Latin American Journals Project

The Latin American Journals Project aims to create a digital collection of Latin American vanguard literary journals in support of multiple goals. Currently, related journals exist in partial form at a number of universities and research libraries including Cornell, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Yale and the NYPL. Consolidating a digital collection of publications that feature Latin American poetry, stories, essays, and visual art will transform existing scholarship in a number of ways. In addition to making these otherwise difficult to access print digitized journals digitally available in support of global scholarship, the project will support Professor McEnaney’s ongoing digital humanities collaboration with a group of colleagues from the University of Chicago. One of the project goals is to support the “mining” of textual information with applications such as topic modeling, natural language processing, information retrieval, stylometrics, and network analysis in order to reconsider questions of style, genre, and literary influence. The digitization of this archive would also benefit students interested in experimenting with such ‘distant reading’ tools and methodologies at Cornell. The grant will help to scale up Cornell’s database of Latin American journals in order to better understand the actual shape of the literary network, rather than accept presumed canons of importance. In the classroom, it will contribute to the curriculum in Professor McEnaney’s will use it for his “Cuba: Technology and Literature” course.

Latin American Journals Website