A Virtual Wunderkammer: Early 20th-Century Erotica in Spain
This project, led by Maite Zubiaurre and Wendy Kurtz at UCLA, offers a digital exploration of early 20th-century Spanish erotica. It serves as a companion to Zubiaurre’s book Cultures of the Erotic: Spain 1898–1939, published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2012, and its Spanish adaptation, Culturas del erotismo en España 1898–1939, published by Cátedra in 2014. Zubiaurre contributed the scholarly content, while Kurtz developed the website’s digital infrastructure and interface. Together, they created a resource to uncover the "forgotten" popular erotic materials repressed during the Franco era, providing access to a rich archive of textual and visual artifacts.
The website features links to digitized erotic magazines, collections of erotic novelettes, essays on sexuality and eugenics, nudist propaganda, and an image gallery showcasing erotic themes such as homosexuality and the portrayal of women. These materials are contextualized within Spain’s cultural and sociopolitical history, highlighting how popular erotica engaged with modernity, gender roles, and sexuality.
My contribution (Dig Hum 299)
For the Sicalipsis project, I undertook a comprehensive overhaul of the website’s backend, focusing on recovering and reorganizing its content files while designing a structured database. This involved downloading, categorizing, and itemizing over 1,370 items stored on the site’s file manager. Over four months, I flagged classification errors, identified damaged and duplicate files, and collaborated with Professor Kurtz to plan recovery efforts for inaccessible files using Omeka. To enhance future usability, I designed an optimized ontology and file structure layout for presenting and managing the content of the site's repository.
Building on this work, I developed a tagging system derived from the data sorting process and OCR-scanned illustrations from the Erotic Novelettes to integrate them into the Image Gallery section. This task also resulted in a dataset dedicated to cataloging these illustrations, which will expand the site’s archival and research capabilities.
Dates: Summer 2022, Summer 2023
