I am passionate about employing digital scholarship and tools for research and education. I have worked on initiatives that implement digital humanities methods to preserve and promote humanistic knowledge and inquiry. My experience with digital humanities and digital scholarship includes:
GeoCimarronaje is a digital mapping project about the history of marronage across the greater Spanish Caribbean (1520 to 1804). Using mapping technologies (GIS) and a relational database, this project reconstructs the histories of maroon communities and how they evolved over time. GeoCimarronaje invites scholars to question how maroon geographies influenced political boundaries, legal regimes, and colonial policy, offering a fresh perspective on the making of the early modern Caribbean.
The Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (CDSC) is a Mellon Foundation-funded initiative that supports the growth and development of digital scholarship on the Caribbean and its diaspora. As Senior Grant Associate Director, I supervised CDSC programs, provided strategic solutions to institutional partners’ needs, and coordinated the CDSC annual micro-grant program, which supported emerging digital scholarship on 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. 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 region’s territorial expansion depended on local actors who adapted to the circumstances of the environment and its people.
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 created posts 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 an image gallery of the Joel Conway Collection to promote the institution’s holdings among historians and genealogists. This project involved 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 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 VU’s Special Collections division.