the ads, and the many facets of slavery. People were able to see ancestors who chose to resist and escape bondage in adverse, inhumane conditions. Due to COVID-19, workshops planned for 2020 are being held online. The aim of these workshops is to engage people with the ads in creative ways, through genealogical research, speculative writing, or digital methods. In this way, we invite the public to contextualize the ads through their local knowledge of places mentioned in the ads, or intimate information about lived experiences. Beyond information that is there, we also hope that workshop participants can imagine what is not there, complete the stories, and give enslaved individuals their place in the archival record.
Additionally, the digitization of these primary sources has great potential for digital projects by students and other researchers that can highlight various aspects of the island’s history. The “runaway slaves” ads help people challenge the customary narrative of Barbadian passivity and submissiveness to slavery; reconstruct family and community networks that supported enslaved Barbadians; and they help give voice to ancestors, whom colonial records intentionally left voiceless.
Bibliographic References
Alpert-Abrams, H. Bliss, D. A., and Carbajal I. “Post-Custodialism for the Collective Good: Examining Neoliberalism in US-Latin American Archival Partnerships”. In: “Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies”, eds. Marika Cifor and Jamie A. Lee. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2.1 (2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v2i1.87
Dourish, P. “‘Computational Thinking’ and the Postcolonial in the Teaching from Country Programme”. Learning Communities. International Journal of Learning in Social Contexts, 2 (2010): 91-101.
Kelleher, Ch. “Archives without Archives: (Re)Locating and (Re)Defining the Archive Through Post-Custodial Praxis”. In: “Critical Archival Studies”, eds. Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, 1.2 (2017). DOI: https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v1i2.29
Sennett, Richard. Juntos. Rituales, Placeres y políticas de la cooperación. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2012.