The Family Letters Project, a digital humanities project developed by Spanish professor Isabel Velázquez and graduate students Marcus Barbosa and Luisa Carolina Julio Gomez, was featured in Around DH 2020.
The project preserves, digitizes, analyzes, and makes public correspondence and other documents of a Mexican American family that migrated from Zacatecas, Mexico, to Colorado and Nebraska in the U.S. during the twentieth century. Project visitors learn more about life for Latinos in the Midwest at the beginning of the last century and better understand the impact of the migration experience.
"It served as training for undergraduate and graduate students while at the same time documenting, preserving and analyzing the social and linguistic experience of an understudied group," graduate student and collaborator Jennifer Isasi shared in the feature. "From an infrastructural perspective, we learned how to patiently create a bilingual project...the technical team had to accommodate two languages for the first time."
Around DH 2020 features digital humanities projects in languages other than English or from minoritized groups worldwide, taking the mission of another project, Around DH in 80 Days, further by sharing the people, sources, tools, and meaning of the projects.
Velázquez and the graduate students are part of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures in the College of Arts and Sciences. The project was developed in conjunction with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
