From November 5–7, 2025, I had the pleasure of attending the 3rd Annual Latin American & Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium, hosted by the Universidad de Puerto Rico in San Juan. It was my first visit to Puerto Rico, and I loved it!!
At the symposium, I presented the very early stages of my new project, From Minorca to Florida: A Digital Archive of Diaspora and Memory in St. Augustine. The project aims at documenting the history of more than 1,400 Mediterranean colonists—most of them from the island of Minorca—who were brought to Florida by Andrew Turnbull in 1768 to establish an agricultural settlement in New Smyrna. After enduring nearly a decade of harsh conditions and indentured labor, the surviving colonists left the colony in 1777 and walked approximately seventy miles north to St. Augustine, where they were granted refuge and established a lasting community.
The slides to my presentation are published in the University of Florida’s institutional repository, are available here.
The project is built with CollectionBuilder and guided by the principles of minimal computing. The idea is that this the open-access platform will bring together dispersed historical materials, reusable metadata, and structured datasets. It also aims to contribute to broader conversations about community archiving, the preservation of marginalized histories, and the study of migration, identity, and cultural resilience in the early modern Atlantic world.
During the symposium, I discovered great initiatives and digital projects from across Latin America and the Caribbean. The organization has created a list of projects here. I was particularly interested in Digital-Arc platform, developed at Indiana University. Digital-Arc is an exhibit platform and toolkit for collective storytelling and community archiving, designed both to support the organization of community-archive events and to host community collections online.
You can fin the full program here.