HOUSTON, TX–The University of Houston’s US Latino Digital Humanities Center (USLDH) announces the release of a comprehensive dataset on over 900 women authors. This dataset documents articles published by women in Hispanic periodicals. Since 1996 Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (Recovery) scholars and graduate students have worked on indexing newspapers at an article level to produce metadata in English and Spanish to facilitate discoverability for researchers. The output is reflected in several datasets that speak of the diversity of the cultural, political and intellectual life of the Hispanic/Latina/Latino/Latinx community in the United States.
Jovita Idar
This dataset, created from 288 indexed periodicals, demonstrates the activity of Hispanic women writers, including poetry, short stories, essays, serialized fiction, literary notices, speeches, travel writing, interviews and more. Among the writers included are feminists Clotilde Betances and Hortensia Elizondo, activists like Jovita Idar, anarchists such as Blanca de Moncaleano, and poets such as Elvira Yañez de Escutia, and many others. They wrote on topics such as women’s rights, politics, intellectual life and social conditions, among others. The dataset is hosted on the Cougar ROAR’s (Research Open Access Repositories) Dataverse Repository, a part of the larger Texas Data Repository, a statewide collaboration of Texas higher education institutions.
Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) is an international program to locate, preserve and make available Hispanic/Latina/Latino/Latinx culture of the United States in its written form since colonial times until 1980. The program has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and ephemera produced by Hispanics/Latinas/Latinos/Latinxs. The holdings available at the program include thousands of original books, manuscripts, archival items and ephemera, a microfilm collection of approximately 1,400 historical newspapers, hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items, a vast collection of photographs, an extensive authority list and personal papers. In addition, the program has published or reprinted more than 45 historical books, two anthologies and ten volumes of research articles. The program organizes a biennial international conference and has thousands of affiliated scholars including librarians, archivists and community members. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage is the premier center for research on Latino documentary history in the United States.
The USLDH Center is a first-of-its-kind program that gives scholars expanded access to a vast collection of written materials produced by Latinas and Latinos and archived by the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) program and UH’s Arte Público Press, the nation’s largest publisher of contemporary and recovered literature by Hispanic authors from the United States. They also produce digital scholarship in the form of visualizations, datasets, digital collections and exhibits. The Center is supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The dataset portion of this research project was generously supported by The Mellon Foundation. Data scrubbing and Cougar ROAR support were provided by Paige Morgan (University of Delaware Library, Museums & Press), Linda García Merchant (USLDH-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Houston) and Reid Boehm (Research Data Management Librarian, University of Houston Libraries). The dataset can be accessed via doi.org/10.18738/T8/HZ1VPM.