Webinar Schedule
Mapping Puerto Rico’s Hurricane History 1899-Present
Friday, April 21, 2 p.m EDT
Ian Seavey, PhD Candidate in the Department of History, Texas A&M University
Hurricanes are an important category of analysis in the study of the Greater Caribbean and specifically Puerto Rico. Most recently, in 2022, Hurricane Fiona and Hurricane Maria in 2017 reminded Puerto Ricans and U.S. government officials that storm preparedness and disaster relief represent a critical part of the colonial relationship. Since the United States acquired Puerto Rico from the Spanish in the War of 1898, 47 hurricanes have battered the island. This amounts to about one every two years, the most out of all the islands in the Greater Caribbean. However, after World War II, the number of hurricanes which hit Puerto Rico began increasing and from 1980 to the present, that number expanded out to at least one every year. The sheer volume and frequency of hurricanes has long warranted a study which visually represents these metrics. This digital environmental history project showcases how prominently hurricanes impacted Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. Using the program ArcGIS, this study maps each hurricane that hit Puerto Rico during the American period. Each pinpoint on the map, when clicked on, includes a brief description of the effects of storm, available pictures, and how each storm fits into the broader discussions of Puerto Rican history and U.S. imperial policy. Chronicling each storm in this way demonstrates in tangible ways that hurricanes as a category of analysis must be consulted when attempting to understand the political, economic, and social environments of Puerto Rico’s relationship with the United States. This project also attracts a wide-ranging audience both inside and outside of academia in an approachable but rigorously researched manner.
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.
Inclusividad, marcado TEl y filosofía en la Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano
Friday, August 11, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Ernesto Priani Saisó, Profesor de tiempo completo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Betsabé Castro Ruiz, FFyL UNAM; Zulema Flores Arellano, FFyL UNAM; Víctor Andrés Campos Chávez, FFyL UNAM, y Cristina Noemi Gonzalez Del Valle, FFyL UNAM
El propósito de esta presentación es exponer la relación que se construye entre estudiantes de filosofía y proyectos de humanidades digitales desde nuestra experiencia como estudiantes de filosofía en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México y nuestra participación en el Proyecto PAPIIT “Colecciones digitales inclusivas. Análisis crítico de la creación de colecciones digitales mexicanas”, (IG400322). Este proyecto tiene por objetivo el análisis crítico de colecciones digitalizadas para formular una propuesta de lineamientos y criterios para hacer más incluyentes los proyectos de digitalización en términos de la representación de sujetos y objetos tradicionalmente marginados. Trabajar, además, en la aplicación concreta de estos en la Biblioteca Digital del Pensamiento Novohispano. En nuestra presentación nos interesa explorar cómo la filosofía ha sido de ayuda al trabajar en un proyecto digital y el modo en que esa labor nos hace repensar nuestro quehacer filosófico. En particular, hablaremos sobre cómo algunas habilidades de lógica formal han permitido tomar algunas decisiones en el marcado XML/TEI, y cómo la reflexión filosófica nos ha llevado a identificar algunos grupos comúnmente invisibilizados y debatir la forma de visibilizarlos a través de la codificación de textos. Igualmente, hablaremos del modo en que la codificación supone otra forma de acercarnos a las obras, para enriquecer la comprensión de las mismas. Por último, queremos pensar en las circunstancias que rodean los cursos, talleres y espacios en los que aprendemos y ponemos en práctica nuestros aprendizajes.
Tracking Religious Racism in Brazil
Friday, August 25, 2 p.m EDT
Dr. Danielle N. Boaz, Associate Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte & Gustavo Melo Cerqueira, Babalorixá, Ilê Axé Omi Ogun siwajú and VP of the ICCRR
Religious racism is a form of religious discrimination that is rooted in racialized prejudices against a particular faith or faiths. The concept of religious racism comes from Brazil, where activists use the phrase “racismo religioso” to refer to discrimination against Afro-Brazilian religions such as Candomblé and Umbanda. Our webinar would talk about the International Commission to Combat Religious Racism’s (ICCRR) digital resources on Brazil. On August 22, 2022, the ICCRR released its revised map, spreadsheet, and report on Religious Racism in Brazil. These materials analyze 500 cases of religious intolerance against Afro-Brazilian faiths that have taken place since 2000. This is an ongoing project that was started in 2019 and has taken more than 1000 hours to complete. The ICCRR plans to update these materials annually, adding and analyzing new cases. The report is designed to provide some insights about the patterns and statistics that can be observed from the cases. The spreadsheet database provides details on the cases such as the name of the victim, the name of the perpetrator, the type of intolerance, the location of the intolerance, and data about the victim and the perpetrator such as age and gender. The interactive maps track the cases that are listed in the database. Each entry on the map includes a summary of the incident and links to available photos and videos. Both maps contain the same data; however, one organizes the cases by year and the other organizes the cases by type of discrimination.
