Thursday, October 15, 2020
On the second day of our seminar “Orality: Archive and Sound”, the Centre for Mexican Studies UNAM-UK had the privilege of presenting a panel of experts on Digital Repositories. In the panel participated professor Alison Sinclair from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), Ricarda Musse from the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Germany), Gloria Chicote from Universidad de la Plata (Argentina) and Mariana Masera Cerutti from the Unidad de Investigación sobre Representaciones Sociales y Culturales, UNAM (Mexico). All of them moderated by Juan Gomís Coloma from the Universidad Católica de Valencia (Spain).
The discussion was structured around various topics which were set forth by the moderator so as to give each panelista an opportunity to present their own perspectives on them. The panelists pondered on the challenges and opportunities presented by the process of digitisation of oral objects as well as the subsequent cataloguing procedure of the material.
The panel started with a discussion that allowed for a tentative approach that permited to define the popular print materials as intermodal objects such as the poetic text, the voice, and the image. The panellists then proceeded to explore the issue of how to archive such types of materials considering their nature.
The session concluded with a Q&A section in which the audience had the possibility of clarifying their doubts and sharing their commentaries directly with the panellists. From this exchange of ideas emerged several considerations, of which it is worth highlighting the question of how to include key elements in the process of cataloguing these materials, such as their historicity and temporality. This issue invited the panellist to expand on the matter of what type of questions a researcher asks herself when approaching a catalogue.
This and many other central notions to the subject of digital repositories where discussed in this session. Thus, concluded the second day of our seminar, which can be watched through our social media platforms @UNAM_UK as well as in the UNAM’s Unidad de Investigación sobre Representaciones Sociales y Culturales (UDIR UNAM) youtube channel.
