DIGITAL INTERSTICES: FROM THE ARCHIVE TO CREATION IN THE HUMANITIES: EDITING, DISCIPLINARY PRACTICES, TEACHING, AND LITERARY AND CULTURAL CRITICISM
The digital humanities have profoundly transformed the relationship that the humanistic disciplines maintain with their objects of study. The archive is no longer merely a repository of sources that precedes interpretation, but a space of mediation — technical, political, and epistemological — where data, before becoming evidence, undergo processes of selection, classification, and representation that deserve to be interrogated. This symposium proposes to think about the humanities in the Americas from these interstices: the spaces between the archive and the data, between the source and its edition, between disciplinary practice and creation, which the digital transformation has made visible and urgent.
We start from a central question: what happens to humanistic knowledge when its material conditions of production, circulation, and teaching are mediated by the digital? This question unfolds across several fronts that organize the symposium. First, archives and data, understood not as neutral inputs but as constructions that require a critique of their own interstices: what is selected, what is omitted, what becomes legible to a machine, and what is lost in that translation. Second, editing, which in its digital version reconfigures notions of authorship, textual variance, and editorial mediation, opening new possibilities but also new dilemmas for those who edit texts, catalogs, or collections in Latin American contexts.
The symposium also welcomes reflections situated within the disciplinary practices of literature, philology, and history, addressing how these fields have incorporated — or resisted — digital tools and logics without losing their methodological specificity. To this is added research-creation, understood as a mode of knowledge production that articulates the critical and the artistic, and which finds in the digital new media, languages, and forms of circulation for aesthetic and conceptual experimentation.
An equally important axis is teaching and training: how are today’s readers, researchers, and editors formed to work with these new digital mediations? Classrooms, curricula, and humanistic pedagogies face the challenge of integrating digital competencies without reducing training to instrumental tool handling. Finally, the symposium calls upon literary criticism, inviting it to rethink its categories and methods in the face of massive corpora, work within academic and cultural networks, digital editions, and new forms of textual circulation that challenge its traditional frameworks of reading and interpretation.
