The principal researcher on the project had previous contact with Digital Humanities due to postgraduate studies in the UK. There are a number of self-reflective articles on the role, organization and future of Digital Humanities which is typical of an emerging field and they attempt not only to define but also to understand the role, impact and challenges of developing digital projects as part of research and teaching in the Humanities [Svensson 2009]. With this in mind from the onset it was considered that DH literature would provide a suitable framework for developing the research project.

Four workshops were organized between September 2010 and June 2011 under the name “Digital Humanities”. The aims of the first two workshops were: to share experiences in the development of digitization and digital resource creation in the Humanities; identify the main difficulties and limitations for DH; discuss and identify the necessary skills for human resources, and to define concrete actions to strengthen and improve digital projects in the Humanities. The last two workshops were specifically aimed at consolidating the RedHD.

One of the first challenges was selecting the participants for the workshops. The aims of the workshop required that the participants have some experience working with digital projects in the Humanities. They were not just informative but also participative. As part of the research project a database of digital projects within the UNAM web space — www.unam.mx — had previously been compiled. This was done by selecting the web pages of all the Humanities-related schools and institutes and navigating through the different links finding and registering digital resources created by university members. This database was used to contact the creators of these resources and invite them to the workshops when possible. Additionally, they were strongly encouraged to invite colleagues with similar backgrounds, creating a snowball effect. Although originally the workshop was only UNAM members, colleagues from other universities became interested in participating and they were included.

In order to be as inclusive as possible the definition of a digital project in the Humanities field was broad. The participants had worked on projects such as XIX century manuscripts markup, digital images (research in pre Hispanic mural paintings, visualizations archeological sites), sound files (linguistics research in indigenous languages), computational linguistics (text mining, corpus of Mexican Spanish), computational creativity (story building) as well as digital journals, collections and libraries. Table 1 shows number of participants by field for each workshop.

For the most part the involvement of participants was fairly constant throughout the workshops and we managed to consolidate a core group. Excessive workload or previous commitments were the most common reasons for not participating.

As previously mentioned, Digital Humanities concepts were used to framework the research. The first workshop began with an introduction to DH explaining its history, main concepts, communication channels, publications and discussions. We defined DH as “an area of research and teaching at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities,” which was taken from the Digital Humanities Wikipedia entry. The principal researcher did, however, previously attempt to find a more concise definition, but this proved problematic. A member of an established DH centre responded to the following when asked for a definition of DH: “a very familiar question! and there is no answer, I'm afraid...I'm currently seeing through press our next edited volume (...) in which we round up all the crucial papers and blog posts in the area and bundle it all into one teaching text that goes ‘there is no one definition! see!’”[2]

In the first workshop only one participant had heard of DH. This was due to a sabbatical in the United States. However, by the fourth workshop two more participants, PhD students in Spanish Literature from the University of Western Ontario in Canada, were familiar with DH. It is worth adding that they had heard of the efforts to establish the RedHD through the participation of several workshop members in March 2011 of Day of DH and this was how contact was established.

The introduction to DH was followed by a group discussion which focused on the experiences that participants had when developing a digital project. In order to provide a framework for the conversation, we identified seven key topics from the DH literature. These key topics were then addressed in the form of questions that participants were invited to respond to orally, and this in turn was discussed within the group. Key topics are listed below and the specific questions are provided in Appendix 1.

The results of these two initial workshops have been reported in much more detail elsewhere [Galina 2012b], but in summary a common characteristic was that participants felt that there was little infrastructural and institutional support for the development of their digital projects and no policies or guidelines in place. Some enjoyed this marginality as it allowed them to work more independently, while others remarked on the difficulties of investing time in a project that was not recognized as “proper” research. Everyone felt that there was little recognition of the value of their work from colleagues and evaluation committees. Contrary to what was expected, participants had few difficulties obtaining funding (albeit small amounts) but in general had more trouble finding and retaining students or research assistants with the appropriate combination of digital skills and a Humanities background to help with the work. Projects were generally a personal initiative, were not properly documented due to lack of time, and there was concern about what would happen to them once the funding run out. As put by one participant, “When does a project become the university’s service and somebody else’s responsibility?” The long-term future of most of these resources was not assured as hosting and maintenance was precarious for almost all projects.

As our discussion focused on general issues related to working on a DH project, we did not find significant differences amongst disciplinary backgrounds. We found that we had similar problems despite the different topics of the digital projects. Although most participants had not previously heard of DH, there was considerable interest in hearing about this field and how it could help them out with their own digital projects. In particular, participants reported a sense of marginality in their workplace and they felt that they benefited from talking to “other people like me.” In this sense the knowledge that there was a larger community of scholars with similar interests and challenges was revealing. At this particular point, participants were interested in how as a local group we could collaborate together towards the “professionalization” of the type of work we were doing as well as address our common challenges together. We did not however, reflect on the nature of Digital Humanities or go into too much depth about its definition. Rather, it served as a useful umbrella term that helped group us together. Possibly the most notable result was that although originally only two workshops were planned, at the end of the second one the group decided to continue to meet in order to address pending issues. It was concluded that the best way forward was to create a DH association that would allow us to deal with them collectively, rather than individually. This was the focus of the next two workshops.

One of the first challenges was moving from a workshop atmosphere to establishing a more formal but still dynamic network of DH practitioners. As mentioned previously the workshops had already attracted the attention of participants from outside the UNAM, so it was clear that the network would be geographically dispersed. No funding was available so we did not want to incur travel costs. It was necessary and practical to think from the start of a virtual community with few or no face-to-face meetings. One of the main concerns during the third and fourth workshop was that although we noted a lot of enthusiasm, we feared that personal workloads, geographical dispersion, and different disciplinary backgrounds would lead to a weakening of our initiative. A virtual community is defined as a situation where “people carry on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships”  [Rheingold 1993]. We therefore wanted to ensure good communication channels to talk, organize and work with relevant people on particular topics.

It was agreed that it was important for us to focus on concrete actions and outcomes rather than just on good intentions or overambitious plans. We therefore developed a concrete agenda that would serve to focus our attention. Initial plans were reported at DH 2012 [Galina 2012a] but the following expands and updates the work done. Referring back to Rheingold’s definition, our main priorities were to: establish our communication channels, define participants, and state our topics.

It was decided that digital technologies could easily be employed for our communication channels, especially with the high degree of computer use by all the participants. The success of the Humanist Discussion group and its key role in the establishment of the Anglo-American DH community led us to decide to establish a listserv as our primary communication channel, despite the fact that there are currently more modern approaches in particular with social networking sites. The listserv was a proven method and in addition it did not require participants to have to belong to a particular social networking site. All participants had access to email thus creating a low barrier entry. We currently have over one hundred and sixty registered participants. Presently participants are asked for their name, institution and country but this was not always the case. We are currently working towards completing the missing information. In general terms there are people from Archaeology, Art History, Computing, Conservation Studies, Culture Studies, Pedagogy, Graphic Design, History, Library Studies, Linguistic Engineering, Philology, and Philosophy. Around a third of the subscribers are from outside Mexico from the following countries: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Perú, Uruguay, USA, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, UK and Signapore. The second step was to set up a webpage. We were fortunate to be able to have one web programmer from the research project to help. The webpage was considered a space for hosting the projects and tools that we wished to develop and not just as an informative page. Both the establishment of the listserv and the webpage required us to make a series of decisions about our aspirations as a group, albeit in a roundabout way, as we made decisions about hosting and domain names. As a starting point we realized that although the workshops had been held at the UNAM already, there were participants from other Mexican universities and from non-academic organizations. We also knew that at least at that time, there was no other Latin American organization. In terms of language, although we were aware of DH type work being done in Spain [Rojas2013] there was still no formal association in place. We therefore agreed that the aims of the RedHD are:

to promote and strengthen work on humanities and computing, with special emphasis on research and teaching in Spanish speaking countries as well as the Latin American region in general. The RedHD supports better communication between digital humanists in the region, the formation of human resources, preparation of documentation and good practices, the promotion of DH projects, dissemination of DH related events as well as promoting the recognition of the field.  Additionally we seek to promote regional projects and initiatives on an international level.

 

In terms of domain names we did not want to associate the DH community to any institution in particular. Additionally, we were thinking not only on a national scale but also on a regional Latin American one. We took the decision to get a .mx and .net domain (www.humanidadesdigitales.mx and www.humanidadesdigitales.net) and pay for external hosting. These costs were absorbed by some of the members of the group, as they are relatively low. However, although costs have gone down considerably this may not necessarily be the case for other countries, and this should be taken into consideration.

It was agreed that we continued to want to be as inclusive as possible. We decided that certain academic structures available to us (such as seminars) were restrictive in terms of who could participate (for example, had to formally belong to a university). The workshops had caught the interest of a diverse range of people from researchers with PhDs to young programmers not interested in traditional academic careers or people not formally employed or enrolled in the university. We also had some from government and private companies. We decided to maintain an open and dynamic structure and anybody who joined the listserv would automatically become a member of the community. This allowed us to grow rapidly without too many restrictions. In recent months however, we have had to alter this slightly and this will be discussed further on.

From the work done at the workshops we concluded that the following topics would be the focus of our attention:

The following section will describe how each one of these topics was addressed as well as the results and the difficulties we have encountered. It is important to note that these topics however do overlap and the boundaries of the different initiatives are not always clear cut but rather complement and connect to each other.