Representing the experiences and languages of non-English speakers is an ongoing challenge for digital humanities scholars and practitioners working in the digital sphere. For community archivists, many of the highest regarded projects focusing on marginalized and underrepresented groups are presented in English. For example, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA), houses the oral histories of migrants from “India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Maldives, and the many South Asian diaspora communities across the globe” but represents their stories and collected material in English. Digital language archives, like the Computation Resource on South Asian Languages (CoRSAL), have a more advanced approach, representing materials across a wide array of languages, but these projects are often dependent on a customized solution built by an on-site developer or institutional partner.

Although community organizations could spend their time and resources developing solutions for archiving, most prioritize on-the-ground activist work. As a result, these organizations have a tremendous impact on their communities, but their work rarely ends up in archives, rendering it invisible to the public. One effective strategy for addressing this issue is by establishing partnerships with scholars, academic institutions, and archives to ensure that this work is not forgotten. To this end, my team–three universities, nine community organizations, scholars, activists, librarians, and students–decided to build an out-of-the-box digital archiving solution designed specifically for working across languages. Our research questions included, “How can we build a community archive that represents materials in multiple languages?”, “How can we represent materials using the terms preferred by our community partners, rather than those prescribed by the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)?”, “How can we build a tool that allows other groups to build and maintain their own multilingual community archives?”, and “How can we build an easy-to-use tool that allows our groups to have autonomy over their sites while still allowing connections to a central archive?”

These questions were inspired by our work with the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico / Emergency Response Archive of Puerto Rico (AREPR), a collaborative digital humanities project funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation (2020-present). AREPR employs the decolonial practice of post-custodial archiving to record stories of mutual aid organizations and individuals surviving and responding to the disasters that have impacted the Puerto Rican archipelago in the last eight years, including hurricanes, earthquakes, and COVID-19. The local and federal government’s disaster-response methods—prioritization of urban centers, slow distribution of resources, and limited communication with those in need–created a need for more effective on-the-ground solutions. Community organizations like Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico and El Puente - Enlace Latina Acción Climática developed short-and-long term solutions for these crises, focusing on food and water needs in the short-term while establishing community centers and educational programs that support the well-being of Puerto Ricans in the long-term. The work of community organizations like these has been integral to the disaster recovery process. As Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón observe, “These grassroots efforts have taken on a new urgency and necessity after Hurricane María as Puerto Ricans are forced to deal with not only the physical destruction caused by the storm but also the further destabilization of many communities as the government failed to act or acted in ways that only exacerbated vulnerability.”

AREPR documents, collects, and shares the work of nine grassroots organizations who were vital to the immediate on-the-ground response. Many of these organizations operate mostly if not entirely in Spanish, and their interest in participating in community archiving was dependent on being able to share their artifacts, experiences, and oral histories in their language of choice. To meet this need, we began assessing possibilities for developing a multilingual archiving platform. With the resources we had available, we decided to build upon an existing open source archiving platform, analyzing the affordances of tools like Mukurtu, Wax, Omeka S, Omeka Classic, and CollectionBuilder. We opted to use Omeka S specifically “for its support for robust collections metadata, focus on linked open data, and allowance for multiple websites [...] Although the [other] platforms could have supported our project’s metadata needs, our technical team and community partners were interested in creating individually controlled subsites for each group that would utilize materials from our broader collections.”

Using Omeka also made it possible for the AREPR team to engage with the project’s core values: decolonial and community archiving. Linda Tuhiwai Smith asserts that “the intellectual project of decolonizing has to set out ways to proceed through a colonizing world. It needs a radical compassion that reaches out, that seeks collaboration, and that is open to possibilities that can only be imagined as other things fall into place.” For AREPR, decolonial praxis is defined as “rejecting extractive forms of knowledge acquisition by relegating authority and control of collection processes, material selection, and dissemination strategies to the participating community organizations.” This approach includes practices like consent-based decision making, which ensures all parties are informed and in support of project developments; a hierarchical project structure, which recognizes that each member of our team has unique expertise to contribute to our collective knowledge building; and flexible, intersectional frameworks, which are responsive to the varied needs of our project partners and to the conditions of life in the Caribbean.

AREPR is also committed to community archiving. The Society of American Archivists defines community archives as “documentation of a group of people that share common interests, and social, cultural, and historical heritage, usually created by members of the group being documented and maintained outside of traditional archives. As archives built for and by community members, community archives are a particularly powerful tool for documenting and responding to humanitarian crises. Marika Cifor, et al. observe, “community archives play significant roles within contemporary social movements” particularly by offering “new ethical foundations for practice.”

One way AREPR lives out these values is through the co-creation of not only the project’s collections but also the platform in which they are housed. In "Co-designing for Society", Deborah Szebeko and Lauren Tan define co-design as "includ[ing] stakeholders of an issue [...] throughout the entire process from research to implementation." By including our partners throughout the entirety of the design process, we could both engage in decolonial praxis–by not assuming that one group, like the technical team, had more expertise than our community members–and ensure that we built a platform best able to meet their needs.

The result is the Omeka S theme, “Multilingual”, which enables communities to house multilingual collections on their sites. “Multilingual” is not only beneficial to the AREPR team, but, as an open source tool, is freely available to any other users who would like to use it. The goal of these technologies is to simplify the process of developing and sustaining multilingual digital projects by providing free, easy-to-use tools for displaying archival and cultural heritage materials across languages.

To increase the functionality of Multilingual, we also developed five related software extensions. The first—“Page Blocks”—provides additional modular, customizable page elements for site designers with a “drag and drop” functionality. Current Omeka S page design relies heavily on custom HTML, which can prove overwhelming for less technical community groups. With the development of the page blocks module, Omeka S website layouts are designed through a simple drag-and-drop interface, not unlike Wix or Squarespace. The second—“WebVTT Timing Duplicator”—simplifies the conversion of VTT files across multiple languages. VTT files allow for videos to have interactive transcripts, making video files more accessible and interactive. This tool already has been adopted for use by the Digital Library of the Caribbean. The third—“Transcript”—allows bilingual, interactive transcripts to be displayed in line with video and audio, ensuring that the media viewing process is streamlined and accessible. The fourth—“SimplePDF”— ensures that all PDFs can be read via screen reader, a feature that was not previously available in Omeka. The final—“Robots”—creates an administrative interface for publishing a Robots.txt file, providing web crawlers with specifications on if and they may crawl your site.

This presentation will examine strategies for multilingual praxis in the fields of digital community archives and digital humanities, using AREPR as a case study. Doing so offers one model of a co-creation process focused on improving and expanding multilingual archiving resources. In particular, centering the project’s values of decolonial community archiving, and thereby the knowledge and languages of our community partners, demonstrates how co-creation can lead to creative solutions for both on-the-ground projects as well as the broader digital humanities community. Implementing tools for multilingual praxis into our own research and pedagogy—including multilingual projects, culturally engaged curricula, reflection activities, and a broader culture of care—can teach our students and communities to do the same. While this case study focuses on Puerto Rico, it also brings attention to the importance of university-community partnerships and demonstrates one way digital humanists can utilize their expertise in ways to further the work of non-English speaking communities.