The Digital-traditional (DT) Creation

Week 7 The Tree of Life What Fell Off the Tree.... After I organized the volumes of encyclopedias that Jose Guerra Alemán published, I continued to go work backward with the boxes. In Box 11, I found a handwritten letter from Jose Guerra Alemán's Aunt Noemi Alemán and she is the sister of his mother, Herminia Alemán. This letter contained the history of Jose Braulio Alemán's parents and Maria Valdes' parents. It was all what Noemi knew and what she was told by her other family members. The letter is six pages long that also includes personal comments such as how much she loves Jose Guerra Alemán and how he should take care of himself (Fig.1). I was excited to find this piece of document because a couple of days ago I started to build Alemán's family tree so I could get a better idea of who he was and to help me write his biography. I want to include as many primary sources as I can. However, I struggled to read the letter because it was in her point of view. I would...

Week 6: New Discovery The Pot of Gold This week I wanted to step back and take some time and investigate on Jose Guerra Alemán and his family. Beforehand, I believe I rushed that process. I went in familysearch.org and I was able to find a few new pieces of information. I found a temporary immigration card to Brazil (Rio de Janeiro) (Fig.1). On the card, it had his full name, Jose Ramon Guerra Aleman. At least in the Spanish culture, people include their father’s last name and their mother’s maiden name next to each other. In this case, Guerra comes from his father’s side and his name was Jose Guerra. While Aleman comes from his mother’s side and her name was Herminia Aleman according to the document below. Another information I found out was that he put journalism as his profession and he could have gone to Brazil for a story. Fig. 1. Jose Ramon Guerra Alemán Immigration Card, Brazil. (Courtesy of Familysearch.org .) As a historian and scholar, one must know how...

Week 5: The Battle Continues At the archives, I have been doing the same routine. I have been organizing and archiving one box to the next. However, I happen to change it a bit. I usually go and work on the next box chronologically, but this week I decided to go backwards and start with box 12. I found more draft pages of his four- volume encyclopedias. I needed to put them in order accordingly to how it appears to the final draft. This task seems easy to do, but it takes time when the draft pages are not in order or not all in the same place. I would imagine someone thinking why I would I care to place a draft together when the final copies of Aleman’s encyclopedias are available. As a historian, I feel the need to preserve the drafts of a manuscript or book because it can be the gateway of the writer’s thoughts. One person can just see changes on a page, but there is more meaning. The slightest change can mean the writer was detailed and thought-provoking. Academically speaking,...

Week 4: The Inside Scope of What I Do! In this internship, I am learning how to be an archivist and what to expect if I want to specialize as a digital archivist. The Special Collections staff is small compared to other institutions so they do a little bit of everything. In other words, they do not necessarily concentrate on one task forever rather they work on the preservation of a collection and at the same time, they may work on digitization for another collection. From past blogs, I have mentioned that I have been organizing materials. Video 1 gives an overview of my daily tasks and my whereabouts. As a historian, this internship has exposed me to the ins and outs of what professional archivists do before I come in and do research. I am seeing it from another perspective, the back-story. In addition, the task I am doing will help me to adapt to places where the archival institutions are not organized so I have the skills needed to navigate and find the materials I am looking for...

Week 3: VIVA CUBA! Organizing his masterpiece! I had to work with his drafts of the four encyclopedias called Cuba Infinita. He completed them in 2008. He had papers with the information and photos. Each of the pages had numbers. However, most were not in the right order. I had to use the published books as a guide to place them in order. I got to see the changes and edits he made. For instance, in Volume III and on page 208, the first photo to the left had additional words to its caption. The video presents a usual day at the Special Collections seen below. I believe his work on the encyclopedias were inspired and guided by an eight-volume encyclopedia of Cuba. The books are organized similarly to Alemán: poems; prose, theater; novels and costumbrism; history; arts and society and philosophy; prose of war; geography and folklore and education and economy; municipals. Although he divided his encyclopedias by decades, his work follows under the categories above...