"Picturing Hispanismo" is a collaborative digital humanities project designed by the students and the instructor of LAA 318 and SPAN 346 (Transatlantic and Transnational / Hispanic Transatlantic Cultures), during the Spring semester of 2021 at the University of Kansas, Lawrence campus.

In essence, this digital site provides an overview of the history of Hispanic cultures, focusing on political, economic, social, and artistic developments from pre-contact times to the present. "Picturing Hispanismo" explores the field of Hispanic Studies or “Hispanism,” with an emphasis on the historical and cultural bonds between Iberia and Latin America, otherwise known as the “Hispanic Atlantic.” Thus, this digital text provides an account of Hispanic cultures across national barriers by addressing the complex circulation of influences in multiple directions informing Hispanic communities and identities across the Atlantic. Drawing from this perspective, this site combines a panoramic and chronological history of Hispanic cultures with analyses of specific Hispanic cultural products.

"Picturing Hispanismo" is a window to the richness and vastness of the Hispanic cultures. It reimagines the understanding of the history, cultures, and traditions pertaining to the field of Hispanic Studies in a virtual format. The site is built upon three main components: collective innovation, individual creativity, and current academic research methodologies.

Guide yourself through a portal to explore and visualize the variety of lenses, approaches and experiences that this class has documented. While broader contextualizations are necessary to visualize the state of the field, this site also incorporates in-depth considerations regarding particular cultural products and historical continuities, alongside critical views and textual analyses.

Ultimately, this digital site aims to present a global and accurate understanding of the cultures that frame the Hispanic world in its entirety.

Humanities are conventionally defined as the academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. The humanities include a wide spectrum of disciplines: history, literature, religious studies and philosophy, among others. The Hall Center for the Humanities website at the University of Kansas defines the humanities as the instrument that "helps us to understand who we are, what it means to be human, how we relate to others, and the pathways that have led us to this point in time. We cannot navigate our way through the present into the future without a balanced understanding of our diverse, complicated, and often problematics pasts." Long story short, the humanities are crucial as to how we conceive our own existence and our relation with society.

In this scenario, can humanities engage with a general public beyond an academic setting? More importantly, how can humanities be established as a field in the non-expert and non-conventional spheres once outside academic institutions? There is one simple answer to this question: public scholarship and digital humanities. Technology has brought innovations and new methods to engage with the humanities. This is because humans can easily interact (especially in our pandemic-afflicted world) digitally with a wide variety of resources anchored in a more traditional understanding of academic research. These projects that fit into what is known as public scholarship are extremely relevant to educate and inform a less academic audience about the findings and conclusions of the scholars who are intensively immersed in the study of the cultures and the understanding of what surrounds human experiences.

Please email Ángel M. Rañales if you were to have questions or inquiries about this class project.
The team is looking forward to hearing your comments!