This blogpost was authored by Professor Jo Crow, from the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. In June 2024, Professor Crow hosted Dr. Gimena del Rio Riande from CONICET (Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council). They collaborated on the RDI funded project ‘Digital Humanities and Latin American Studies: Challenges and Opportunities for Open Research’.
In the first week of June 2024, the School of Modern Languages and Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB) welcomed Dr Gimena del Rio Riande to Bristol to deliver an enlightening and provocative lecture, asking ‘Is there such a thing as global Digital Humanities?’, and to lead a really helpful step-by-step workshop focusing on ‘Tools and tips for an open Digital Humanities project’. Bristol does not currently have an UG or PGT program in digital humanities but many of us are working on digital humanities projects, the University has set up several important research centres and institutes focused on digital innovation (e.g. the Centre of Creative Technologies and Bristol Digital Futures Institute), and we have recently launched Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful super computer. When it is one of our celebrated areas of excellence, it is especially important to think about the ethical issues bound up in digital technologies (and our use of and investment in them). I was delighted that Gimena del Rio Riande accepted our invitation to come and talk and work with us. She is president of the Argentine Association of Digital Humanities, co-director of the journal Revista de Humanidades Digitales, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at CONICET (Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council). This lab in Buenos Aires has a long history of working with minimal, open source and sustainable technologies related to DH projects.
Digital Humanities conferences, programs, and publications aim to establish a global community, using technology as a key element capable of bringing together researchers from different latitudes. Gimena’s talk questioned the meaning of ‘global’ in this context and probed its connection with globalization – that is, the successful globalization of one particular localism. She urged more critical reflection on power relations within the scholarly communications ecosystem: the fact, for example, that the DH tools and standards we use were built in the Global North and primarily use English as the default language. How do we build a local field, she asked and, at the same time, collaborate? Her answer focused on Latin America-based practices and experiences of open and multilingual scholarly production and knowledge exchange which, she argued, offer a way of radically transforming Digital Humanities on a global scale.
The workshop took place the following day. After participants had introduced themselves and the DH projects they were working on, we looked back together over the last couple of decades of scholarship in DH, honing in on some of Gimena’s own publications as well as the writings of Dominico Fiormonte, Alex Gil, Simon Mahony and Jennifer Isasi Velasco. In the next part of the workshop, Gimena took us through – and answered questions on – a huge range of open source tools and minimal computing technologies. I could not believe how little I knew! Finally, we discussed our hoped-for future projects and the possibility of further collaborations.
In response to this discussion enabled by RDI funds, Patience Schell (Aberdeen), Gimena and I came up with a proposal for research support funding from the Society of Latin American Studies. We were successful in our bid (April 2025) and are currently co-leading the project ‘Sustainable and Ethical Technologies for Digitally Engaged Research in the Humanities: A North-South Collaborative Lab’ (2025-2026). We are also co-writing a chapter on ‘Ethics and Sustainability’ for the Palgrave Handbook of Digital Latin American Studies (due for submission in October 2025) and testing out ideas for an AHRC Catalyst Award. The conversation that started in June 2024 has thus kept going, taking us in new directions and connecting us with more scholars in the field of DH, and especially in minimal computing.