Archive of Literatures of the Caribbean (ALC)
by Suzanna Engman
IMAGINE CARIBBEAN HISTORY as a handful of multicolored confetti. Each color represents a different language. Now scatter the confetti over a globe. As each bit of paper touches down, it's whisked away and locked up in archives across Europe–in Spain, England, Denmark, and France–and in Caribbean universities, private libraries, or government archives.
Just as Caribbean islands are separated linguistically and geographically from the continents and from each other, Caribbean manuscripts, starting with Columbus's journals and letters, are linguistically and geographically fragmented.
"The Caribbean's presence on the Internet is equally fragmented and marginalized from the rapidly developing electronic canon," says Jo Anne Harris, Interim Director of the Education Resource Center in General Studies at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and the director of the UPR, RP team of researchers working on a project to make Caribbean manuscripts generally available via the Internet.
Digitization, the conversion of paper texts into electronic machine-readable format, is bringing the scattered Caribbean manuscripts together. "Most people think that scanning a text is all that's involved in digitalization, but scanning is a very minor part of the entire digitization process," says Harris.
Digitization of Caribbean manuscripts involves international cooperation among librarians, computer experts, and humanity scholars. The first step is to obtain permission from an archive to allow its manuscripts to be scanned. Sometimes the manuscripts are delicate and need to be handled by experts. Then, because many of the manuscripts are written in longhand archaic script with nonstandard spelling, a paleographer needs to transcribe the manuscript into readable text. The text then needs to be annotated and translated into a modern language, from Old Spanish into modern Spanish, for example. Then the modern language needs to be translated into other languages.
The UPR, RP digitization project, "Selected Ecclesiastical Voyages and Missions in the Caribbean: 1500-1800," focuses on the evangelization and colonization process. To digitalize 16th century manuscripts that are physically housed in the Archivo General de las Indias in Seville, Spain, professors from the Centro de Investigaciones Históricas at UPR, RP provide the historical expertise of a paleographer, history professor José Cruz Arrigoitia, Ph.D., who also annotates the documents, and Miriam Lugo, part-time history professor and Ph.D. candidate in history, who edits the documents. UPR's High Performance Computing Facility's computer programmer, William Cabán, provides the tools necessary to catalogue and index the digitized manuscripts as well as a storage and retrieval system.
Digitization doesn't happen overnight–these 16th century manuscripts won't be available on the Internet until the end of 2005–but once a manuscript is placed on the Internet, it's instantly available to researchers across the globe.
Miriam Lugo and José Cruz Arrigoitia, College of Humanities; Jo Anne Harris, College of General Studies; Guy Corimer and William Caban, HPCF.
This project is the first phase of a larger proposed project, The Archive of Literatures of the Caribbean, which would be a joint effort of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and the University of Virginia to deploy a fully searchable, cross-indexed set of hypermedia itineraries.
| |
The ALC project would digitize:
- Original documents, maps, journals, and other testimonial material
- Documents of freebooters, buccaneers, privateers, and other early mariners' accounts during the 17th century
- Plantation registers, journals, early engravings, wills, treatises on the sugar mills, and imaginative literature of the 18th and 19th century
- Essays, historical documents, and imaginative literature surrounding abolition
- Documents and literature of the indentured laborers from the East Indias, the Indian subcontinent, China, and the Levant who came to the Caribbean to replace the freed slaves
|
|
The university's HPCF was created in 1997 with NSF funding to network the university's campuses across the island. Since then, the HPCF has expanded to take on other projects, including the Internet2 project, designed to link the university to the top 200 research universities in the states. Director of the HPCF, Guy Cormier, says that the facility is also developing a Digital Archive Resource Center.
www.hpcf.upr.edu or http://cih.upr.edu |
