The Digital Humanities project that I found interesting to look into was a project from the University of Toronto: Mississauga titled “Visualizing the America’s”. The project is based on the history of capitalism and wealth extraction from Latin America by pointing to the history of the banana, a fruit that we as Americans generally take for granted thanks to this economic imperialism. The project claims to “decolonize knowledge” by presenting research on Latin America in “simple and compelling terms”. On the home page there is a condensed timeline of the history of banana cultivation in Latin America and the webpages under “Themes” and “Key Moments” provide more in depth articles. Its’ sources on the historical events can be found at the bottom of the website’s articles and generally uses secondary sources, photographs, and United Fruit Company documents to construct its’ narrative.
Something the project is currently working on is the digitization of documents, letters, and photographs from the United Fruit Company that was found in an attic of one of their plantations by Philippe Bourgois. They are also working on the digitization of the photographs of Rafael Platero Paz’s who documented the lives of the working class in a banana town in Honduras. Currently the documents are not freely available to the public without a login, however it does state its’ intention to make them publicly available to all once the digitization process is complete.
