[Para una versión en español de este artículo, por favor hacer clic aquí].

On 17 and 18 May 2012, the Mexican Network of Digital Humanists (Red de Humanistas Digitales, RedHD) held the First Meeting (or Conference) of Digital Humanists at the Vasconcelos Library, Mexico City.

The event was indeed the first academic event of its kind in Mexico, formally introducing the concept of digital humanities in the Mexican academic landscape. It was attended by more than 200 scholars from Mexico and other countries, and it combined keynote lectures, panels, poster sessions and remote presentations.

In the words of Dr Isabel Galina, president of the Mexican DH Network, “since we know that other groups of digital humanists exist around the world, it was important to bring this concept [digital humanities] to Latin America, in order to enrichen the approaches, actions and research around it.”

The conference covered various topics, including digital resources for the humanities, text encoding, digital museums and libraries, the role of the digital humanities in teaching and research, intellectual property, innovation, multimedia, etc.

The complete programme for the event is a PDF which is available here. Elika Ortega, a PhD student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Ontario, has collected some of the presentations, papers, and other material pertaining to the event on a Yutzu site, here.

The conference, which was also livestreamed and encouraged online engagement through the #RedHD hashtag, was co-sponsored by Mexico’s National Council for the Arts and Culture (CONACULTA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), through its School of Humanities, the Bibliographic Research Institute and RedHD.

The event had an excellent national press coverage, helping widen the awareness of the meaning and significance of the digital humanities amongst the general public.

In forthcoming posts for 4Humanities, I will be sharing some interviews with members of RedHD, the Mexican Digital Humanists Network.

[Para una versión en español de este artículo, por favor hacer clic aquí].