The Archive of Latinx Feelings: 19th Century Letters, Notebooks, Diaries, Books
Raul Coronado, Professor
Ethnic Studies
Applications for Fall 2024 are closed for this project.
How can we write a history of Latine feelings? How can private writing give us access to how Mexicans in the Southwest thought about their feelings, their interiority, their sense of self? Knowing more about this can give us a better sense of two things: how have Latine communities expressed their emotions? Are there patterns in how they’ve expressed emotions? Or are there beginnings and endings—a time when they expressed emotions in a certain way but that no longer exists for us today? A more specific question is: how have Latines expressed beauty, admiration, serenity, belonging, peace, equanimity? When have they felt these positive emotions?
One way we can begin to answer these questions is by turning to the history of nineteenth-century Spanish-Mexican private writing. By looking at their private writing—correspondence between loved ones, notebooks, diaries, etc.—we can get a glimpse into the history of Latine feelings.
Professor Coronado has spent many years collecting archival materials—private Latine writing from the 1800s held by various archival repositories. He’s scanned these documents and turned them into PDFs. Now, we are ready to turn these PDFs into OCRable scans. This means that we will convert handwritten letters, most of which are in cursive writing from the 1800s, into a document that is searchable. By scanning them, we can then use AI to do large scale searches for words that will allow us to answer our questions. This is a game changer.
We will be working with the Digital Humanities Lab. The project will begin by making the PDFs ready to be OCRed. You will receive training from the D-Lab so that you can prepare the PDFs to be OCRed. Then, the D-Lab will OCR the documents, and will use AI to transcribe these handwritten hard-to-read manuscripts. We will then read selectively by focusing on letters that Prof. Coronado had already identified as important. We will look at the transcription created by AI and check for accuracy. Eventually, we will create a database that tracks the language of feelings.
Students are asked to commit to a minimum of 5 hours a week. More hours are available if desired.
Role:
The ability to read Spanish is helpful, though not required. Together, we will learn paleography: the ability to read old cursive handwriting from the 1800s. With time, you’ll become an expert in deciphering nineteenth-century handwriting.
Qualifications:
Students should be meticulously detail-oriented, especially in editing PDFs, transcribing, and data entry. If a record is misnamed or incorrect information is entered in a database, then that record will not be retrievable. We will be working with a lot of data, and it is important that students be precise. Students are asked to commit to a minimum of 5 hours a week. More hours are available if desired. Reading-level knowledge of Spanish is preferable so that you can read the documents, but it is not required.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Mia Aguilar, Research Team Coordinator
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Mia Aguilar, Staff Researcher
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Related website: https://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/people/raul-coronado-1/
Arts & Humanities Social Sciences