Toward a Latinx digital humanities pedagogy: remixing, reassembling, and reimagining the archive

Abstract

This essay considers the teaching of the Latinx nineteenth century as a starting point for elucidating the unique interplay between pedagogy, epistemology, and ontology in our digital age. I argue that fields such as the Latinx nineteenth century, which must confront absences in the archive, foreground groundbreaking new pedagogical possibilities that draw on, but are not limited to, the computational methods that the digitization of archival texts has enabled. As scholars of Latinx Studies – as well as those in related fields such as hemispheric studies, black Atlantic studies, and indigenous studies – work to question the assumptions and omissions of our print-dominated past, digitization projects have become sites for recuperating lost voices, for breaking out of the disciplinary formations that have made sense of cultural history to find new patterns, and for increasing participation in the production of knowledge itself. While much of this work to date has centered on opening up new research trajectories, an emerging wave dedicated to digital humanities pedagogy in Latinx studies and related fields is engaging students in remixing, reassembling, and reimagining the archival record. Such new pedagogical approaches call for corresponding educational research methods and tools that can assess the effectiveness of the new digital humanities pedagogy in encouraging reflexivity about what we know and how we know it – and, ultimately, in contributing to the democratization of the production of knowledge.