Digital humanities activity has been ongoing in Spain since the 1970s, including early collaborations and projects such as BOOST and Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library. However, the field has seen a dramatic surge in activity and organizations since 2011. Some challenges to the development of digital humanities in Spain include its atomized state, challenges to interdisciplinary research recognition, and lack of clear career paths for early career researchers. Overall the document analyzes the history and current state of digital humanities in Spain.

1. Global Challenges, Local Interpretations. An analytical
perspective on Digital Humanities in Spain
Paul Spence (Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London)
Elena González-Blanco (Laboratorio de Innovación en Humanidades Digitales, UNED)
Digital Humanities 2014
University of Lausanne (UNIL) & Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Switzerland, 9 July 2014
14/07/2014 10:14 ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 1
The original slides have been lightly edited
here, with added commentary

2. 1970s - Early research projects (BOOST: Bibliography of Old Spanish Texts)
involving international collaborations
Historical context
http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/philobiblon/
“En 1973 las humanidades digitales estaban firmemente asentadas en España”,
Francisco A. Marcos-Marín
http://fmarcosmarin.blogspot.com.es/2013/12/las-humanidades-digitales.html

3. Miguel de Cervantes Virtual Library
http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/
http://www.cch.kcl.ac.uk/clip2006/
Isolated research projects, initiatives
CLiP 2006
The forty years that followed saw numerous isolated
research projects in Spain, including the Miguel
Cervantes Virtual Library, which frequently made
valuable contributions to research in what was then
called ‘humanities computing’, and which often had
close relations with Italian colleagues involved in
‘informatica umanistica’ and with other Europeans
initiatives such as the CLiP seminars. But as is so often
the case for non-Anglophone traditions, this rich
tradition in Spain is largely absent from historical
depictions of the field at an international level.

4. Mexican association RedHD
http://humanidadesdigitales.net
Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas
(Hispanic Digital Humanities)
http://www.humanidadesdigitales.com/
THATCamp Caribe 2
http://caribbean2013.thatcamp.org/
Argentinian association AAHD
http://aahd.com.ar/
First GO::DH Conference, Second
Meeting of Digital Humanists
http://caribbean2013.thatcamp.org/
Hispanophone Digital Humanities organisations
The last few years have seen a dramatic surge in activity in the digital
humanities in Spain (see http://hd.paulspence.org/recursos/hh-dd-
es/), which are part of a broader articulation of Hispanophone digital
humanities organisations

5. http://andresdepoza.com/
http://www.cica.cat/
http://corpus.rae.es/cordenet.html
Wide range of projects, research groups
http://portal.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/
instituto_cultura_tecnologia_miguel_unamuno

6. http://pares.mcu.es/ http://roai.mcu.es/es/inicio/inicio.cmd/
Connections to Libraries and Archives
Some landmark projects such as PARES (which provides access to
the digital holdings of Spanish archives) and HISPANA (which
follows OAI principles in connecting digital holdings throughout
Spanish archives, libraries and museums) have played a key part in
broader digital initiatives.

7. The portal PCDig explores connections between art,
technology and digital culture
http://patrimonioyculturadigital.uma.es/pcdig
Connections to broader concept of digital culture

8. Humanities domain focus
http://tc12.uv.es/
http://www.charta.es/
(Humanities) domain-specific communities
have played an important role in developing
awareness of digital scholarship

9. Tentative conclusions about DH research projects in Spain
• Delimited to large extent by traditional disciplinary boundaries
• Formal evaluation and credit mechanisms for digital outputs are
a particular challenge in Spain
• Collaborative research is not usually given appropriate credit
• Strong theoretical tradition grounded in conventional humanities
disciplines or information science
• But there is not the strong history of tool-building that is more
prevalent in other regional contexts.
• Digital innovations typically result from fragile and unstable
partnerships with computational science researchers offering
their time on a volunteer basis or from commercial
agreements with software companies.

10. Master in DH, UCLM (2005-2011)
http://linhd.uned.es/p/escuela-de-verano/
• Some success in informal training/workshop events
• But historically, there have been few experiences in
teaching digital humanities as a formal academic
subject
• Master in DH at UCLM (2005-2011) was crucial in
establishing DH as a subject of study in Spain

11. DH Events in Spain since 2011
Great number of DH events in
Spain since 2011

12. abc
HDH 2013 conference July 2013
HDH2013 brought together 103 attendees, with 59 papers and posters accepted
from nine different countries and covering a wide range of subject matter, including
lexicology, digital libraries, art history, e-learning, digital edition and crowdsourcing.
HDH2013 represented a first response to what Sagrario López Poza has identified as
a “clear interest of an increasing number of researchers who are disoriented and
isolated and wish to create areas of confluence” (López Poza ‘Humanidades digitales
hispánicas’ in Ciencuentenario de la AIH, forthcoming), a group which has been
visibly galvanized by ongoing Global Outlook debates in the DH

13. Community building in wider hispanophone field
Zotero group for
‘Humanidades digitales’
curated by Antonio Rojas
Castro, with 42 members
and 371 items
https://www.zotero.org/gro
ups/humanidades_digitales

14. http://grinugr.org/mapa/ Esteban Romero-Frías (University of Granada, Spain) &
Élika Ortega (University of Western Ontario, Canada)
Atlas de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Digitales

15. Sharp increase in publications since 2011
• Dedicated monographs
• Special issues of journals
• New journals with a DH theme
Search on ‘humanidades digitales’
on Dialnet
http://dialnet.unirioja.es/
Publications about “digital humanities”

16. Publications
Publication venues for
“humanidades digitales” in Spain

17. Data from ‘Who are you Digital Humanists?’ survey (Cleo).
Graph from La stratégie du Sauna finlandais, Marin Dacos
http://blog.homo-numericus.net/article11138.html
Visibility, evidence /context
Visibility an issue, but depends on
context

18. Rodríguez-Yunta, Luis. “Humanidades digitales, ¿una mera
etiqueta o un campo por el que deben apostar las ciencias de la
documentación?”. Anuario ThinkEPI, 2013, v. 7, pp. 37-43
DH under the microscope in Spain

20. • Ongoing atomisation
• Identify of field
• Cross-channel communication
• Recognition for interdisciplinary research
• Peer recognition at disciplinary level
• Formal evaluation and credit
• Opportunities for early career researchers
• Career paths
Challenges for DH in Spain

21. • Which parameters to use when examining given regional/linguistic
group?
– “How many people self-identify with DH in some way?”
– “How many people do we identify with DH by some pre-agreed
metric?”
– “How many people are actively involved in building digital models of
humanities research?”
– “How many people are involved in reflective research on the impact of
technology on human scholarship?”
– “How many people are involved in any kind of digital scholarship?”
– Etc.
• Analysis of regional groups typically has overlapping, but non-
identical objectives:
– To research DH as a particular domain of scholarly activity
– To build a digital humanities community
– To build a DH research field with appropriate academic recognition
– To improve visibility for particular geographic and linguistic groups
within the field as a whole and address imbalance
* Term coined by Roopika Risam during Global Outlook panel which this
presentation was part of
Documenting a regional accent* of DH

22. Paul Spence, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London
paul.spence@kcl.ac.uk
http://www.paulspence.org/
Twitter: @dhpaulspence/@hdpaulspence
Elena González-Blanco, Laboratorio de Innovacion en Humanidades Digitales, UNED
egonzalezblanco@flog.uned.es
http://linhd.uned.es
www.uned.es/personal/elenagonzalezblanco
http://filindig.hypotheses.org/
Twitter: @elenagbg
Essay ‘A historical perspective on the digital humanities in Spain’ forthcoming in:
H-Soz-u-Kult http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/
Contact