From 20 to 24 July, Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD) participated in the Digital Humanities 2020 conference, organized by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). The annual conference is aimed at digital humanities scholars and practitioners around the world. It was supposed to take place in Ottawa (Canada) this year, but was reorganized into a virtual event due to the coronavirus pandemic. The themes of the conference were public digital humanities, the open data movement and the field of First Nations, Native American and Indigenous Studies.
ProHD fits well into the context of the conference: It is a cooperation project between the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Germany) and the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana (Cuba). It aims to preserve, research and provide open online access to documents that witness the traces of Alexander von Humboldt in Cuba, his interactions with Cuban intellectuals and politicians as well as the conditions in which the transatlantic slave trade took place.
At the conference, ProHD was part of the panel “Compartir lo que nos une: Digitizing and Curating Colonial Records from the Caribbean and Central and South America for Public Outreach”. Together with Amalia Levi, Hadassah St. Hubert and María José Afanador Llach, ProHD team members Tobias Kraft, Kathrin Kraller and Antonio Rojas Castro aimed to encourage a conversation about the preservation and research of written cultural heritage against the background of “the historical and continued impacts of colonialism, postcolonialism, and hegemony” (ADHO 2020). After the panelists had presented their respective projects, they had a lively conversation with the audience about their experiences with and the challenges of digitizing colonial archival collections in the Caribbean and Latin America.
ProHD’s contribution to the panel – Reconstructing Humboldt’s Footprint in Cuba: Challenges and Opportunities of Digitizing 19th Century Cuban-German Written Heritage – was in the form of a video created by both the German and the Cuban team members (see below). The presentation introduces the project, focusing on its objectives and duration, the cooperation with other institutions, the digital workflow, and the most important challenges and benefits.
ProHD followed the contributions of the other panelists with great interest. Amalia Levi’s contribution Beyond Digitization: Engaging the Community to Decolonize the Archival Record addressed thoughts and lessons learned about the project phase following the digitization of colonial records. Hadassah St. Hubert introduced Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiatives at Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), focusing on how to protect and preserve endangered archives in Haiti. In her contribution Inventar el virreinato de la Nueva Granada: curaduría crítica de fuentes primarias y la construcción de conjuntos de datos espaciales, 1739-1810, María José Afanador-Llach talked about the critical curation of primary sources and the construction of spatial data sets regarding the invention of the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada (today Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama).
ProHD would like to thank the conference organizers for the opportunity to participate in this interesting event!
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Alina Mendt (18. August 2020). ProHD at DH2020. Proyecto Humboldt Digital (ProHD). Abgerufen am 10. Oktober 2024 von https://doi.org/10.58079/peo0