Hispanic Digital Humanities: the construction of a scientific field

MARÍA GIMENA DEL RIO RIANDE

Digital Humanities Quarterly

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

Año: 2016

1938-4122

We have learned from Walter Benjamin that any act of translation is a condition of possibility and that the relation between a term that is translated and its translation may not necessarily imply similarity (The task of the translator, 1923). We have also learned from Benjamin that art forms cannot be separated from the technical standards of their time, as exposed in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936). Taking both of Benjamin?s premises, it may be stated that the Spanish Humanidades Digitales has been used for approximately six years as an automatic and not very much meditated translation for Digital Humanities, in Latin America and Spain. Anyway, both Humanidades Digitales and Digital Humanities seem to be nowadays developing very differently. Regarding the aforementioned, some questions may arise: are there possibilities of dialogue and co-working in this field between developed countries and others with unequal access to technology? Who are the agents that can be part of this dialogue? How do they become part of the scientific field and legitimate their work? How much of that symbolic violence comes across in this dialogue? This presentation aims to outline some possible answers to these questions at the time it claims for new approaches in global/local Digital Humanities.