Introduction
This is the introduction for a special issue.
“Solving the ‘Social Question’: Women Workers and Working-Class Families in Restoration Valencia, 1870-1900.”
/in articleIn Restoration Valencia, social reformers engaged in solving the so-called “social question” honed in on working women and the structure of the working class family as a way to promote a hegemonic view of bourgeois culture among the working classes. The data they produced, primarily in Valencia’s report for the Commission for Social Reform, are the most comprehensive data about women’s work lives available for late-19th-century Valencia, and helped to provide the foundation for legislation limiting women’s work, particularly the law of 13 March 1900.
El problema morisco y la retórica de la infección corporal en “La historia del cautivo”
/in articleThe object of this study, from the perspective of a Cervantist, is to put two forms of medicalizing discourse in dialog with one another: the first is the discourse of sickness and health in texts advocating the expulsion of the moriscos; the second is the medical images of the captive’s tale (“la retórica de la infección corporal en ‘La historia del cautivo’”).
Queering the Early Modern Iberian Archive: Recent Trends
/in articleThe article proposes to rethink the landscape of the early modern archive of the Iberian world from a queer perspective. It addresses recent trends that explore the possibilities that rethinking queerness, in particular in relation to the archive, has for reconsidering the trajectory of historical analysis. It argues that the structure of the archive has sometimes obscured the ambiguous sex and gender of some individuals in the early modern Iberian world.
Constructing Normativity: A Historiographical Essay on the Codification and Regulation of Gender and Sexuality in Franco’s Spain
/in articleThis historiographical essay traces the contours of the field of gender and sexuality during the Franco regime in Spain with a focus on the codification and regulation of normativity. The article presents definitions of normativity for men and women, provides a historical narrative of the dictatorship’s attempt to control lived realities of masculinity and femininity, analyzes how scholars have interpreted transformations in and resistance to Francoist power structures, investigates the role of sexual deviance in those processes, assesses theoretical conceptions of the regime, and examines possibilities of continued study.
Multiple–Layered Encoding as an Editorial and Pedagogical Strategy for Colonial Latin American Studies
/in articleThis article considers a multiple–layered approach to the digital encoding of manuscript and rare print materials related to the colonial period in Latin America. I explain my adoption of this method, describe its technical implementation, and consider its benefits from editorial and pedagogical standpoints. By way of example, I examine the specific implementation of this model on three projects I have undertaken in collaboration with students at the University of North Florida. In preparing this study, I seek to contribute to emerging conversations about how we understand, practice and teach the ideas and methods that underlie the transmission today of written materials related to colonial Latin America, and more broadly, the Early Modern Iberian world. I aim, as well, to add to efforts to advance the presence of these fields within larger interdisciplinary conversations around editorial theory and practice in a digital age.
Undergraduate Research, Student-Student Mentoring, and Student-Faculty Collaboration in a DH-Intensive Seminar on Early Modern Spanish Cities
/in articleThis article reveals strategies, resources, and experiences from this newly designed Spanish undergraduate seminar that responded both to students’ request for program diversification as well as personal interest in training Spanish majors in the application of digital humanities software programs to analyze, examine and visualize early modern Spanish cities.
Deciphering Secrets of Medieval Cathedrals: Crowdsourced Manuscript Transcriptions and Modern Digital Editions
/in articleThis paper discusses Deciphering Secrets, a large-scale transcription project linked to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to teach Spanish paleography and the SILReST paleography method. It also addresses issues of accuracy, particularly how connecting crowdsourced transcription to class assignments will increase the accuracy of transcriptions and quickly make available to the scholarly community many manuscript transcriptions from the cathedral chapters of Burgos, Plasencia, and Toledo. It discusses the refinement of editorial techniques in migration of archival materials to digital format, creating standards for text encoding, and postulates the next steps of building databases. The paper then shows how new knowledge came to light through the transcription process and highlights possibilities for future research. Moreover, crowdsourcing makes students active participants in the creation and preservation of cultural materials. It engages students – making history and the humanities more relevant to them.
Podcasting Historias: Public Outreach through Digital Storytelling in Iberian History
/in articlePodcasts are now a standard way for the public to consume audio media, and some academic history podcasts now boast thousands of listens per episode. Yet research on academic podcasting has concentrated on its educational uses while neglecting to ask how historians can best use podcasts as a tool for public outreach. This article aims to fill that gap by arguing that historians can best practice podcasting as public history by understanding the medium as part of the digital humanities, that is, by creating engaging, original audio content accompanied by an interactive website rather than simply posting recordings of lectures or conference panels. Drawing on recent research on both the digital humanities and podcasting, insights from podcast hosts, and the podcast recordings themselves, the article first briefly surveys the histories of the digital humanities and podcasting in order to highlight parallels between the two and provide definitions for both. The piece then turns to short reviews of various podcasts, exploring what academic podcasters can learn from the most popular commercial history podcasts, how popular academic history podcasts became successful, and what podcasts are currently available that concern Iberian history. Finally, the author enumerates what steps are involved in creating a podcast, urging Iberian historians to get involved in the digital humanities in this way, helping to create a web of different podcasts that will enhance the public footprint of as many historians as possible.
The Spanish Civil War Memory Project: Constructing and Enhancing a Digital Archive
/in articleThe Spanish Civil War Memory Project consists of over one hundred audiovisual testimonies of victims, militants, survivors, and witnesses of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Francoist repression (1939-1975). The testimonies were recorded by researchers between 2006 and 2010 as part of an initiative of UC San Diego in collaboration with several human rights associations in Spain, including: the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), the Asociación de Ex-presos y Represaliados Políticos, and the Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria, among others. This article discusses the origins and development of the project, as well as current efforts to make the project a more user-friendly and media-rich experience by training student researchers to digitally enhance the collected testimonies with the web-based system OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer).
