Intellectual statement
Across projects that span literary archives, geospatial mapping, and historical data visualization, my journey in the Digital Humanities has led me to explore how digital infrastructures (tagging systems, data schemas, visualizations) can help surface stories that might otherwise remain obscured. Whether designing an optimized ontology for the Sicalipsis erotic literature archive or writing interpretive text for maps in the geospatial project Entre las aguas, I have worked to make digital platforms do more than store or display data; I conceptualize them as a space to construct narratives that are grounded in research, embedded in their historical context, analytically rigorous, and attentive to issues of representation. I approach each project not just as a technical exercise, but as an opportunity to pose humanistic questions: What patterns does this data conceal, or reveal? What assumptions lie beneath its structure? And what stories emerge when we reorganize or reframe it?
Equally important to my DH practice is a commitment to collaboration and tool-building as forms of critical inquiry. I have developed backend systems using Omeka, cleaned and structured datasets in OpenRefine, and designed data visualizations and maps using Flourish, QGIS, and Carto. These skills have allowed me to contribute meaningfully to both the technical and interpretive sides of collaborative projects, while also deepening my understanding of how interface design, data cleaning, and platform choice shape the interpretive possibilities of a project. In Entre las aguas, I shaped the project’s narrative arc, integrating maps and data visualizations with written analysis to explore the trajectory of Latino artists featured at NSU Art Museum. I helped define research questions, guide data cleaning strategies—especially around gender diversity—and interpret findings such as the underrepresentation of women and the prominence of Cuban exile artists. Similarly, in my work with the National Archive of Catalonia’s dataset on Catalans illegally tried under Franco, I made decisions about data omission and territorial framing that had real consequences for the story the visualization could tell. Across my projects, I’ve grown increasingly interested in how DH methods can be used to interrogate archival silences, emphasize power structures, challenge the narratives and systems through which knowledge has historically been organized and disseminated, and foreground previously unheard voices. My goal is to continue developing a DH practice that is grounded in both technical skill and critical reflection—one that treats digital work not as ancillary to the humanities, but as a space where qualitative and quantitative research meet and where scholarly interpretation and public engagement converge.
My critical understanding of Digital Humanities
In 2023 and 2024, I worked as a Teaching Fellow for the Cluster program at UCLA. Specifically, within the Political Violence in the Modern World Cluster, which, in part, introduces STEM and Science majors to the methodologies and questions of the humanities. For many of these students, it was their first exposure to college-level humanistic research and practices, and while they engaged earnestly, some expressed frustration or shock at the nature of qualitative research practices, being mostly used to conduct scientific, quantitative analysis. In Spring 2023, within this program, I had the opportunity to teach a seminar partially based on my research on tensions between collective memories in the aftermath of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1939-1975). I devoted one lesson to Digital Humanities and its role in shaping spaces of public memory. We read UCLA’s Prof. Wendy Kurtz’ article Mediating Memory (2018) and discussed how digital platforms can become spaces of remembrance, intervention, and reinterpretation.
To begin the session, I asked my students if they had ever heard the term “Digital Humanities.” A few nodded. When I followed up asking them to define it, silence followed. I offered a pretty simplified explanation (one of many perspectives of DH) in an easily digestible manner for college freshmen: Digital Humanities as a bridge between the type of research I conducted—about literature, humanistic, qualitative—and the type of research they carried out in their own majors. As we moved through examples of DH initiatives and explored tools to engage with data from a humanistic perspective, I saw their interest increase. They began suggesting potential topics for the course we could apply those to, and even to their own research. After a whole year of taking a humanities class, they, too, were eager to return to their own major with a new perspective.
Moreover, designing a lesson plan forced me to articulate my own understanding of Digital Humanities. I had to consider how to present DH not only as a set of tools, but as a mode of inquiry that reshapes what it means to engage critically with knowledge in a digital age. I often return to Wendell Piez’s (2016) framing of DH as a form of “media consciousness”, one that sees digital platforms not only as subjects of analysis but as active sites of cultural production and reinvention. I particularly resonate with Piez’s historic comparison with the origins of the humanistic movement as we conceive it: “Digital Humanities resembles nothing so much as the humanistic movement that instigated the European Renaissance, which was concerned not only with the revival of Classical scholarship in its time but also with the development and application of high technology to learning and its dissemination (191).” This dual engagement—this reciprocity—of critique and creation reminds me that DH is not only about using digital tools but about understanding the assumptions, structures and affordances that shape those tools.
In an increasingly data-drive world, where humanistic knowledge is often discarded are often dismissed as unprofitable or impractical, I believe it is important to foreground the ethical and political stakes of digital work. Wendell’s words ring especially loud: a humanistic approach—or a humanistic curiosity—to the data, to digital media, to technology implementation is not only necessary, but it can prevent a rigid, hierarchical view of the world. When I asked my students what they thought “the truth” is, they remitted to facts or data, things that are empirical, axiomatic, measurable. However, if there is something I have learn throughout my work (and coursework) in the Digital Humanities is that technical systems are never neutral, and that digital methods can serve as powerful tools for both scholarly analysis and critical intervention. As d’Ignazio and Klein argue in Data Feminism (2020), data frequently reinforces existing power structures and beliefs and, therefore must be considered side by side with other factors that provide a framework to understand or detect what omissions or biases they present. As they write: “We strongly believe that data can do good in the world. But for it to do so, we must explicitly acknowledge that a key way that power and privilege operate in the world today has to do with the word data itself (10)”. Notoriously, projects like Mimi Onuhoa’s The Library of Missing Datasets have drawn attention to these systemic absences, the blank spaces where vulnerable or minorized groups are rendered invisible by the very systems that claim objectivity.
Similarly, as a doctoral candidate in literature whose research focuses on memory, trauma and political silence in post-dictatorship Catalonia, I see digital methods not only as instruments of historical inquiry but as platforms of contestation, counter-memory, justice and grief. Visualizations can draw attention to archival silences, interfaces can be designed to invite participation, and datasets can be restructured to make visible what was previously erased. Narratives can be constructed or disassembled, and the same data that may be weaponized against vulnerable or minority groups can also be approached from a critical perspective that disentangles how far-right organizations build their discourses, like Chris Houghton’s usage of word clouds analyzing extreme-right speeches from the 1940-1950 and 1990-2000 to see which topics and groups were targeted (2021). As David and Zucker write in Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age (2020), “the past, once curated, contained, and circumscribed in the public domain, is now being reassembled in novel forms and formulations through ever-growing digital capabilities that are employed by a multitude of actors” (2). This reassembly is not only analytical but political, and DH provides the means to participate in that process in a deliberate and informed manner.
Ultimately, my work in the Digital Humanities is centered around an a belief of the narrative power of digital form and the interpretive responsibility of scholarly practice. Projects like Sicalipsis and Entre las aguas have led me to consider how interface, structure, and visualization shape not only how stories are told, but also whose stories are made legible. My solo project Postwar Trials in Catalonia, in particular, help me realize the ways digital platforms can illuminate patterns, reframe histories, and invite reflection on the gaps within our collective memory. As I continue to build tools and contribute to digital projects, I remain committed to a DH practice that foregrounds critical awareness: one that treats digital media not as neutral information or vessels, but as frameworks that shape meaning, perception, and the narratives we carry forward.
Works referenced
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data feminism. MIT press, 2020.
Kurtz, Wendy Perla. “Mass Graves and Remembering through Ritual: Historical Memory in Contemporary.” (2017).
Houghton, Chris. Can Digital Humanities teach us more about Political Extremism? (2021). https://review.gale.com/2021/01/26/can-digital-humanities-teach-us-more-about-political-extremism/.
Onuhoa, Mimi. The Library of Missing Datasets: An Ongoing Repository of Data That Is Not Collected. https://github.com/MimiOnuoha/missing-datasets.
Piez, Wendell. “Something Called Digital Humanities.” In Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Ed. by Melissa Terras, Julianne Nyhan, Edward Banhoutte. Routledge, 2016, pp. 187-193.
Zucker, Eve Monique, and David J. Simon, eds. Mass violence and memory in the digital age: memorialization unmoored. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.