The Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities bibliography is a living document. Please get in touch if you would like an article or project to be included in the library.

The Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities bibliography seeks to agglutinate and organize digital resources about, on, and from the Caribbean region. As a geographical notion, as a cultural milieu, and as an academic field of study, the Caribbean constitutes a complex and rich space marked both by cultural diversity and cross-fertilization as well as by displacement and absences. In recent years, scholars in Caribbean Studies and related fields have undertaken numerous digital humanities projects that seek to map cultural networks across the region and recuperate and reconstruct obliterated archives. Yet, these projects are often carried out in different university departments, languages, and academic and institutional settings. In addition, the archipelagic turn has extended the contours of the Caribbean, a trend that has intensified the need to develop models that can more adequately contend with these expanded coordinates. This bibliography hopes to address these needs by offering a comprehensive resource that can potentially provide a fuller understanding of the region’s DH initiatives. 

The contents of the bibliography can be classified into two broad categories that I have designated as reflections and projects. Reflections includes scholarship and academic activities that are specifically about Digital Humanities practice in the Caribbean. Reflection sources about the Caribbean Studies and DH are less abundant than projects themselves and most of these emanate from two main venues: SmallAxe’s a journal of Caribbean digital praxis and the Caribbean Digital conference. Nevertheless, these resources are comprehensive and they provide a broad overview of DH methods and best practices for and in the Caribbean. 

Most of the entries collected in this bibliography correspond to DH projects about or relevant to Caribbean Studies. The section seeks to provide an overview of the main DH methods and approaches in the field. In order to facilitate navigation, the bibliography menu classifies the projects answering two questions: “what do the projects do?” and “how do they do it?”. The aim of these questions is to highlight the main trends in digital methodology and approaches in Caribbean Studies and to provide a sense of what remains underexplored. For example, users can observe at a simple glance that archives and collections constitute the field’s strongest area, while the use of digital methods to examine primary materials is scarce. Recognizing the diversity of interests and disciplines in Caribbean Studies, the bibliography provides an alternative way of navigating the entries according to location, theme, or discipline. These are designed using a “keyword” format and keeping in mind what potential users might find most helpful when browsing the resource. 

In the process of compiling this bibliography, I encountered the wonderful resource CardiScho2020: A Directory of Caribbean Digital Scholarship. Built through crowdsourcing, this resource offers a comprehensive collection of DH projects in the Caribbean. What the Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities adds is a different way of organizing, navigating, and understanding the increasingly expanding landscape of DH in the field.