Diana Roig Sanz

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya/ Oxford Internet Institute

Data mining and big data approaches are changing the ways in which we create knowledge, access information and preserve our cultural heritage. This talk will present the MapModern project, which applies cutting-edge technology to analyse a neglected aspect of European and non-European social and cultural life of the 20th century: the impact of Hispanic and Lusophone literary networks and cultural mediators in international modernity between 1898 and 1959. The project pursues three central goals: 1) to retrieve the lost history of Iberoamerican mediators in modernist intercultural and multilingual networks and reappraise their role; 2) to narrow the knowledge divide in terms of access and production in the Iberoamerican field by generating and making freely available new and reliable data that addresses the lack of documented cultural heritage, and 3) to offer an innovative and reproducible model that can be applied across periods, languages, and disciplines to analyse cross-border phenomena, under-examined mediators and networks and overshadowed geographical scales in their relations to the wider world. For doing so, the project uses an open and collaborative research tool providing a data source for quantitative and qualitative analysis.