This panel will provide a forum in which to initiate a reflection on the potential of the Digital Humanities to study Latin American literature and guide practices in literary criticism. In recent years, the Digital Humanities are consolidating in Latin American Studies as a transdisciplinary field through research associations, international conferences, and academic journals. Currently, the number of studies published attests to growing interest in this field. Examples include Humanidades digitales: Recepción, institucionalización y crítica (2018), Digital Humanities in Latin America (2020), “Digital Humanities & Colonial Latin American Studies” (a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2020), “Digital Humanities 2018: Puentes/Bridges” (a special issue of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2021), and the current issue of Hispania (2021).

Using digital tools and computational methods has provided new approaches to explore Latin American literature. These include but are not limited to digitization techniques, digital pedagogy, text encoding, data analysis, distant reading and text mining, network analysis, data visualization, and geospatial mapping. In unique ways, these four papers accomplish the reflective integration of these methods for researching and teaching. Together, they will propose approaches to Latin American literature from the Digital Humanities that challenge traditional readings or open new fields of study.

Alberto Fonseca will begin by exploring the ways in which Digital Humanities are used to teach Colombian conflict/post-conflict literature. By blending concepts like memory, archives, and ghosts with literary conventions like auto-fiction, bildungsroman, and travel narratives, the author will show how Colombian literature provide a way to reflect on the country’s past, present, and future. Fonseca also proposes that digital tools like Youtube, Scalar and Google Maps allow students to annotate images and videos online, write commentaries, and have a choice of presenting research papers in the form of a multimedia digital piece. In this way, they are aware of the possibilities of Digital Humanities in analyzing literary texts and the new ways of tracing ideas and concepts in a multimodal format.

Working from this overview of Digital Humanities pedagogy, Sylvia Fernández will go over GeoTestimonios Transfronterizos, a living border-community storytelling project in collaboration with Gris Muñoz that reappropriates women’s experiences through testimonies and literary narratives about life in the El Paso-Juárez border region. Collecting this work through a methodology of theory of the flesh, community-driven data and feminist mapping approaches allows for visualizations that push towards questioning and challenging the perception of the geopolitical boundary, the patriarchal culture in relation to gender roles, and creating a greater awareness of oppressive systems that women confront and resist in public and domestic places. Fernández will demonstrate that GeoTestimonios Transfronterizos records and preserves the literary legacy, personal experiences, and voices of women from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds living in a particular border area affected by gentrification, lack of mobility, changing ecosystems, gender-based violence, and other social issues.

Similarly, Alicia Rodriguez will examine how Francophone women writers present radically subversive narratives of colonized spaces in the Caribbean. The author has developed a new methodology that brings together digital humanities, postcolonial literature, and ethnographic practices to show how female characters’ itineraries, within the space of the novel, reveal patterns of shared struggle against the organization of space by colonial forces. Caribbean writers have vastly explored the struggle to remain on a colonized land which lacked concrete reorganization of space after its absorption into France’s transcontinental territories. Among these writers, Guadeloupean novelists Maryse Condé and Gisèle Pineau confront the mental and physical borders imposed on women by coloniality and patriarchy. Rodriguez will use digital maps to understand the everlasting effect of colonialism on space and study how women moving in the space of novels contribute to exposing and undermining colonial dynamics.

The formal part of the session ends with a presentation by Daniel Carrillo-Jara, who will use Digital Humanities methods to explore the construction of the Peruvian poetry canon in anthologies published from 1910 to 2008. By transforming the anthologies of Peruvian poetry into literary data and using Bourdieau and Even-Zohar’s theoretical concepts (literary capital and dynamic canonicity, respectively), the author reflects on how to determine the canonical status of a writer. Data visualizations allow the graphical representation of three groups coexisting within the field of Peruvian poetry: consecrated, legitimatized, and aspiring authors. They also show the prestige trajectories of poets, or how their literary value changes over time. Finally, Carrillo-Jara will propose a quantitative model that considers the process of accumulating literary capital (recognition in different formats) as the principal factor when measuring the canon formation in any cultural institution.