Caribbean Diaspora: Panorama of Carnival Practices

FAIN: HAA-258807-18

University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus (San Juan, PR 00925-2512)
Nadjah Rios-Villarini (Project Director: June 2017 to February 2021)
Mirerza González-Vélez (Co Project Director: August 2017 to February 2021)

Early planning for a project to explore migration and the Caribbean diaspora through the lens of cultural practices related to Carnival. Coordinated through a series of meetings and drawing on multiple archival collections, the project will produce a website for public audiences and a white paper.

This project aims to initiate new approaches to inquiries on migration at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras (UPR-RP) that can be digitally shared with a broader audience, particularly those of the Caribbean and its diasporas. Project activities and outcomes will be: (1) to hold a series of discussion-based meetings between external digital humanities specialists and local librarian and Caribbean scholars to design an interactive, general audience website on Caribbean mobility as evidenced in Carnival; (2) to generate a preliminary webpage that includes curated content using existing digital audiovisual materials and artifacts related to Caribbean Carnivals in the UPR archives, the Puerto Rico Foundation for the Humanities, the original Project Diaspora website, University of Florida’s Digital Library of the Caribbean, and other sources; and (3) to produce a final white paper documenting the development process with implications so that digital humanities scholars can benefit.