Recovery projects are initiatives that aim to “locate, preserve and disseminate” historical records that have been devalued, dispersed, and destroyed through historical processes such as colonialism [Recovery 2020]. These projects depend on cross-organizational and multinational collaboration, and frequently decenter Europe and the United States. They provide access to widely dispersed collections of archival materials while building on new methods for crowdsourced transcription, text encoding, and descriptive metadata that better reflect the ambiguities and linguistic complexities of the colonial period. Within DCLAS, these projects have proliferated so widely that we cannot list them all here: some examples include the Primeros Libros de las Américas, the Fundación Histórica Neogranadina, A Colony in Crisis, Escritos de Mujeres, and coloniaLab.[7]

Three articles in this special issue address the challenges of recovery work. In her article on the Catálogo Colectivo de Marcas de Fuego, an index of authorities, Mercedes Isabel Salomón Salazar examines the obstacles faced by digital projects that need to reference bibliographical materials across different institutional systems. She demonstrates the difficulties of standardizing the study of provenance and coordinating a project across organizational and national boundaries. She also illustrates how collaborative recovery projects can lead to the uncovering of histories that were erased by the boundaries of collecting institutions.

George Allen Broadwell et al. address the particular challenges of recovering Indigenous materials in collaboration with scholarly, student, and Indigenous communities. They reflect upon Ticha, a digital text explorer for writings in Colonial Zapotec. They explain how Ticha provides access to little-known archival materials, enabling modern-day speakers of Zapotec to connect with the history of their language and communities. The authors also examine Ticha as a model for partnering with Indigenous stakeholders in the production of knowledge and the design of digital humanities endeavors.

In a similar fashion, Laura Matthew and Michael Bannister consider Nahuatl/Nawat in Central America (NECA), a project focused on recovering and making accessible Nahuan-language texts written during the colonial period in Central America. They explore the reasons for prioritizing this corpus and explain the history of the project and its technical evolution. By looking in part at site analytics, they also analyze the challenges that this project has faced, and formulate a model for moving forward.

We would also like to note here one additional project focused on recovery that we were, in the end, unable to feature in this issue. Digital Aponte is a project “dedicated to the life and work of José Antonio Aponte, a free man of color, carpenter, artist, and alleged leader of a massive antislavery conspiracy and rebellion in colonial Cuba in 1811-1812.” Digital Aponte is a creative reimagining of what it means to engage with archival silence; its subject is a lost volume produced by Aponte and recalled through notarial archives from the trial that would end his life [Rodriguez and Ferrer 2019]. Linda Rodriguez, the creator of Digital Aponte, passed away during the process of assembling this project and her contribution to this issue was never completed. Linda’s presence in our community ended too soon, and we dedicate this special issue to her.

Thinking critically about representations of place and space has been fundamental to CLAS, which has a long history of engaging with and disrupting the interaction between Indigenous boundaries and colonial borders. These areas of study benefit from new digital methodologies, which bring together what Thomas Padilla has named “collections-as-data” with technologies for geospatial representation [Padilla 2020]. For example, projects like Maria José Afanador Llach’s Mapping Nature in New Granada and the broadly collaborative Power of Attorney take advantage of the affordances of digital technology to see history differently, allowing us to engage with historical categories ranging from borders and languages to legal codes and natural resources.

In this special issue, Patricia Murrieta-Flores et al. approach these questions by examining how computational approaches can expedite and facilitate the identification, analysis, and cross-referencing of vast amounts of historical, anthropological, and archaeological information available in sixteenth-century sources. Murrieta-Flores et al. consider the the experiences of the Digging into Early Colonial Mexico project, which focuses on the analysis of the Relaciones geográficas, a set of responses to a sixteenth-century questionnaire completed for the Spanish Crown by local colonial administrators. Their work demonstrates the potential of these methods to address questions relating to the economy, culture, natural history, and religious practices of New Spain.

Emma Slayton draws on archaeological data about Indigenous Caribbean settlements to model hypothetical canoe routes between Trinidad and the mainland coast of South America, exploring how possible avenues of travel were changed or interrupted during the early colonial period. Her work shows how data-driven analysis can complement the written record to better describe the impact of colonization on Indigenous communities.

By extending beyond the practice of close reading to explore cultural analytics and extratextual evidence, these projects allow us to find new ways of knowing that extend beyond the narrow perspective inscribed in the colonial text. This can allow us to locate new information left out of the historical record, as Slayton writes. It can also, in the words of Murrieta et al., “facilitate the discovery and analysis of geographies not immediately apprehended with normal reading.”

Questions surrounding labor and pedagogy — separate categories which are nonetheless closely intertwined — are central to DCLAS. Like the Ticha and Nahuatl/Nawatl projects described by Broadwell et al. and Matthews and Bannister in this issue, much current work in DCLAS involves envisioning new models for accomplishing scholarly work. This often entails imagining ways to achieve more equitable relationships across national boundaries, among scholarly institutions, and with groups that have been historically marginalized within academic settings, including Black and Indigenous scholars, language activists, and knowledge and heritage communities. Examples of such projects would be the digitization of the Fondo Real de Cholula, a collaboration between scholars and librarians at the University of Texas and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, the digital edition of the Codex Mendoza developed by the Instituto Nacional de Arqueología e Historia (Mexico), Mesolore, and Musical Passages.

Current work in digital colonial Latin American Studies pushes us to think critically about what it means to teach about the colonial world in the digital age. Projects like Ticha and coloniaLab involve students as participants or primary collaborators, and include reflection on that student involvement as a central component of their work [Flores-Marcial 2020] [Lillehaugen 2020] [McCarl et al. 2020] [Palacios 2020]. Other projects deploy technology to provide new learning opportunities for those who do not have access to attend in-person classes related to the colonial world. Two examples are Chqeta’maj le qach’ab’al k’iche’, a language-learning resource for K’iche’ Maya, and Programming Historian en Español, which offers free training resources in digital humanities for researchers working in multiple languages. As we write this introduction from our home-offices (or our kitchen tables) while under stay-at-home orders during the coronavirus pandemic, the importance of these resources and the critical apparatus that informs them are at the forefront of our minds.

In this special issue, Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank explores the merits and drawbacks of using digital visual materials, both scholarly and pedagogically, for understanding and analyzing colonial Latin American art. She demonstrates how instructors can use digital methods in teaching to reveal how “the digital frames or reframes our understanding of visual culture and to effectively critique it.” In one example, Kilroy-Ewbank discusses how an active role in the creation of metadata — a process often overlooked or regarded as acritical — can alter students’ understanding of the objects we study and the biases inherent in scholarly work.

One commonality across projects in DCLAS, as is often the case in DH more generally, is an attention to the bringing together of theory and practice. Slavery in the Machine, the third issue of the Archipelagos journal of digital Caribbean studies, is a model for the breadth of theoretical possibility in colonial DH [Johnson 2019]. The work represented in that issue, much of which draws on the history of colonization and enslavement, envisions and implements a digital humanities based in a theoretical space of movement and change, a Caribbean that “won’t stand still” or an isla que se repite [Glover and Gil 2019]. In this framework, experimentation exists alongside critique, silence alongside voicing, and mourning alongside rebirth.

Similarly, in their survey of digital research on visual culture in Spanish America, Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn describe a field of scholarship that reconfigures ways of knowing, seeing, and working together, even as it works with and through digital tools [Mundy and Leibsohn 2017]. As Maria José Afanador Llach writes, in the digital humanities “nos enfrentamos a procesos de producción de conocimiento mediados por el pensamiento computacional, el software y las interfaces digitales” [8] [Afanador Llach 2019]. Even as colonial digital humanists build tools and platforms, digitize documents, enter metadata, and design websites, they work to understand the alignment between the tools we use, the things we see, and the knowledge that we make possible. This can involve not just thinking critically about digital tools and their interaction with social and cultural factors of colonial and post-colonial communities, but also investing in the construction of new technologies that better reflect scholarly values [Alpert-Abrams 2016] [Alpert-Abrams 2017].

The questions of theory and praxis that emerge from the articles in this special issue open new ways of theorizing DCLAS. These largely collaborative projects aim to produce “transformative work” by way of an iterative process conducted “through an ongoing conversation with user communities” [Matthew and Bannister 2020]. As Matthew and Bannister write in this issue, this introduces a “paradigmatic change” in how scholars work together, with far-reaching consequences for knowledge production in and beyond the academy. They open the possibility, in the words of Broadwell et al., for a form of digital humanities that “democratize[s] access to materials and resources.” As Matthew and Bannister add, however, these projects also introduce new problems as we think through their relationship with colonial and neoliberal politics, the technology industry, and institutions of higher education in the United States and Latin America.

This collection points to various possibilities for CLAS. The articles gathered here illustrate ways that digital scholarship can provide new pathways to conducting scholarship in a collaborative fashion. They suggest innovative means for representing the heterogeneous and incomplete nature of the colonial archive. They demonstrate how the curation of colonial data sets can enable new ways of understanding Latin American history. Likewise, they show how digital pedagogy, or critical approaches to the selective use of digital tools and resources in teaching and learning, offers new ways for students to engage with colonial material and textual history.

This is not to say that DCLAS does not continue to face challenges, many of them made explicit by this special issue, both through its content and the circumstance surrounding its publication. Foremost among these challenges are issues related to peer review, the precarious professional circumstances of many within DCLAS, as well as the need we face, as a field, to think critically about how we engage digitally with colonial-era materials.

Like many scholarly projects, this special issue faced significant challenges during the process of peer review. We originally intended to publish these pieces in a more traditional humanities journal, but after careful consideration, the editors determined that review and revision of these project- and pedagogy-oriented initiatives was too far out of scope of that publication. This problem was exacerbated by the professional diversity of those involved, who include not only research/teaching faculty, but also faculty members, librarians, programmers, students, and language activists — voices not often included in many conventional humanities forums. A DH journal turned out to be a more appropriate home, but identifying reviewers who could speak to these articles as work sitting at the intersection of DH and CLAS proved to be another challenge.

All of these circumstances reflect the broader difficulty that digital humanists have in demonstrating the value of their work, with real consequences for hiring, tenure, and promotion, as well as for the sustainability of projects themselves. Such dynamics play out in CLAS in ways that are common across the humanities, with many of the scholars who are engaged in digital work within CLAS not emerging from, or entirely identifying with, the disciplinary routes that traditionally have fed into the field. As a consequence, such scholars do not have a clear path into a professional existence within the very area of inquiry that they are best positioned to help transform. Higher education in the United States and many other parts of the world continues to rely for administrative purposes on the notions of disciplines, and many scholars themselves, particularly in the face of financial cuts to vulnerable areas, defend such disciplinary lines. In an extremely tight job market, those who might identify first-and-foremost as practitioners of DCLAS face a difficult challenge in selling their broadly focused skills to disciplinary departments who are often searching for candidates with more traditional profiles who can teach more conventional coursework. The lines that have long separated librarianship from the labor of research/teaching faculty exacerbate the problem, as practitioners of DCLAS might naturally fit into a professional sphere that could span both areas, but at the present, that space is extremely limited.

On a conceptual level, practitioners of DCLAS face a need to imagine the common questions that should be asked about how we interact digitally with colonial-era objects. This is a topic that arose during a panel at DH2018 in Mexico City, and was one of the objectives of the first meeting of the Association for Digital Research in Early Latin America (ADRELA), held at the annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association in Boston the following year.[9] As was discussed at both events, a shared protocol might be not only of a logistical nature, but also have ethical implications, helping us to consider the assumptions behind our tools and their conceptual models that might distort our work in ways we do not realize. Such questions might also address the ways that our own assumptions — as specific people working in specific contexts — do the same.

In gathering together the articles in this collection, we seek to advance the emerging conversation about the role of digital scholarship within CLAS and contribute to the formation of a more coherent digital humanities community in the field. We also seek to understand how articles like those collected here help CLAS connect with larger conversations about scholarship in the twenty-first century, and consider how digital methods can expand the ways we study, understand, and interact with the colonial period in Latin America. Perhaps most importantly, we hope to emphasize DH as a point of entry for a new generation of scholars in our field, which — like DH itself — is inherently interdisciplinary, and built upon an enthusiasm for innovation and collaboration.

Much of the work in this special issue has been touched by local and global crises, including climate change, the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. immigration policy, and the defunding of humanities programs at academic institutions in the United States. During the three years that this collection was developed, contributors were directly and indirectly impacted by multiple health crises, wildfires, travel bans, and campus closures, while one editor of this volume no longer works in academia. These events draw attention to the precarious conditions of our histories, our communities, and our industries, even as they make the values of openness, access, collaboration, and virtual connection that underlie these projects more essential than ever. Likewise, in the current moment of instability, crisis, and misinformation, the value of using digital technologies to preserve and provide access to culture has never been greater, particularly when those tools can empower us to recover stories that have been lost or erased.