Teaching Mexican American Studies through Local Archives and Community-Based Pedagogy
Saturday, March 30, 9:30–3 pm, Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center
This symposium and workshop will focus on creating lesson plans with local archives for Mexican American Studies (MAS) curriculum planning and pedagogy. Roundtable panels include community-based educators discussing their creation and implementation of MAS curriculum as well as presentations from local archivists from the Austin History Center and the University of Texas with tips for accessing and incorporating archives into the classroom.
Cassie Smith (2018 LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Fellow) will lead a community-based teaching workshop about using praxis-based pedagogy to create culturally relevant and locally ground MAS lesson plans using primary sources from the Benson’s U.S. Latinx holdings.
Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative
Wednesday, April 3, 1–2:30 pm, PCL Learning Lab 1A
LLILAS Benson “Digital Scholarship in the Americas” Speaker Series
Co-Sponsored by the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies
In 2010, dLOC launched the Protecting Haitian Patrimony Initiative, which builds on strong, existing long term partnerships, with an emphasis on accountability and transparency. dLOC built Haiti: An Island Luminous, a digital humanities site to help readers learn about Haiti’s history by combining rare books, manuscripts, and photos scanned by archives and libraries in Haiti and the United States with commentary by over one hundred (100) authors from universities around the world. dLOC currently hosts 40,000 titles with more than three million pages of content, much of which is accessible content related to Haiti. This presentation will discuss cultural preservation initiatives in Haiti supported by dLOC.
Dr. Hadassah St. Hubert is currently the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at Florida International University. She received Ph.D. in History from the University of Miami and her dissertation, Visions of a Modern Nation: Haiti at the World’s fairs, focuses on Haiti’s participation in World’s Fairs and Expositions in the twentieth century. Hadassah served as the Assistant Editor for Haiti: An Island Luminous, a digital humanities site dedicated entirely to Haitian history and Haitian studies. As a Postdoctoral Fellow with dLOC, she leads programming and digitization efforts in collaboration with dLOC’s partners, such as Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) and L’Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN) in Haiti. She is the liaison and historian for DVCAI’s Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant for African American History and Culture.
Light refreshments will be served. Space is limited. Registration opens Wednesday, March 6 and closes Tuesday, April 2 at 5 PM through Eventbrite.
National Library Week A-Thons
April 8-12, 12:30–3:30pm, PCL Learning Lab 2
Learn new digital skills and help make your University of Texas Libraries collections more discoverable along the way! No prior knowledge/experience or foreign language proficiency required—friendly UT Libraries staff will be offering step-by-step trainings on the different digital tools/platforms and supply laptops.
- Monday, April 8: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Queering the Record, Part 2
Improve Wikipedia articles on LGBTQIA+ issues - Tuesday, April 9: Transcribe-a-thon: Decipher + Translate the Archive
Broaden literacy of handwritten, multilingual collection materials - Wednesday, April 10: Index-a-thon: Multilingual Texts & LatAm Gazeteer
Classify and tag texts for research communities - Thursday, April 11: Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Chicana Activists & Indigenous Languages
Connect Wikipedia articles to the Benson’s archives - Friday, April 12: Georeference-a-thon: UT Libraries’ Map Collections
Help make Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) and Benson historical map collections GIS-ready
Event is free and open to the public. For more details and registration, visit our Eventbrite page. Light refreshments and snacks will be served. Stay for the duration or just pop in to help with a few tasks—all contributions are greatly appreciated. We hope to see you there!
LLILAS Benson Digital Initiatives Open House
April 19, 2-4pm, Benson Second Floor
Come check out the work of LLILAS Benson’s Digital Initiatives, including the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), Post-Custodial Archives, and the Digital Scholarship Office. Light refreshments will be served.
Past
The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo Digital Archive: Historical Memory and Guatemala’s Disappeared
Wednesday, February 13, 12–1:30 pm, Benson Conference Room, SRH 1.208
No prior knowledge necessary. Students, faculty, and staff from any discipline are encouraged to attend. For questions, please contact Albert A. Palacios at aapalacios@austin.utexas.edu.
LLILAS Benson “Digital Scholarship in the Americas” Speaker Series
Co-Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
This talk describes the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) Digital Archive – a collaborative, post-custodial project that is digitizing, preserving, and providing access to documentation of human rights violations during Guatemala’s armed internal conflict (1960-1996). The digital archive is a partnership between the GAM, one of Guatemala’s oldest and most respected human rights organizations, and the Digital Scholarship (DS) team at Haverford College. Dr. Alex Galarza will discuss how the project team – composed of students, scholars, and human rights activists – has centered pedagogy and sustainability in the work of creating a digital archive that aims to shift historical memory of the armed conflict by sharing case files about forced disappearances and other atrocities. These efforts raise important issues of ethics in working with and sharing traumatic materials as well as privacy for victims of human rights abuses.
Dr. Galarza is the Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Haverford College and leads the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM) Digital Archive. He completed his Ph.D. in Latin American History at Michigan State University where his work focused on soccer clubs and urban politics in Buenos Aires. He is the co-founder of footballscholars.org, an online platform for soccer scholarship and the editor of GradHacker, an InsideHigherEd.com blog sharing advice on graduate studies.
Light refreshments will be served. Registration opens Tuesday, January 22 and closes Tuesday, February 12 at 5 PM through Eventbrite.
Multilingual Sentiment Analysis Workshop
Wednesday, February 13, 10-11:30 am, PCL Learning Lab 4
University of Texas Libraries’ “Digital Humanities Workshops @ PCL” Series
In this text analysis workshop, we will be learning how to perform sentiment analysis, a method to determine if a text is positive or negative, using R programming language and narratives as a multilingual dataset. Jennifer Isasi (CLIR/DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation) will teach the basics on how to use the syuzhet package in R implementing the NRC Emotion Lexicon to extract data on eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) and two sentiments (negative and positive) in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
Web Mapping: Intro to ArcGIS Story Maps using Benson collections
Friday, March 1, 3–4:30 am, PCL Learning Lab 1
University of Texas Libraries’ “Data & Donuts: Geospatial Edition” Series
Discover how you can take advantage of the cloud to store and share your geospatial data. Michael Shensky (UT Libraries’ Geospatial Data Coordinator) and Albert A. Palacios (LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship Coordinator) will will teach you the basics of creating custom interactive maps in ArcGIS Online through an activity that allows you to follow along and gain hands on experience using the Benson’s geospatial special collections.
Distant Viewing Posters from El Salvador’s Civil War
Saturday, March 2, 10–11:30 am, PCL Learning Lab 4
In conjunction with the Institute of Latin American Studies Student Association Conference
Sponsored by the Mellon Foundation
Digitized visual materials are evocative artifacts for research. Finding insights, however, can be overwhelming if we are exploring vast collections of images. In this workshop, we will be using ImagePlot to visualize and plot a selection of posters from the Museum of the Word and Image (MUPI) in El Salvador, accessible through the Benson’s Latin American Digital Initiatives. Participants will learn how to create metadata from image elements and understand how this information can help in the navigation of collections.
No prior knowledge necessary. In order to participate, you must bring your own computer and download ImagePlot prior to the event. Students, faculty, and staff from any discipline are encouraged to attend. The workshop will be in English and Spanish.
Lunch will be served. Space is limited. Registration opens Friday, February 1, and closes Wednesday, February 27 through Eventbrite pages for UT affiliates and Non-UT ILASSA participants.