CDH Latin American Digital Humanities Seed Grants Awarded

Congratulations to the recipients of 2018 Latin American Seed Grants! Awards were given to faculty, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows from Latin American Studies, History, and the Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities to support a variety of digital humanities endeavors.

Special thanks to CDH Postdoc Nora Benedict, specialist in Latin American literary studies and digital humanities, for coordinating this grant.

The Colombian Oligarchy Project : Robert Karl (Profesor, Department of History) will use the Seed Grant to apply a social network analysis to Colombia’s long-standing class of oligarchs who help perpetuate inequality in the country. He will process data found in the 1944, 1961, and 1970 editions of Quién es quién en Colombia. His research will contribute to his Spring 2019 course entitled Digital Histories of Crime in the Americas.

Tracking Intellectual Production in Mexico: UNAM Theses from 1929-1982 : Jessica R. Mack (PhD student, Department of History) will use the Seed Grant to analyze the changes in students’ theses at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) as the university moved to its new campus in southern Mexico City. She will eventually create a database of theses across various criteria. This will help shed light on the relationship between Mexico’s shifting national priorities and university intellectual production. Jessica’s research will contribute to the new Undergraduate Latin American History Workshop this year.

Maxixe in the Metropolis: Constructing Afro-Paulistano Respectability ca. 1920 : Aiala Levy (Fellow, Princeton Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities) will use the Seed Grant to study the burgeoning black press generated by Afro-Paulistano’s of São Paulo, Brazil in the midst of rapid European migration to the city. Her project will specifically involve reformatting OCR digitized issues of various publications to make them more available online and create a database of Afro-Paulistano historical spaces and events.

Natural Prison to National Park: A Carceral Ecology : Ryan C. Edwards (Postdoctoral Fellow, Program in Latin American Studies) will use the Seed Grant to create a digital humanities component to his ongoing manuscript that explores prison and carceral studies through environmental history and political ecology. His digital humanities project visualizes what he calls a “carceral ecology” that maps the extent of forest fires caused by the Ushuaia prison at the southernmost point of Argentina. Ryan’s project will contribute a case study of the environmental impact of carceral institutions to existing international digital humanities collaborative projects.