Humanidades Digitales is the Spanish for digital humanities (DH). This project comes from the conversations of digital humanists in CUNY, as members of a Hispanic-serving institution in the United States. We want to highlight the Spanish language as a central part of US contemporary culture and intellectual life.

We acknowledge Spanish was spoken in what we know today as the US even before it existed. Like English, Spanish is a colonial language. Much of the current land was colonized in Spanish and populations in those places have a strong cultural identity related to that language and the traditions they cultivated on it. The language continues to be spoken in those communities, and the presence of this language has increased with the migration from all over Latin America. 

We understand that Spanish is not the only language of the Hispanic community. Living in the linguistic borderlands is very common in a world where multilingualism is the rule, so translanguaging has been a practice for many of the members of this community, including intellectuals such as Gloria Alzaldúa in the US, Eulalia Bernard in the Central American Caribbean, and Brigitte Vasallo in Spain. 

Naming this project in Spanish is a decision to highlight our interest in contributing to knocking down the wall of English as the main language to build DH and its limitations. We do not want to create another wall by following the logic of monolingualism, because excluding the scholars who inhabit the borderlands of language would be against our Hispanic-serving interest. 

We want to focus on how Spanish connects scholars doing digital humanities and help to find dialogs between digital humanists in the US and those across other territories, especially on topics that affect communities. We aim to open a space to listen to our colleagues from other latitudes and find out about the different topics they are working on.

We envision Humanidades Digitales as a place to help understand DH as a field that translanguagues and transcends space and place. Our interest is connecting practitioners of DH in Spanish with those who produce in English around topics that communicate with the identities imagined as “Spanish speaking.” We want to allow English speakers to learn about and from their Spanish peers. 
Humanidades Digitales is an exercise to prioritize our human interests beyond the language of knowledge production. We chose to include publications in Spanish, English, and /or both to challenge the isolation of the voices of the digital humanists who produce knowledge on the intersections we care for.

Credits

This website is a project created by GC Digital Initiatives and developed by Silvia Rivera Alfaro in Fall 2024.