Please join the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (FLDH) in June for the next three webinars, part of its 2023 Webinar Series: Latin America and Caribbean Edition. More information below:
Using Social Media to Explore Haitian History – Rendering Revolution
Friday, June 16, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Siobhan Meï, Lecturer, University of Massachusetts Amherst & Dr. Jonathan Square, Assistant Professor, The New School
“Rendering Revolution: Sartorial Approaches to Haitian History” is a queer, bilingual, feminist experiment in digital interdisciplinary scholarship that uses the lens of fashion and material culture to trace the aesthetic, social, and political reverberations of the Haitian Revolution as a world-historical moment.
Launched in 2020, Rendering Revolution focuses on stories of self-fashioning that rarely receive attention in colonial archives and explores the many ways in which modern identities (and concepts such as human rights) were formed in relation to the legacy of slavery in the Americas. The materials produced, curated, and translated for this project focus on the activities of occluded figures in history, including women and members of the LGBTQI+ community. Drawing on black feminist thought and transnational queer methodologies, Rendering Revolution generates a transhistorical, undisciplined digital archive that illustrates the importance of material culture in constructing diverse (and often competing) visions of freedom in the Atlantic world.
In this webinar, project founders Dr. Siobhan Meï and Dr. Jonathan Square will offer a brief overview of the project and will then focus on our approaches for publishing public-facing short-form content on proprietary social media platforms. While platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have allowed us to engage with a wide and diverse audience, there are also many concerns that arise when using a privately owned tool to curate a digital archive that explicitly addresses colonialism and its afterlives.
United Fronteras: A Transborder Digital and Public Repository
Friday, June 23, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Sylvia Fernández, Assistant Professor of Public and Digital Humanities, University of Texas at San Antonio & Dr. Laura Gonzales, Assistant Professor of Digital Writing and Cultural Rhetorics, University of Florida
In 2019, the project United Fronteras began with the intention of countering the official or hegemonic representation of the Mexico-United States border in the digital cultural record and to inspire the questioning and critical development of materials or projects that utilize digital technologies to represent the border from various perspectives. In this webinar I will touch on the process of how UF creates a digital registry through a transborder model of work between academics from various humanities disciplines and members of the community outside of academia to make use of de-postcolonial digital humanities and minimal computing practices and methodologies to generate a third digital space that demonstrates the multiplicity of (hi)stories from the border and to document the public memory of the materials and projects in this region. The use of minimal computing in this project is a fundamental part of this independent and autonomous projects dedicated to resist the structures of power and physical and digital vigilance in border regions because of its ability to provide autonomy, independence, accessibility, functionality, security, neutrality and material stability across borders.
Developing a Multilingual Repository of Open/(ish) Access Materials: A Case Study of the Haitian Studies Association’s Digital Initiatives
Friday, June 30, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Natália Marques da Silva, Digital fellow, Haitian Studies Association and Director of the Hand Art Center, Stetson University; Dr. Darlène Elizabeth Dubuisson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Laura Wagner, Independent scholar/Haitian Creole Team Lead, Respond Crisis Translation; & Dr. Petrouchka Moise, Assistant Professor / Cultural & Community-Based Digital Curator, Grinnell College Burling Library.
As part of its Decolonize Haitian Studies efforts, the Haitian Studies Association (HSA) is improving public access to Haiti-related materials. Economic and linguistic barriers in academic publishing, along with inequities of representation and authorship have had adverse effects on Haiti-based scholars and students as well as non-affiliated scholars in other locations. Despite leading knowledge production related to Haiti, such individuals have less access to resources and materials than peers associated with large North American or European universities (where facilitating high cost memberships to research databases is common). This duality is deeply concerning and requires ongoing attention, including by organizations like the HSA.
In this presentation, we outline an HSA initiative to aggregate and index Haiti-related publications, resources, and syllabi on a self-hosted repository. The goal of this repository is to support students, emerging scholars and the public with multilingual resources, like syllabi and Open/Open(ish) Access publications. We believe that the creation and dissemination of such repositories is crucial to decolonizing scholarship, particularly in relation to Digital Humanities. The presentation will address successes and challenges we’ve encountered during this project and initiate a group discussion on creatively addressing unethical barriers to knowledge.