Isabel Galina is currently a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). With a background in English Literature and Electronic Publishing, her PhD research at University College London (UCL) was on the impact of electronic resources on scholarly communication and publishing. This led to a particular interest in new modes of scholarship and digital projects within the Humanities.
At the UNAM she has been involved in numerous initiatives related to institutional repositories, digitization projects, electronic publishing and the use and visibility of digital resources. She is a founding member and current president of the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD) which aims to promote and strengthen Digital Humanities with special emphasis on research and teaching in Spanish as well as the Latin American region in general. She is Associate Editor of
This is the source
Although Digital Humanities (DH) has become more established in recent years one of the main issues that remains is the true internationalization of DH as an academic discipline. Up to this point the DH community has been mainly focused on scholars from a handful of English speaking countries and there is little or no participation from other regions of the world. This paper discusses the experience of setting up a DH community in Mexico. The aim is to describe the multi-faceted approach used for DH community building as well as discussing different strategies employed, difficulties encountered, produced results as well as areas for future growth. We propose that this may serve as a model for similar initiatives in other countries.
A case study of the RedHD, a DH community in Mexico.
In recent years there has been a noticeable growth in the establishment of new DH
associations both regional and national. 2011 saw the establishment of the Red
de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (HDH) and the
Associazione per l’Informatica Umanistica e la Cultura Digitale... from the point of view of the scientific results, research projects,
and institutional presence, Informatica Umanistica, like most of the
other
DH practiced in the world, practically doesn’t
exist
There are, of course, numerous and complex issues at stake here and they must be
addressed on many different levels. However, one small step which may contribute
towards knowing and recognizing
In April 2010 a research project was funded by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma
de México (UNAM) with the principal aim of studying the current situation of
digital resources for the humanities. The methodology for this research project
included the organization of a series of workshops. It was during these that the
idea to form a DH network was proposed by the participants. This article will
not report on the results of the research project that have been reported
elsewhere
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
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!
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
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 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
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
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
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 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.
One of the workshop results indicated that there was little documentation
available about DH in Spanish. Additionally there was modest and dispersed
information about the work that had been done in Mexico and other Latin American
countries. This situation has changed considerably in the past four years and
there is a fast growing corpus of DH literature in Spanishth May 2007. Published AHDS webpage 13th June 2007. Available Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20071012045201/ahds.ac.uk/news/futureAHDS.htm
and NINCH (National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage).
"International Database of Digital Humanities Projects." Project report:
http://www.ninch.org/programs/data/.
This was another area that we identified as a key issue. Almost all the projects experienced difficulties finding and retaining human resources — in particular research assistants and programmers — that had the right combination of both technical skills and subject knowledge to develop the projects. The lead researchers themselves were also in need of specific training that simply was not available. Most work was done through trial and error and self-training. This is similar to what has been reported in other parts of the world but the growing number of DH courses and DH degrees at the postgraduate level seeks to address this. Therefore, teaching and training were one of our focus points.
Initially we offered a few basic courses such as
At the UNAM we worked on a syllabus proposal for a DH
final form reflects not only the
More recently we worked on another academic course known as
what we do and why we matter and why we should be supported and why DH makes sense.This will be discussed in more detail further along.
As well as training and formal courses we also noted an absence of information about DH in Spanish, although as mentioned previously this has changed notably over the past four years. One of our first actions was a special issue of the
In the near future we are planning on more formal and extensive publications,
namely a book and a journal. Recently a number of DH readers have been published
(
Another strategy for the human resource formation has been the organization of DH
events, namely a biannual conference. Academic events provide visibility of DH
as well as promote the formation of human resources and foster collaboration
between the community members. As the community grows we feel that these events
are key to identifying and bringing together fellow digital humanists. In May
2012 we organized the 1er Encuentro de HD (Digital Humanties Conference) in
Mexico City, co-hosted by CONACULTA, the ministry of art and culture, and again
in 2014 additionally held in conjunction with GO:DH (Global Outlook: Digital
Humanities), a special interest group of the ADHO (Association of Digital
Humanities Organizations). In both cases the events have been free as we have
wanted to be as inclusive as possible, and due to administration problems
regarding funds that will be described later. The venue was provided by
Conaculta and catering and other amenities were kept simple. The work for the
conference has been done mainly by members of the RedHD and student volunteers.
In 2012 we had 31 presenters and almost all were from organizations within
Mexico. For 2014 there were over 70 presentations and although there was a
predominance of speakers from the hosting country, which is to be expected,
almost half of the authors were from other countries namely Argentina, Canada,
Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom and
the United States. The program was divided into talks on: Libraries and
archives, Social networking, Teaching, Theory, Applications, Language and
corpora, Cultural studies, Technology and philosophy, Visualizations, Reading
and materiality as well as Demos and Posters
The third and final issue that we decided to focus on was project evaluation. As
mentioned previously among workshop attendees we found that lack of recognition
of their work was a constant grievance. DH scholars felt that evaluation
committees and peers tended to dismiss digital resources as inferior to
Most DH projects are not presented in traditional research output formats such as
articles or books, but take on various formats such as development of metadata,
textual markup, tools, websites and others
We wanted therefore to develop and provide basic guidelines and best practices for DH resources. In addition we wanted to provide an online checklist that allowed users to evaluate a particular resource using an interface that displays the results of the evaluation, indicating areas of weakness and strength. The aim of this tool would be threefold: step-by-step evaluation tool for committees, a resource for developers, and an informal compliance of a minimum standard.
We formed an ad hoc committee from the original workshop attendees to work on a
proposal and revised related guidelines (both national and international) and
created initial best practice guidelines. We then extracted key elements in the
form of questions and presented them as an online checklist. The final product
is in Spanish and adjusted to our own particular requirements. The checklist is
divided into five sections with questions related to: Project Team,
Documentation, Usability, Design and Access; Evaluation and Peer Review;
Copyright and Visibility and Dissemination. The checklist is also available in
English
In the previous section we discussed the work we have done around the topics that
we set out to solve. In this process several general issues arose. As mentioned
previously, the workshops used the term Digital Humanities. However, during the
workshops we discussed whether this was an appropriate term. We looked at the
terms used in English over time (at that point Humanities Computing was still
used by some) and different options in Spanish, specifically
Furthermore, as we seek to consolidate our DH community we also have to continue identifying and clarifying the particular needs and challenges we face that are different from other DH communities around the world. It is not just a question of importing but of establishing our own agenda. In order to do so, however, we have had to work on defining ourselves. At the beginning we had settled on being very open in order to be as inclusive as possible, but in recent months we have started to consider in a more detailed manner what the RedHD is, what it does, who belongs and what our relationship is to other emerging and established DH communities
In this way we have begun to address some regional as well as linguistic issues
which we would like to work on in the near future. To this effect we
participated in the organization of el Día de Humanidades Digitales (DíaHD)/ Dia
das humanidades digitais modeled on the well known project Day of DH. The event
has been held twice, in June 2013 and then again in October 2014, and it sought
to identify and bring together the work of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking
digital humanists. The idea behind creating a separate event to the Day of DH
was to see if we could identify particular characteristics that differed from
the main event, in particular because Day of DH is characterized by a
predominant participation of digital humanists from the USA, Canada, and the
United Kingdom. From the 2013 edition, 97 blogs were analyzed in order to
document and transcribe how there is an emerging discourse, in the Foucauldian
sense, as Portuguese and Spanish speaking communities undergo a process of
semantic change in order to accommodate the language and terminology used in the
Digital Humanities. The results are reported elsewhere exploration
of the features and intersections among those who self-identify as HD
practitioners and their characteristics beyond language affiliation
which not only evidences the existence of this DH community but also some of its
characteristics
One aspect that we did not take into consideration during the workshops and that has been important in the creation of the RedHD has been our connection to the international DH community. Our work has coincided with a particularly self-critical period for DH as a field and increasing international participation has become a key priority. As mentioned previously there are also a number of other regional and/or linguistic initiatives have that been created over the past few years. It is important that as a community we define how we want to fit in with other DH communities around the world. As the global DH community is expanding, many aspects about the organization are being renegotiated and this is an important moment to participate in the discussion.
From our own experience at the RedHD the use of English as the predominant
language in DH international events is an obstacle for further participation.
Although this is a common problem in academia in general, in DH we have found
this to be particular troublesome due to the makeup of participants. Although
further research would still be necessary it is quite common in the Sciences
that PhD holders will generally have a good working knowledge of English as it
is usually indispensable to their field. In the Humanities however, this is less
common as many work on particular subjects where English is not necessarily the
Funding has been a particular ordeal for us. Originally we set ourselves up as a
loosely formed network as this allowed us great flexibility in setting up our
community. However, this less rigid structure does not allow us to exist
An association however, allows us to participate in government funding, offer bursaries for our members, receive payments for courses, workshops or other academic events, issue receipts, do consulting work and other activities which we could not do before.
Membership fees are modest and exemptions and alternative options are in place in order to remain as inclusive as possible.
The work done during the workshops, in particular identifying critical issues
through the DH framework exercise, has been key to the success of the project.
In retrospect, developing specific tasks and areas to be addressed helped the
formation of the RedHD and as a community gave us a sense of direction and
purpose. In the DH spirit of building and making things
We have entered now though, together with other people in DH, a period where there is a need for reflection on how we understand the term Digital Humanities, who we are as a community, our objectives, and the way we relate to other DH communities both regional and international. Defining Digital Humanities and our role as a community is an ongoing and continuing process. It is important at this stage, as we are trying to more formally institutionalize and implement our projects to better phrase what we are doing and what we want to achieve. Additionally, collaboration and communication with other DH communities around the world is fundamental and we must find ways of addressing this. We will be working towards that and other issues described here in the near future.
The author would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their extremely helpful comments.
‘State of the Art’: Negotiating a national Standards Approved Digital Humanities Curriculum