Doing Digital Humanities: Methods and Ethics
Haiti possesses an extraordinarily rich documentary record, but those records are dispersed across numerous archives, languages, institutions, and nations, making them difficult to access - this portal seeks to mitigate these impediments. This project also navigates ethical considerations in doing digital humanities, the conundrums of combining human-driven thinking and storytelling and technology/AI tools, to analyze and understand a place that has often been misrepresented. This repository is not just collecting sources, it is a study of the conditions under which knowledge about Cap-Haïtien and Haiti writ large has been produced. An important question is not only “what is the data telling us”, but what does the existence of this dataset tell us about how Haitian history has been and can be remembered? The dataset is itself historical, and has a biography of its own.
Telegraph and Public Works Office, Hinche, Haiti, October 6, 1928.
Photographer unknown. Original repository/collection unverified.
02 — Repository
How are sources organized and made accessible?
From the data these efforts yielded, we chose a subset to build the second layer: a web-based repository. Building this layer asked us to contemplate what source materials have survived the ravages of time and entered into the collections of libraries and archives around the world.
From the sheer array of materials, we assessed what would be useful and accessible for users. In addition to how libraries and archives categorized materials, we created additional categories after accessing the materials. We decided for the repository to focus on maps, audio and video materials, photography and other visual sources, published texts, and unpublished texts, including correspondence.
03 — Knowledge
How do we interpret what survives?
This brings us squarely to the third layer—knowledge—during which the project team inquired more humanistically about what the documents tell us about Cap-Haïtien, how to interpret them, and how we extract the voices, thoughts, and experiences of Capois.
In utilizing the repository, we urge users to ask: How were these sources produced and circulated? Why have they come to be a part of these particular institutions, these locations, these dates, and in these languages? Users can traverse the global map of the repository and use keywords in their areas of interest to search and locate source materials.
Plan de la plaine du Cap François en l’Isle St. Domingue, 1786.
René Phelipeau.
Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
01 — Infrastructure
What information exists?
The first layer of data infrastructure asks and answers “what information exists?” This is the primary excavation layer in which our methods are predominantly computational. We scraped the websites of archives and libraries around the world, cleaned metadata, standardized the names of people and places, geocoded, and visualized.
Toussaint L'Ouverture, ca. 1870.
Published by George DeBaptiste; printed by Corrie's Detroit Lithographic Office, Detroit, Michigan.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Pottery merchants, Port-au-Prince, Hayti [sic], W.I., 1901.
Detroit Publishing Co. Glass negative.
Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Reproduction No. LC-DIG-det-4a05451.
No known restrictions on publication.
Student Research & Methods
This presentation was developed by project researchers Ariana Duduna and Stara Cindelle D’Haiti and offers a closer look at the methods used to locate, organize, and interpret materials for the Mapping Haiti repository.