Talks and Posters

Abstract

The PDF images of early American printed books in the Primeros Libros digital collection pose several challenges for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems. The Ocular system, designed by Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Greg Durrett, and Dan Klein, jointly models the physical operation of hand-press printing and the language of the written document, allowing it to ‘learn’ to read early printed books. Ocular cannot, however, handle the diacritics and code switching prevalent in the American context. Working with PDF images of trilingual texts in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, we set out to modify Ocular for use on the Primeros Libros collection. Our purpose was, to paraphrase Mary Louise Pratt, to make these texts read (by an online audience) and readable (by a computer).

In this paper, we turn a critical eye to our OCR system. The books in the Primeros Libros collection represent a new print technology that has often been seen as an apparatus of Spanish colonial rule; at the same time, they encode shifting relationships between church and state, between Europe and America, and between Spaniards and indigenous Mexican peoples. In this paper, we will describe how the OCR model transforms these original texts to create a new surface for textual engagement, and how this surface reflects back onto processes of transcription and translation underlying the original production of the Primeros Libros. Focusing specifically on textual code switching and the challenges that it has posed for OCR, We will consider how these technologies engage with processes of isolating and codifying indigenous languages and cultural practices.

Abstract

Digital repatriation, or the return of culturally significant texts to their site of origin in digital form, has become an increasingly common means of cultural exchange. Through these projects, local institutions are able to claim ownership over digital facsimiles of heritage objects, while websites provide near-global access to historical texts. As a result, these projects disrupt the geographically bounded archival networks through which these objects have long been preserved and contextualized. This project addresses this disruption by tracing the institutional history of four copies of the Advertencias para los Confessores de los Naturales (Mexico, 1600) and their digital facsimiles in the Primeros Libros project. An analysis of the archival context of these copies reveals the different roles that they have played in forming institutionally sanctioned historical narratives from Mexico City to Houston Texas, roles that are defined in part by the organizational systems of the libraries and in part by their geographical location. In contrast, I consider the digital manifestation of these copies in the Primeros Libros project, a collaborative enterprise seeking to digitize all books printed in America before 1601. As my analysis will show, this new context reasserts the centrality of printing technology in the Mexican colonial archive, emphasizing the material fragmentation of colonial history and also encouraging the reconstruction of a historical ideal from that fragmented past.

Abstract

Samuel Cramer, the anti-hero of Charles Baudelaire's early novella La Fanfarlo, is the product of a German father and a Chilean mother: combined with a French education, this national hybridity produces in him a hopeless romanticism. Thus Cramer embodies what Mary Louise Pratt calls the romanticism of the contact zone, the possibility that European romanticism is an epidemic from across the Atlantic.

In Pratt's model, romanticism returns to the Americas through the early nineteenth-century travels and travel writings of Alexander von Humboldt. Samuel Cramer resurfaces here too, in the unlikely figure of Juan Dahlmann. Dahlmann, the protagonist of Jorge Luis Borges' short story El sur, is the Argentine son of a German father and an American mother. Though on the surface this story is quite different, its narrative runs parallel to that of La Fanfarlo. Like Cramer, in the end Dahlmann also suffers from a fatal romanticism.

In this paper I will read El sur alongside La Fanfarlo to construct a transatlantic lineage of hybrid identities and hybrid literatures. I will examine the oscillation between the modern and the romantic as an iterative movement, from salon to city streets, from library to pampas, and from Baudelaire's Paris to Borges' Buenos Aires.

Abstract

How do archives construct communities (and how do communities construct archives)?

In this paper, I talk about subversive, disappearing, and silent archives in Roberto Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes. In 1989, Roberto González Echevarría's Myth and Archive offered a definitive historiography of Latin American literature culminating in the "archival novel" of the "boom" era. This genre is characterized by the combination of a mythic or cyclical narrative structure with a more teleological narrative based in the archive — in a collection of canonical national and historical texts. Bolaño's novel can be read as a continuation of and a return to the "archival novel" because of the way in which it collects and catalogues texts. This suggests that it can also be read as a continuation of the project of building a national or continental Latin American identity, and Bolaño has often been read this way, striking an ongoing debate over his Chilean, Mexican, and Latin American authenticity.

Although the archives in Los detectives salvajes do follow archival convention, however, they are both parodic and subversive. One archive catalogues the great Latin American poets by way of their (imagined) sexuality; another contains books that are stolen but not read; another contains the poems rejected by a literary magazine. These archives are constructed in bars, in bedrooms, and on rooftops; the archivists themselves are dropouts and poets and prostitutes, often drunk or high. I will argue that this archival parody makes obsolete the concept of the fixed national archive and, thus, the project of constructing identities along geopolitical lines. Bolaño's archives, instead, offer an escape from a violent and chaotic world, indulging the fantasy of narrative stability and of play.