The Material & Visual Text in Latin American Digital Humanities

Draft Program

Over the last five centuries, Latin America has produced a rich legacy of textual artifacts that reflect a broad range of historical and cultural circumstances. To understand many of these texts, we must engage with them not only as linguistic constructions but also as objects with physical and visual dimensions. While scholars have long grappled with the materiality of the textual products of the region, in recent decades digital methodologies and technologies have enabled us to approach this work in new ways, asking different types of questions and arriving at distinct kinds of answers.

This virtual symposium features presentations by researchers and cultural heritage professionals who are using digital approaches to analyze and transmit a diverse range of Latin American texts from the colonial period, nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The participants are based at institutions in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and the United States, and work in areas including archives, art history, history, and literature. They include archivists and librarians, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars at all stages of their careers. Each presentation will be 15 minutes, prerecorded in either English or Spanish and captioned in the other language, and each session will conclude with a live Q&A at which panelists and attendees may speak either language.

Organized by ADRELA in partnership with the Bibliographical Society of America, this event is free and open to all interested participants.