Resources

C19 Latino New York builds on the foundational work conducted by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage project. We also see ourselves as participating in a growing wave of scholars working in Latino Studies and related fields through traditional and digital humanities methods to recover the heterogeneity of print cultural history and to confront absences in the archival record.

Digital maps and archives on U.S.-based Spanish-language print culture

Borderlands Archives Cartography

A project of Maira E. Álvarez and Sylvia A. Fernández at the University of Houston, this site maps newspapers of the U.S.-Mexico border from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. The site also provides access to a growing digital archive.

Our Americas Archive Partnership

Bringing together collections from Rice University, the University of Maryland, and Instituto Mora - Fondo Antiguo Biblioteca Ernesto de la Torre Villar, this site provides access to primary source materials in English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese from across the Americas.  The site’s metadata includes a series of “Americas Concepts” (such as constitutionalism, emancipation, liberalism, and migration) meant to help students and researchers identity understudied hemispheric currents in the archive’s materials.

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

This vast collection of U.S. newspapers is searchable by language and includes a variety of Spanish-language periodicals.

Print and digital approaches to engaging absence in the archive

Augst, Thomas. “Archives: An Introduction.” American Literary History, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, pp. 219–27. - A helpful reflection on what U.S. literary history's potential shift through digital archives to what Augst refers to as "a collection rather than a canon" (4).

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. “Translatio Studii and the Poetics of the Digital Archive: Early American Literature, Caribbean Assemblages, and Freedom Dreams.” American Literary History, Apr. 2017. CrossRef, doi:10.1093/alh/ajx007. - Provides a number of examples of digital humanities projects that are reanimating voices that have been omitted or marginalized within the archival record. Projects include the NULab's own Early Caribbean Digital Archive and Vincent Brown's Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761.

Gathereau-Bryson, Lorena. “Global Linking Through Archival Digitization: The Our Americas Archive Project and Spanish, Portuguese, and American Womend (1876).” Microform and Digitization Review, vol. 40, Mar. 2011, pp. 25–29. - Reflects on the efforts of the Our Americas Archive Project to make understudied transnational patterns and movements more accessible.

Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “Unsettlers and Speculators.” PMLA, vol. 131, no. 3, May 2016, pp. 743–51. CrossRef, doi:10.1632/pmla.2016.131.3.743. - Considering foundational work by Raúl Coronado and Anna Brickhouse on U.S.-based Spanish-language print culture, Gruesz articulates a recent trend among scholars using traditional humanities methods “to reorient colonial centers and peripheries, to detach place-names from their mythic accretions, to forget the stories that we think we know” (744).

Klein, Lauren F. “The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings.” American Literature, vol. 8, no. 5, Dec. 2013, pp. 661–88. - Klein's much-discussed article offers a foundational example of the role that computational methods might play in recovering and re-imagining lost and oppressed voices. 

Kreitz, Kelley. “Toward a Latinx Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Remixing, Reassembling, and Reimagining the Archive.” Educational Media International, vol. 54, no. 4, Oct. 2017, pp. 304–16. Taylor and Francis+NEJM, doi:10.1080/09523987.2017.1391524. - An articulation of

Liu, Alan. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, pp. 490–509. - This 2012 call to digital humanists might be considered a source of inspiration for much recent work on critical computation within the digital humanities.

Padilla, Thomas. "Engaging Absence" - In this February 2018 blog post, Padilla challenges digital humanities to consider how computational methods might highlight rather than obscure absences in the archival record.