Despite the overdue growing recognition of the genre of comics in academia, the study of foreign/second language comics within the United States has encountered specific obstacles. Primary-source research of Spanish-language comics has often proved to be challenging. Among other difficulties, collections are most often housed in the source countries, and a desired piece of documentation may sometimes be in libraries hundreds or thousands of miles away. Items may be both in public and private hands, and access to certain items is often highly restricted due to their fragility, rarity, and value. Oftentimes, specific documents aren’t cataloged in the archives’ container lists, making the identification, location, and access of relevant materials problematic. When using traditional research methods, these challenges have to be confronted and resolved by the researcher, who works in isolation with the source documents. Many of these issues also generate constraints in the realm of teaching, where the limitations to the access of sources restricts course conceptualization and implementation, and where students don’t usually have much agency or opportunities to engage in larger debates and conversations with other students or scholars of Latin American comics.
Digital tools have the potential to facilitate or solve many of these issues for research and teaching of this important cultural and literary medium. Indeed, they have the ability to address precisely the core values that Spiro (2012) associates with work in the Digital Humanities -- openness, collaboration, diversity, experimentation, collegiality, and connectedness. These tools can, for instance, create optimal opportunities to view and use some of these sources online, thus granting access to an audience who may never have had the chance to see them in the “analog” era, and opening and expanding the possibilities for a richer and deeper type of collaborative research. Our goal is to expand the possibilities of using Spanish-language comics by identifying and piloting the use of digital tools with which digital copies of representative Latin American comics can be made, accessed, and annotated in collaboration with students and scholars. Our focus is on developing an archive of sources that scholars and students can use for analysis, interpretation, and research employing digital tools.
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