Humanidades Digitales:Life on the other side

MARÍA GIMENA DEL RIO RIANDE

Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative

Open Edition

Año: 2017

The last decade witnessed the emergence of the humanidades digitales in Spain and Latin America. This does not mean that applied use of computing or digital technology had not interested some humanities scholars, but that the field started being named more uniformly since 2011, with the raise of many local and regional associations and networks. As expected, the way in which the humanidades digitales developed in the Spanish-speaking countries differs significantly from that of the Anglophone digital humanites. These differences can be found not only in the language that communicates research?all the different variants of Spanish?, but also in the topics, methods and tools, due to the diverse academic, cultural and economic contexts. However, the history of the humanidades digitales is still unwritten. This paper aims at collaborating with this task, focusing on the Scholarly Digital Edition field in Spain and Latin America, highlighting a few milestones that give good account of the early interest in standards like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). It reviews different digital edition projects that made use of the TEI in very different ways, and their best and not so good practices and results. In addition, it offers an updated state of the art, pointing out to the linguistic and economic barriers that have not helped with the development of this field, mainly in the Latin American academies, where funding and financial support are still unresolved matters.