Digital Humanities in Haiti and in developing countries « Digital Humanities Questions & Answers

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Digital Humanities in Haiti and in developing countries

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Asked 4 years ago by Brian Rosenblum
Latest answer from elotroalex
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Brian Rosenblum
Member
I will be travelling to Haiti next week to attend the INURED conference <http://inured.org/conference.html> and then several days of site visits to libraries and universities.

I would be very interested in hearing from the DH community any thoughts or experiences with digital projects focusing on Haiti in particular, or developing countries in general. What kinds of collaborative projects (with local institutions) are most useful or practical? What works well, and what doesn't. What are the most feasible ways to bring DH projects and access (or basic library training and development) to countries with low technical infrastructure and connectivity, and high levels of poverty?

I know of several initiatives focused on providing open access to scholarly or cultural resources in Haiti, including

Digital Library of the Caribbean: http://dloc.com/
Libraries Without Borders--Haiti: http://www.librarieswithoutborders.org/?cat=32
eGranary Digital Library: http://www.widernet.org/egranary/

and a previous DH Answers post on Haiti: http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/best-dh-tools-for-best-access-in-haiti#post-283

What roles are there for digital humanities in Haiti and developing countries, and how to we help it happen?
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Posted 4 years ago Permalink
James Neal
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Brian ... are you following Laurent Dubois on Twitter? He's<@Soccerpolitics)>. He might be a good resource for you. We were in the same cohort at the University of Michigan in anthropology graduate study. He's now a professor at Duke and a good Caribbean scholar who has done some interesting work in Haiti. Hope all is well in Kansas.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
JenniferServenti
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Immediately following the earthquake, the John Carter Brown Library put together a digital project called Remember Haiti. Here's the website http://www.brown.edu/Facilities/John_Carter_Brown_Library/remember_haiti/index.php. In the About this Site section, I see that they list all of their partners.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink
elotroalex
Member
Best Answer

I'm looking forward to your experiences in Haiti. Although, I've shared some of this information with you in private, I thought I would post some of these resources for the larger DH community (never too early to start preparing them for THATCampCaribe!):

The Caribbean Association of Libraries, ACURIL is an invaluable resource for connections in the area: http://acuril.uprrp.edu/ They are doing an excellent job, and they acknowledge the role of new technologies in the future of Caribbean archival and scholarly communications work.

To get an overview of the present state of libraries across the Caribbean region, a good book to read is Caribbean Libraries in the 21st Century. The book covers mostly the English-speaking Caribbean, but most of the issues are relevant to the other linguistic areas.

For Haiti in particular, an invaluable source of information and networking is the Haitian Studies Association: http://www.haitianstudies.umb.edu/

As Jen Serventi pointed out, Brown U. is a key player here. They happen to have the largest collection of Haiti materials outside of Haiti. The contact there is Dominique Coulombe. I had the pleasure of meeting with her recently, and she is eager to work with that collection. Let me know if you're interested. The Department of Africana Studies there is also looking to make things happen.

Posted 4 years ago Permalink

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