I am passionate about employing digital scholarship and tools for research and education. I have worked with initiatives implementing digital humanities methods to preserve and promote humanistic knowledge and inquiry. My experience with digital humanities and digital scholarship includes:
The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) is an initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation that supports the growth and development of digital scholarship about the Caribbean and its diaspora. In my role as Associate Director, I oversee the CDSC programs and provide strategic solutions to the needs of the institutional partners. I am also one of the coordinators of the CDSC annual micro-grant program that supports emerging digital scholarship about the Caribbean.
During my time in Neogranadina, I supervised volunteers and interns participating in our crowdsourcing program. I have also contributed to the design and development of various digitization and cataloging programs, including the Collective Archive and the Collective Catalog of Colombian Archives, two open-source platforms that make historical materials accessible to educators, researchers, and the general public.
Narra is a collaborative history project that seeks to democratize the narratives about Peru’s independence processes. Neogranadina supported the creation of a digital archive that holds the Colección documental del sesquicentenario de la independencia del Perú which the general public can access for research and education. I supervised the first phase of the crowdsourcing project in this project, where students from the Universidad Nacional de San Marcos helped process the digitized materials.
“Sacred Spaces” is a digital project about the history of the Province of Venezuela through the lens of the religious built environment created during the colonial period (1500-1800). My goal was to develop visualization tools that show how the territorial expansion of the region depended upon local actors who adapted to the circumstances of the environment and its people. This project will be expanded during the completion of my dissertation.
This exercise was my first attempt to engage undergraduate students with historical sources through social media. Based on Olaudah Equiano’s (1745?-1797) autobiography, my World History students were responsible for creating posts based on the autobiography that reflect ideas about freedom and enslavement in the Atlantic world. Students also had to think critically about their choices to tell Equiano’s story.
As an intern at the Santa Barbara County Genealogical Society (SBGCS), I digitized and created the image gallery of the Conway Collection to promote the holdings of this institutions among historians and genealogists. Joel Conway was a local photographer who devoted most of his life to compile antique photographs from Santa Barbara and southern California. This project consisted in digitizing over nine hundred glass plate negatives from the mid-twentieth century, adding metadata to the digital objects, and sorting the physical materials according to the SBGCS standards for further preservation.
During my M.A. at Villanova University, I participated in a digital project that explored scrapbooks as a form of memory and source of information on varied experiences during the First World War. I created articles exploring topics related to understanding WWI and a digital project about female representations in WWI visual culture. DH specialist Deborah Boyer led the project in collaboration with the Special Collections division at VU.