Vol. 10 No. 1 (2023): Digital Humanities in Latin America
The concept of “Digital Humanities,” although frequent in academic vocabulary for more than a decade, has been used until today with different meanings. While it designates a community of practices, it can also be understood as the discourses on these practices, a set of transdisciplinary activities or a field of knowledge. However, even if there is no agreed definition or a unified field, there is a consensus around this concept: the idea that it represents a strong link between the Humanities and Social Sciences and a set of knowledge production and validation practices related to societies increasingly dependent on digital technologies.
The existence of diverse regional and national histories and traditions cannot be ignored in this context, given that societies are not in the same stages of technological production and democratization of access to technologies. As the DH tend to reproduce and reconfigure economic asymmetries and inequalities, and in the face of a global race to institutionalize the field, as well as strong competition for funding, it is important to claim methodological models that escape the hegemony of the paradigms created by the Anglo-American and North European axes, which have dominated research on new technologies in the Humanities since its inception.
For this reason, this issue of MATLIT seeks to bring together articles that reflect on conceptual formulations, practices and methods of the Digital Humanities in the context of Latin American countries. In this way, we seek to broaden the debate on the geopolitics of the field and offer a diversified image of its practices and traditions in different cultural spaces. From a situated perspective, which articulates a specific context of technological development to the production of humanistic knowledge, it is possible to give greater visibility to approaches that not only presuppose the digital as a research tool in the Humanities, but that elect the digital —and its tools— as an object of investigation.
Manaíra Aires Athayde (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Rejane C. Rocha (Universidade Federal de São Carlos)
