Category Archives: Collections

Libraries Partners in Exhibition Celebrating Black Classicists

The University of Texas Libraries is collaborating with other local heritage institutions to highlight the contributions of Black historians to the study of antiquity.

“Black Classicists in Texas” is a free public exhibition, celebrating the life and work of classicists of color in Austin and Central Texas. In 1900, Reuben Shannon Lovinggood, the Chair of the Greek and Latin Department at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, made an impassioned argument against those who minimized the value of liberal education, especially Classics, for Black people. In the same year, Lovinggood became the first president of Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University), and a pillar of the Austin Black community.

But he was not the only one.

The exhibition tells the story of Central Texas’ early educators of color and their passion for the study of antiquity. Explore images, archival materials, interviews, and current scholarship to find out more about Lovinggood, L.C. Anderson, H.T. Kealing and their vibrant community of scholars, students and public intellectuals. Learn about Classics and its place in historic debates on Black self-determination, and find out more about classical education in Austin today.

This exhibition is a collaboration between the Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, University of Texas Libraries, the Black Diaspora Archive at the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, the Downs-Jones Library at Huston-Tillotson University, and the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center.Visit the three exhibition sites at the Benson Collection at the University of Texas at Austin, Huston-Tillotson University, and the Carver Museum.

For more information on the exhibitions, including a self-guided tour and additional resources, visit the Black Classicists in Texas website at https://bcatx.org/.

“Black Classicists in Texas” will be on view through December 22, 2023.


Over the past year, Adriana Cásarez, U.S. Studies and African Studies Librarian, played a key role in coordinating the “Black Classicists in Texas” exhibition project, and worked in partnership with Libraries’ colleagues Rachel E. Winston, Dr. D Ryan Lynch, Dr. Lorraine J. Haricombe, Shiela Winchester, Mary Rader, and Aaron Choate.

Casarez was interviewed about the exhibit on the Texas Standard, which you can listen to here.

The Missing Link: Peer Learning for Linked Data

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of initiatives by GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) using Linked Open Data technologies to enhance access to their collections. From nation-wide collaborative campaigns, such as the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Wikidata Pilot, to paradigm-shifting implementations, such as the transition of the Library of Congress cataloging operations to a hybrid MARC and BIBFRAME environment, the growing availability of tools, ontologies and platforms are finally allowing cultural heritage institutions to explore the promises of linked data.

Librarians and archivists see the potential in Wikidata as a pragmatic solution for managing local authorities in a linked data environment; Wikidata is increasingly used for research and increasingly integrated into software applications, including Library Service Platforms like Alma/Primo.

The UT Linked Data Learning Group, an informal community of practice at The University of Texas at Austin, composed of professional staff working in archives and libraries, convenes monthly to address the need for pragmatic ways to integrate linked data into routine workflows. We collaborate to build knowledge, skills, and institutional support for linked data initiatives in our respective institutions.

In 2022, group efforts focused on building knowledge and skills around Wikidata. Some members of the UT Linked Data Learning Group have been exploring and using Wikidata in various projects in recent years. This group aspired to leverage those members’ knowledge and skills to train other staff through a hands-on peer learning experience, with intentions to expand awareness and surface opportunities for integrating Wikidata into existing and future work. To that end, group members designed and delivered a 2-day virtual Wikidata Workshop on January 12-13, 2023.

Workshop Outcomes

Goals achieved:

  • Staff familiarity with Wikidata and Linked Data
  • Enhanced linked data ecosystem relevant to Texas Cultural Heritage
  • Expanded impact of Handbook of Texas diversification efforts (adding & enhancing Wikidata entries about Texas women)

Building a community of practice – campus representation among 36 registrants:

  • UT Libraries Content Management unit
  • UT Libraries Access Systems unit
  • UT Libraries Branch & Borrower Services unit
  • UT Libraries Stewardship department
  • UT Libraries Alexander Architectural Archives
  • UT Libraries Benson Latin American Collection
  • Harry Ransom Center
  • Briscoe Center for American History
  • Tarlton Law Library
  • Texas Digital Library
  • School of Information

Hands-on peer learning to build new skills:

  • 21 active editors contributed to Wikidata throughout the workshop. Some continued with contributions after the workshop.
  • 31 new items created in Wikidata for entries represented in the Handbook of Texas
  • 74 existing Wikidata items updated with data from the Handbook of Texas
  • 835 new references for Wikidata statements citing the Handbook of Texas as a source
Infographic of workshop outcomes

Individuals involved in designing and delivering the workshop: Melanie Cofield, Head of Access Systems, University of Texas Libraries (UTL); Brenna Edwards, Manager for Digital Archives, Harry Ransom Center; Paloma Graciani-Picardo, Metadata Librarian and Head, Printed & Published Media, Harry Ransom Center; Katie Pierce Meyer, Head of Architectural Collections, UTL; Michael Shensky, Head of Research Data Services, UTL; Yogita Sharma, Alexander Architectural Archives team member, UTL; and Elliot Williams, former DPLA Metadata Aggregation Outreach Coordinator for Texas Digital Library.

Annual ¡A Viva Voz! Event to Feature Chicana / Tejana Artist Santa Barraza, Exhibition Opening

The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection is proud to host the 21st Annual ¡A Viva Voz! Celebration of U.S. Latino/a/x Culture, featuring a conversation with Chicana/Tejana artist Santa Barraza.

Santa Barraza, courtesy Juan Johnson Lopez

A native of Kingsville, Texas, Santa Barraza is a contemporary artist and founder of Barraza Fine Art, LLC, a gallery and studio committed to furthering the appreciation of the visual arts in the borderlands and among isolated, rural populations.

Barraza’s artwork is in the permanent collections of museums in Texas, California, and Maine; the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; France; Germany; and Spain. Most recently, her work is on view in the art museums of Denver, Albuquerque, and San Antonio as part of Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche; the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin for Chicano/a Art, Movimiento y Más en Austen, Tejas, 1960s–1980s; and for the Art in Embassies exhibition organized in Mexico City by the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar.

The ¡A Viva Voz! event also marks the opening of the exhibition Legacies of Nepantla: Artists Affirming Identity and Existence, curated by Maribel Falcón, the Benson’s U.S. Latina/o/x Studies Librarian. The exhibition showcases work that is part of the Benson’s archival holdings. It will be on view in the Benson’s Ann Hartness Reading Room through mid-August 2023.

“The exhibition showcases work from women whose myriad identities include Chicana, Native American, Tejana, and Latina, in addition to mothers, sisters, organizers, artists, activists, teachers, and students,” said Falcón. “Many of the featured artists are established as leaders in their communities and recognized as pillars of the Chicano/a art world, such as Santa Barraza, Carmen Lomas Garza, Patssi Valdez, Yreina D. Cervántez, Ester Hernandez, Irene Pérez, and Alma López.”


If You Go ¡A Viva Voz! takes place in the Benson Latin American Collection (2300 Red River Street, SRH 1) on Thursday, April 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. Light refreshments provided by The Local Explorer Mezcal and La Cocina de Consuelo; vinyl sounds by Chulita Vinyl Club. 

Due to an event at the Moody Center, parking is limited. We encourage attendees to use alternative forms of transportation. City of Austin street parking is available on Dean Keaton and on Red River north of Clyde Littlefield.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Susanna Sharpe.


Image: Cihuateteo con Coyolxauhqui y La Guadalupana, Santa Barraza, 1996

Inaugural Black Queer Studies Award Winners

On Friday, February 12, the Libraries announced the inaugural winners of the Black Queer Studies Student Awards! A true labor of love several years in the making, the Monica K. Roberts Graduate and the Hogan/Schell Undergraduate Awards recognize honor, and celebrate excellence in student scholarship and creative endeavors in the field of Black Queer Studies. Winning submissions directly engage with the Libraries’ groundbreaking Black Queer Studies Collection

Our first cohort of winners are Allen Poterie, a graduate student from the Performance as Public Practice program in the Theater and Dance Department, and Jeremiah Baldwin, an undergraduate senior majoring in Government, Rhetoric and Writing, and African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS). 

Allen’s winning submission is entitled “And Don’t Let Go: Scenes of Holding as a Means of Emotional Exchange between Black Men.” Allen’s work is a scholarly literature review that contextualizes his creative work-in-progress – a television screenplay about the lives and relationships of Black Queer men. The selection committee was impressed with the quality of his literature review. Allen cited many books and films in the Libraries’ Black Queer Studies Collection, including literary work by Essex Hemphill, films directed by Marlon Riggs, and scholarship by E. Patrick Johnson. 

Jeremiah’s submission is “Caught At An Intersection The Podcast,” which examines Black Queer experiences through interviews and discussions, using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s watershed theory of intersectionality as a framework. In one episode about James Baldwin, Jeremiah interviews author Alejandro Heredia. Alejandro’s book You’re the Only Friend I Need is part of the Black Queer Studies Collection. 

Additionally, the selection committee was so impressed with two additional submissions that they awarded Honorable Mentions to Alexandria Cunningham, a graduate student in AADS, and Tolu Osunsade, a senior majoring in Public Health and AADS. Alexandria’s submission was a selection from her dissertation “The Black Freak Nasty Magic Project™ :: Choreographies of Play, Pleasure and Sexuality.” Tolu’s work was the research paper “The Harm in Reproductive Healthcare for Black Women and Gender Non-Conforming Individuals in The United States”. 

These four students were recognized at the Awards Ceremony, held on Zoom on Friday, February 12. The ceremony included several guest speakers, including two of the collection’s co-founders. Matt Richardson shared the story of how he founded the Black Queer Studies Collection with librarians Kristen Hogan and Lindsey Schell, and he read from his recent novel Black Canvas: A Campus Haunting. Lindsey Schell and Xavier Livermon discussed their contributions to the BQSC, and Dee Dee Watters and Jo Hsu spoke about the life and legacy of Monica K. Roberts. Monica was known as the TransGriot, and she was a Houston-based transgender rights activist and blogger. The graduate award is named for her. Alexis Pauline Gumbs closed the ceremony with her presentation on “Archive as Oracle”, which included creative divination readings based on the poetry of Audre Lorde. The Black Queer Studies Collection includes Alexis’s books, such as Undrowned and M Archive: After the End of the World

Many UT staff and faculty worked behind the scenes to make both the awards and the ceremony possible. Gina Bastone and Adriana Cásarez are the liaison librarians who curate and maintain the collection, and they partnered with professor Lyndon Gill from African and African Diaspora Studies to organize the awards and the event. The faculty selection committee included Hershini Young, Neville Hoad, and Nessette Falu. 

The Libraries would like to thank our campus partners for sponsoring the awards ceremony and providing annual funding for the Black Queer Studies Collection. They include the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, the LGBTQ Studies Program, and the English Department. The prize money is dispersed through the UT Libraries, and primarily draws from the Black Queer Studies Collection Endowment, originally funded through a crowd-sourced fundraising campaign in 2021. To give to the Black Queer Studies Collection Endowment fund, please contact the UT Libraries Development Office. 

WHIT’S PICKS: Vol. 11 – GEMS FROM THE HMRC

Resident poet and rock and roll star Harold Whit Williams is in the midst of a project to catalog the KUT Collection, obtained a few years ago and inhabiting a sizable portion of the Historical Music Recordings Collection (HMRC).

Whit’s immersion in local music history and performance qualifies him as an authority as he explores and discovers some of the overlooked gems in this massive trove, and so in this occasional series, he’ll be presenting some of his noteworthy finds.

Earlier installments: Take 1Take 2Take 3Take 4Take 5Take 6Take 7Take 8Take 9, Take 10


Tyler Ramsey / The Valley Wind

Available at Fine Arts Library Onsite Storage

Onetime Band of Horses’ guitarist Tyler Ramsey takes a solo walkabout into deeply-wooded indie folk on The Valley Wind. From the Windham Hill-esque instrumental opener “Raven Shadow” through brooding ballad “1000 Blackbirds,” then on to the Laurel Canyon roots jangle of “Stay Gone” and the post-rock epic closer “All Night,” this collection draws you in to its warm campfire glow and unfolds its sad stories slowly. Ramsey’s reverb-drenched guitars and paper-thin tenor hearken Harvest-era Neil Young, but the songwriting is uniquely his introspective own. If tearjerker “Angel Band” doesn’t put a lump in your throat, check for a pulse.

The Men from O.R.G.A.N.

Available at Fine Arts Library Onsite Storage

This groovy compilation from under-the-radar hipster Italian label S.H.A.D.O. Records pays loving tribute to those bubbly analog organ sounds of the Hammond, Farfisa, etcetera, variety. Standout Euro and Euro-inspired tracks from Remington Super 60, Experimental Pop Band, Tony Goddess (Papas Fritas), and L’augmentation get the festive chamber pop party going, while Louise Philippe’s cover of Lennon/McCartney’s “I’m Only Sleeping” is simply divine. Don your finest threads, grab some wayfarers and a pack of Gauloises, and head towards that sunny Mediterranean beach in your mind.

Unheard (Rarities, 1991-2009) by Louis Philippe

Little Barrie /EP

Available at Fine Arts Library Onsite Storage

Before all the buzz from their Better Call Saul theme song, U.K.’s garage/soul/rock trio Little Barrie thrilled club crowds and vinyl aficionados alike with their fuzzed-out retro tracks. The vibe is vintage – style and audio-wise – and this four song EP lays out a sampler platter of smoky bluesy treats. The slow and sly backstage funk of “Burned Out” has all the swagger needed for a proper British single, while “Mudsticks” comes across like Link Wray on a Death Valley peyote trip. And so as they say across the pond, “Bob’s your uncle.” What a fine introduction to their debut album We Are Little Barrie this is.

Burned Out by Little Barrie

Eden Brent /Ain’t Got No Troubles

Available at Fine Arts Library Onsite Storage

Greenville, Mississippi’s Eden Brent proudly carries forth the banner of boogie-woogie piano blues, all the while mixing in elements of jazz and classic pop. Schooled at the University of North Texas (and even more so on the road with legendary Abie “Boogaloo” Ames), Brent cooks down the musical ingredients of New Orleans, Memphis, and even a pinch of the great American songbook into her own greasy gumbo of groove. Recorded in the Crescent City (with ex-Meter George Porter on bass), the vibe leans more Mardi Gras than Beale Street, but it’s Brent’s Bessie Smith late-night lowdown voice that keeps it all rooted in an earthy Delta mood.

Ain’t Got No Troubles by Eden Brent

Harlem Quartet / Take the A Train

Available at Fine Arts Library Onsite Storage

This critically-acclaimed string quartet put the art music world on notice with their debut album, Take the A Train. That Billy Strayhorn classic certainly shines as a title track, and even adds some needed levity to what is a fairly heavy collection. The bulk of the album is fleshed out by Wynton Marsalis’ brilliant avant-garde Creole-themed work “At the Octoroon Balls,” a modern American chamber music ode to Carnival culture. Other pieces foray into world music, further stretching the boundaries of fixed classical genres. On top of all this high level musicianship (and of even more importance), Harlem Quartet was founded by the Sphinx Foundation, a nonprofit promoting music education while working to build diversity in the field of classical music through outreach to underserved communities.


Harold Whit Williams is a Content Management Specialist in Music & Multimedia Resources. A celebrated poet, he is the longtime guitarist for the indie rock band Cotton Mather, and his solo projects include the lo-fi bedroom pop Daily Worker, as well as the retro funk GERVIN.

Digital Access to Deep Time

A project to provide digital access to an important collection of geologic cartography from the Walter Geology Library has been completed.

The Deep Time Maps are a collection of paleogeographic maps showing the landscapes and oceans of ancient Earth through hundreds of millions of years of geologic time. These maps are an extraordinary resource for geoscientists, but have been inaccessible to users due to limits on the technology available for allowing access to this large of a collection.

The project to make this resource accessible online through the Libraries’ online presence was an idea that had been sitting around collecting “digital dust” for quite some time due to limits on the technology available for our use.

Senior Content Management Specialist Stacy Ogilvie took lead on the project to provide digital access to views of the Earth’s continents over the course of millions of years through the Libraries’ unified management resource system component Alma Digital. Adding this collection to Alma Digital is a significant step in increasing its accessibility to our users and fulfilling a goal that our late colleague Dennis Trombatore had in purchasing the materials. 

“The process also served as our first big test of adding a large collection to Alma Digital and the experience Stacy gained from working on this from scratch will help inform how we work more closely with SRD and add additional large collections to the Alma Digital workflow,” says Head of Content Management Corey Halaychik. “Her work on this front is invaluable to our team.”

View the available maps at the links below:

North America key time slices
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991047203019706011

Paleogeography of Europe
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058325874106011

Global paleogeography and tectonics in deep time

https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058405079206011

Paleogeography of Southwestern North America
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404871506011

Paleogeography of Greater Permian Basin
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404969506011

Paleogeography of the Western Interior Seaway of North America
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404969306011

OA Week Highlight – South Asia Open Archives

As part of Open Access Week 2022 celebrations, I want to highlight a few of the open access initiatives that UT Libraries supports.

Image from @SouthAsiaOA

Today, I’ll be highlighting the South Asia Open Archives. The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) is a rich, curated collection of historical and contemporary resources from and about South Asia. The SAOA collection contains hundreds of thousands of pages of books, journals, newspapers, census data, and magazines with a focus on social and economic history, literature, women and gender, and caste and social structure. The collection includes documents in English and in other languages of the region such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali.

SAOA is administratively hosted by the Center for Research Libraries, and is the product of a broad consortium of 26 current member research libraries in South Asia and around the world, including the University of Texas Libraries. It is enriched by substantial contributions of content, human and material resources from a community of libraries, research centers, archives and other institutions partnering to bring these resources out for global scholarship and pedagogy.

Some of the titles that have been digitized with direct support from the University of Texas include: Baghi, Viplav, and Viplavi Tract. All three titles have a Leftist/Marxist focus and engage with workers and labor issues.

Cover image from Viplava 01-01-1949
Cover image from Viplava 01-01-1949

In keeping with the OA Week theme for this year of Open for Climate Justice, I did a search for climate, in the SAOA Collection, and found over 1200 results ranging from census information, Indian Assembly debates, newspapers, correspondence, and books. SAOA has been digitizing and will be publishing collections of colonial records related to public works (irrigation), forests, land settlement, trade and navigation, and famine that will be available to support the work of environmental historians and climate scientists.

You can find more information about SAOA within the collection in JSTOR, on Twitter, and on Instagram. To suggest sources to add to SAOA or learn more about joining or participating in SAOA, please email them at saoa@crl.edu. UT Austin faculty, staff, and students with questions about SAOA, may also reach out to Mary Rader, South Asian Studies Liaison Librarian. To learn more about open access at UT, please see our Open Access blog or our Open Access LibGuide.

Read, Hot and Digitized: Dasubhashitam – ‘An Uncommon App’ for Telugu Speakers

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

This post was written by Jyotsna Vempati, the Global Studies Digital Projects GRA at Perry-Castañeda Library and a current graduate student at the School of Information.


A Telugu (pronounced ˈteləˌɡo͞o) literature classic – Bāriṣṭaru Pārvatīśaṃ, is a novel that I brought along with me despite the strict luggage weight limits of international flights so that I have a piece of my childhood and home with me in a new country. But if I am honest, this was my way of ensuring that I don’t forget how to read and write in my mother tongue. Although the biggest of the Dravidian language family with over 80 million speakers and 4th most spoken language in India, the future of Telugu is in danger from the proliferation of English and other less-regional languages in Telugu speaking regions. 

Many believe it is time to take deliberate action to preserve a language that has a rich history and culture, and many compelling literary works that date back to 575 CE. While there is still a sizable reader base for Telugu literature, there is a rising need to make these texts more accessible and visible in today’s digital era. And in comes the first of its kind Telugu audiobook application – Dasubhashitam.

Founded by Konduru Tulasidas and his son Kiran Kumar, this ‘uncommon app’ draws its essence from multiple disciplines that include Literature, Behavioural Science, and Non-Dualism. It promotes personal, professional, and spiritual wellbeing through original content in a style that is simple and straightforward. The app contains free content as well as paid literature works, which can be accessed through subscription plans.I think this app fills the gap by providing an opportunity for those who speak Telugu but face difficulty in reading the script to reconnect with their roots, thus reviving the language from its slumber.

The Dasubhashitam app is paving the way to immortalize the works of both renowned and new authors by creating an ecosystem where people connect Telugu texts to audio content. It contains literary works in various digital formats such as audiobooks, ebooks, podcasts, interviews, and albums within categories like short stories, novels, poetry, wellbeing, and educational content. The audiobooks need a mention of their own due to the deep cultural context within which they’re recorded and presented. Not only is a book read out loud, but some audiobooks of play scripts also have accompanying musical notes that add a touch of the popular Telugu cinema experience, transporting one back to the age of black-and-white films. Another noteworthy aspect of this app is that it offers the opportunity for individuals to suggest a book to digitize, or submit their audiobooks to the app for hosting (after a strict copyright and quality check, of course).

As a student of User Experience Design here at UT, I cannot help but comment on opportunities for improvement when it comes to the user experience and usability aspect of the mobile application. I find that the app’s heuristics are yet to be optimized to make the content more accessible to their user base. Especially, ramping up the in-app search and filter options, standardizing the transliteration of the literary title to the English alphabet (romanization), having uniform navigation gestures across and refining the information architecture would surely minimize user pain points and add value to the overall experience.

This spectacular enterprise is carving out a presence for itself rapidly and, all-in-all, the kind of content and initiatives undertaken by the creators clearly reflects their intentions, namely,  to promote the wellbeing of their users. I look forward to witnessing the great potential of this piece of technology, especially as some of the notable names in the world of Telugu literature are available on the Dasubhashitam app.

I’m also delighted to discover that UT Libraries hold a great collection of Telugu literature. One might be encouraged to read one of UT’s print versions of these titles alongside the audio book on Dasubhashitam!  See for example the Telugu writings by:

P. V. Narasimha Rao, the former Prime Minister of India

Madhubabu,renowned Telugu detective novel writer

Gurajada Venkata Apparao, popular Indian playwright

Kandukuri Veeresalingam  (Vīrēśaliṅgaṃ), prominent social reformer and writer from the Madras Presidency, India.

Read, Hot and Digitized: More is less? Less is more? Minimal computing in South Asian Lexicography

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the UT Libraries Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship. Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of, and future creative contributions to, the growing fields of digital scholarship.

I had the lucky opportunity recently to catch Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara’s presentation on the University of Colorado’s Digital El Diario project at the UC San Diego Digital Initiatives Symposium wherein she advocated for the use of “minimal computing” to achieve “archival justice.” Deeply inspired by her comments but woefully ignorant of the corpus on minimal computing within DS/DH (what seems a combination of activist- and digital-turn on the “less process, more product” concept in archival work), I took it upon myself to learn more as I struggle with the constant nagging tension between achieving the immediate task at hand (“will a simple Google chart effectively communicate my point?”), exploiting technologies to their fullest extent (“boy, I sure bet I would impress folks if I used a sexy Tableau dashboard”), and justifying resources (“this will cost how much??”).  When, I wondered, is less actually more in DS/DH, when is more actually more, and how should we negotiate those differences?

Way back in 2017, Roopika Risam and Susan Edwards argued (in “Micro DH: Digital Humanities at the Small Scale”) that the fixation of everything “large” is not conducive to justice across our institutions, our staff, nor our data:

“Digital humanities practices are often understood in terms of significant scale: big data, large data sets, digital humanities centers… This emphasis leads to the perception that projects cannot be completed without substantial access to financial resources, data, and labor… While this can be the case, such presumptions serve as a deterrent to the development of an inclusive digital humanities community with representation across academic hierarchies (student, librarian, faculty), types of institutions (public, private, regional), and geographies (Global North, Global South).”

I found their argument compelling and wondered where I had seen these tensions in practice.  As a South Asianist, I had to look no further than the uniquely colonial way of knowing—lexicography–and the uniquely 21st century way of access–digital reformatting. 

For over 20 years, the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (part of the Digital South Asia Library at the University of Chicago) has arguably been the gold standard for online South Asian language dictionaries.  Recognizing the inadequacies of OCR tools to convert images of most South Asian scripts to accurate text data, the DDSA has utilized strategies such as “double blind keying” to produce highly accurate digital editions of established and respected dictionaries.  The process is time-consuming and expensive but produces trusted full-text data that can be used and manipulated in a variety of ways, including those beyond dictionaries.  The institutional positioning of the University of Chicago has allowed for many successful grants over the years to fund DDSA, including those from the US Department of Education, the Mellon Foundation, the Association for Research Libraries and others.  The DDSA is truly extensive in scope and in impact.

At the other end of the spectrum is the DigitalRoses project.  In this pilot, an individual researcher, Gil Ben Herut, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida, presents another approach to digital dictionary making.  Rather than seeking a fully searchable, text-mineable dictionary, Herut suggests that simple encoding that operationalizes headwords alone (rather than the full-text) for navigation within a dictionary is sufficient for most user applications.  Using target words, the DigitalRoses approach “resolves a common problem in OCR text ingestion through the utilization of manual indexing of the first entry word on each page in physical media, [thereby… ingesting dictionaries at a fraction of the time and cost of full digitization,… streamlining searching by allowing partial, wildcard and fuzzy searches, and maintaining the richness of the printed layout.”

In comparision, then, we have two approaches to the same problem and therefore two solutions.  See, for example, a search for the Kannada word for “book,” Kitaba/ಕಿತಾಬು, in the DDSA version of Kittel’s Kannada-English Dictionary and in the Digital Roses version.

The thoroughly meticulous approaches used in the DDSA model produce a robust and unique digital experience built on fully manipulatable, multiscript data while the simple imaging and only partial inputting of the DigitalRoses project produces a quick digital surrogate to the analog counterpart. 

Turning back to “minimal computing,” these two projects offer up models to complicate our understanding of who gets to do what and how in our technologically informed research.  Grant funding allows for big data and big research at big institutional levels.  Minimal computing allows individuals and less resourced cohorts to also meaningfully contribute to the field.  Both approaches have the potential to positively impact users and the creation of new knowledge. 

I encourage you to consider where you fall on this debate: is less more? Is more more?  And when does it matter?


For more on minimal computing, justice through DS/DH, lexicography, and Kannada, see:

Constance Crompton, Richard J. Lane and Ray Siemens, eds.  Doing digital humanities: practice, training, research (London; New York: Routledge, 2016)

Howard Jackson, ed. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Lexicography / [edited by] Howard Jackson. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)

Ferdinand Kittel and Mariappa Bhatt. Kittel’s Kannaḍa-English dictionary. (Madras: University of Madras, 1968-1971)

Roopika Risam. New digital worlds: postcolonial digital humanities in theory, praxis, and pedagogy (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2019)

Preserving Endangered Languages

“When you lose a language and a language goes extinct, it’s like dropping a bomb on the Louvre.” –Linguist Michael Krauss

Language is so central to humanity that it frequently takes on the involuntary characteristics of breathing or eating—words seemingly form in our minds and fall effortlessly from our mouths or onto a page in a way that can go without notice or concern. It’s only when we lose our ability to communicate that we realize how important a shared language is to our collective experience, and a better understanding of ourselves.

Such is the inspiration at the heart of the Archive of the Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA), a digital repository of multimedia resources in and about the indigenous languages of Latin America, founded in 2000 at The University of Texas at Austin and located today at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection.

The archive’s mission is the preservation of the wealth of recordings of natural discourse in the indigenous languages of Latin America made by native speakers of the languages, frequently in collaboration with linguists and anthropologists, during the past fifty to sixty years. Most of these languages are endangered, and all of them are at risk of being replaced by dominant languages. Some of them, in fact, like Tehuelche, a Chonan language of Patagonia, have lost all speakers since the recordings housed in the archive were made.

According to the World Bank, there are some 560 different languages spoken in Latin America, most of which are spoken by Indigenous Peoples. Some, like the Mayan languages K’iche’ (Guatemala) and Yucatec Maya (Mexico), have speakers numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But there are examples that more fully demonstrate a need for preservation, such as Guató (Brazil) and Kawésqar (Chile), each having fewer than 10 living speakers.

AILLA’s collections represent over 420 Indigenous languages, and include audio and video recordings, some with transcriptions and translations in Spanish, English, and to a lesser extent Portuguese, as well as photographs, maps, charts, and written works of all kinds. The recordings include narratives, songs, conversations, prayers, ceremonies, oral histories, interviews, and grammatical elicitation. Written materials include grammars, dictionaries, word lists, ethnographies, field notes, journals, correspondence, theses and dissertations, published and unpublished academic articles, essays, and manuscripts, as well as original literary works in indigenous languages, such as poetry, short stories, and novels.  There is ongoing work to incorporate textbooks and teaching materials for bilingual and ethno-education and for language reclamation programs into the archive,

“Every language is like a cosmos, containing vocabulary, stories, songs, spiritual beliefs, ceremonies, games, jokes, food ways, and patterns of thought which form a worldview that is unique in the history of humanity,” explains AILLA Manager Susan Kung.

AILLA collaborates directly and indirectly with Indigenous communities to archive their linguistic cultural heritage and coordinates the digitization of fragile analog materials in Indigenous languages so that they can be added to the archive. The archive accepts any material that was written or spoken in one of the indigenous languages of Latin America by native speakers of that language, on any topic, in any style. AILLA also collects materials of cultural and academic interest that are written about the indigenous languages of Latin America, and especially values items of interest to indigenous communities, like teaching materials and literary works.

An essential focus of the work at AILLA is to make these resources available to a global audience via unrestricted online access. Rapid technological development and an expanding internet has increased the reach of resources that were once kept in private offices and homes so that they can now be shared with speakers of the languages, scholars and interested audiences worldwide. By building out a broader global audience for these resources, the hope is that expanded access will extend and/or guarantee the life of at-risk languages.

“We want to support indigenous efforts to reclaim their languages and develop [their] literatures,” says Susan Kung. The archive makes it easy to publish indigenous works to a wide audience. It also serves as a medium of collaboration and communication, in addition to providing a repository for resources.

AILLA was founded in 2000 at The University of Texas at Austin by Dr. Joel Sherzer, Professor of Anthropology, and Dr. Anthony Woodbury, Professor of Linguistics, working in collaboration with a group of their graduate students, and with technical support from Mark McFarland, the former University of Texas Libraries Director of the Digital Library Services Division. AILLA’s pilot site was funded with seed money from the College of Liberal Arts, and the first online digital repository was built with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Today, AILLA’s primary support comes from the University of Texas Libraries and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, and AILLA is at the heart of the LLILAS Benson collaboration and its Indigenous languages initiatives.

Over AILLA’s 20-year history, staff have worked to make academia and the general public aware of the importance of archiving priceless and irreplaceable linguistic cultural heritage and to develop and promote best practices in this field.  These endeavors, along with AILLA’s efforts to digitize and archive significant collections of indigenous language documentation materials, have been generously funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.

To explore AILLA’s collections, visit ailla.utexas.org. The catalog information is open access, but you must register for a free account to stream, view or download media files.

If you are a speaker of an indigenous language and are interested in creating an archival collection for  your language, please write to us at ailla@ailla.utexas.org.