Digitizing the Archive

This article explores how digital humanities (DH) projects, specifically the building of digital archives and digital exhibitions, can be implemented to preserve, reveal, and highlight previously invisibilized histories. This piece examines the construction of the Latino/a/x Issues Conference (LIC) archive at Bowling Green State University (BGSU), a public university in rural Northwest Ohio. This article, from the perspective of the archivist, explores the following research questions: How can DH archival projects reveal and preserve invisibilized histories of Latinx students at public universities against a series of constraints and serve as a means of (re)producing latinidad? This case study explores how to utilize the traditional form of the DH digital archive to document and preserve latinidad in institutional archives and advances the notion of digital archiving as a form of first-aid care to address the historical erasure of Latinx communities in institutional archival contexts. In doing so, this article critically examines the process of archiving the BGSU LIC as a means to consider the possibilities and limits of archival intervention, the production and preservation of memory, and the challenges and affordances of descriptive infrastructures that underlie archival work.