Digital Humanities: el laboratorio de pensamiento y acción

by Jo Crow and Patience Schell, with Gimena del Rio Riande and Andrew Sage

Gimena del Rio Riande (CONICET and Universidad del Salvador, Buenos Aires), an international leader in Digital Humanities and minimal computing, has been helping Jo Crow (Bristol) and Patience Schell (Aberdeen) develop their understanding of minimal computing in DH for several years. Funding from two SLAS UK Scholars Research Grants (2025) enabled a deepening of this collaboration, which meant that Crow and Schell could enhance their understanding of minimal computing both in terms of the state of the field and in terms of how it works in practice. Emerging from a recognition of DH’s (time, resource, ecological) constraints, minimal computing puts at its core the question of what minimally is needed to achieve our research goals, building on the open software and hardware movement. Minimal computing also keeps our responsibility to reduce the ecological resources (which DH requires) at the forefront of planning. 

The laboratorio de pensamiento y acción, including the four SLAS-funded Raspberry Pis (in bright red).

The first SLAS Grant enabled Roy Youdale – Senior Research Assistant in Translation Studies at the University of Bristol, with a passionate interest in computational analysis and how it can help (and hinder) the translation of literary texts – to investigate debates about and developments regarding minimal computing in the UK and the Anglophone world. This meant researching its origins and key milestones (such as the publication of Hartmut Obendorf’s book on Minimalism in 2009 and the launch of the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2012), the driving forces behind it (connections with the climate justice movement, for example), and its reception and up-take (or lack of uptake) within higher-education institutions (including the creation of dedicated scholarly journals and the setting up of new UG and PGT teaching programmes). This was a new field of enquiry for Youdale, bringing the really helpful perspective of an enthusiastic ‘outsider looking in’. Youdale developed his review in dialogue with del Rio Riande and Gabriel Calarco at the HD Lab in Buenos Aires. With their extensive knowledge added into the equation, this became a broader and more global history of minimal computing, that allowed for a comparison between the UK and Latin American contexts. Del Rio Riande and Calarco have made this available as the minimal e-book entitled Minimal Computing 101 – https://hdlab.space/minimalbook/ – an excellent resource for any researchers, educators or students interested in the topic or about to embark on a digital humanities project. This is an open educational resource, which includes sections in both Spanish and English, together with a bibliography, and information about and links to a range of exciting minimal computing initiatives.   

Following this research and compilation of the Minimal Computing 101 site, Crow and Schell were able to test their understanding of minimal computing in practice thanks to a second SLAS Grant for a hands-on workshop in Buenos Aires. The laboratorio de pensamiento y acción was held at the end of March 2026, hosted by CONICET’s Digital Humanities Lab (HD Lab, Buenos Aires), bringing Crow and Schell as scholars from the Global North to learn from and alongside expertise in the Global South. Among the other workshop participants were students and scholars from a range of humanities backgrounds and career stages, including undergraduates. Workshop leaders were Gimena del Rio Riande (HD LAB, IIBICRIT-CONICET/USAL), Gabriel Calarco (HD LAB, IIBICRIT-CONICET) and Romina De León (HD LAB, IIBICRIT-CONICET). Workshop attendees were Laura Volkind (HD LAB, IIBICRIT-CONICET), Florencia Miranda (IIBICRIT-CONICET), Agustina Miguens  (IIBICRIT-CONICET), Agustina Ryckeboer (USAL), Catalina Cattaneo (USAL), Martha Faiad (UBA), as well as Crow and Schell.

Participants showing off one of the finished webpages (bottom from left Miguens, De León, Volkind, Calarco, Ryckeboer; top, from left, Miranda, del Rio Riande, Crow, Schell, Cattaneo)

The HD Lab had pre-prepared a six-page multilingual edition of the 1816 Declaration of Independence of Argentina (published in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara) and made this available on its webpage using TEI coding. SLAS funding supported the purchase of four Raspberry Pi 500s, which some participants used for the entire workshop. Others worked on their personal laptops. The advantage of the Raspberry Pis is their low-cost, and their suitability for open-source software and programming work. Participants had their own GitHub repositories, linked to a shared repository, which gave them access to the codes for the pre-prepared corpus. From/ through GitHub they also had access to and could work with Codespaces, a GitHub environment for fast coding. In addition to learning how to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ (to upload to a static website and move files between repositories), participants learned basic command line work essential to programming on Raspberry Pis. 

The group also learned how to update the ‘values’ for the pre-prepared Declarations of Independence, changing titles, adding notes about people and locations into an Excel spreadsheet, which they could ‘push’ to update their version of the website. As coding novices, Crow and Schell were delighted to see the updates they’d coded appear in their individual versions of the digital editions of the 1816 Declaration. There were also many failed attempts to make changes, flagged as ‘fatal errors’ (a dramatically and yet appropriately named mistake which resulted in much rueful laughter from workshop participants).

The North-South and South-South exchanges at the workshop allowed Crow and Schell to experience the key problems faced and (re)produced by digital technologies, problems that our institutions in the UK live differently to the HD Lab in Buenos Aires, not least due to the very unequal access to resources. One of the practical challenges we faced was limited bandwidth. which made it difficult for all participants to ‘push’ their finished code to the webpage at the same time. The solution, participants sharing data from their phones and creating local hotspots, showed the creativity and ingenuity required for DH under constrained circumstances. It also showed what could be accomplished despite little digital resource.   

The final component of the project was the updating of Schell’s project website, http://memoriasdecarreño.org/, by bringing in more principles of ‘minimal computing’ and FAIR data. Schell worked with Andrew Sage, the web developer who created the original website. Changes included adding a link to developer information, hosted on GitHub, a GitHub space for the project, archiving the website’s data and the coding, as well as making them available for reuse. The version on GitHub was enhanced to include the ability for the website to load the data from JSON files as an alternative to a backend database. This provides the option of running the website locally on a computer that could be accessed by a local network when online connectivity is limited. Sage also applied a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0  or Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International to the website. This public copyright license allows creators to share their work freely, provided others use it only for non-commercial purposes, give proper credit, and share any adaptations or modifications under the exact same license. Finally, Sage added key words for Google Searches. 

The grantees, their collaborators and all of the workshop participants are enormously grateful to SLAS for the funding which made this work possible.