Personal Digital Archiving 2018

This 3-presentation panel will focus on the work and efforts put forth by the University of Houston’s Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage program. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is a program to locate, preserve and make available the written legacy of Latinas and Latinos in the United States since colonial times until 1960. Through 25 years of successful work Recovery has not only being able to inscribe the excluded history of Latinas/os, but also has created an inclusive and vast digital repository that facilitates scholarship in this area of studies. The presentations in this panel will focus on the importance of recovery work in the writing, teaching, and understanding of history. We will consider how local personal archives have helped to fill in the gaps of mainstream history. Presentations in this panel will also include a discussion of the process of creating the first Digital Humanities Research programming focused on US Latina/o Studies. We will detail the goals and challenges of this mission, as well as the importance of educating the community in digital methods that preserve and disseminate minority voices.