Introduction

This two-part interactive DIGITAL BARCELONA project grew out of an East Carolina University Honors Seminar class taught during fall 2016. The digital humanities project includes both an exhibit created using a campus installation of Omeka and a map interface constructed in Omeka’s Neatline plug-in.

Dr. Benjamin Fraser’s HONS 2011.003 course—titled “Barcelona: An Urban Cultural History” (click here to see the syllabus)—explored connections between landscape, art, culture and the hallmark material sites of the coastal Catalan capital. Students approached this single global city from multiple perspectives: fictional and documentary film with English subtitles, science fiction in English translation, architecture and design, health and medicine, science and technology, and urban planning/history. Student-led and professor-assisted discussions of scholarly readings, films and literary texts emphasized the city’s history and uneven geographical development.

Approximately half of the class were students in their first-year at East Carolina, and a smaller number were sophomores, juniors or seniors. Few began the class with knowledge of Spanish, Spain, or Catalan identity, but each brought their own perspective to the class material due to their varied interests across many fields: health, medicine and nursing, art and design, psychology, Hispanic studies, leisure studies, and more. The different points of view that students brought to the urban material are the core of this project’s strength.

PROCESS

During fall 2016, each student developed their own portfolio of site-specific writings focusing on urban locations and topics of interest to them. Students interested in having their work incorporated into the digital project gave signed permission to that effect.

During spring 2017, after the course was completed, students’ audio, video and textual contributions were vetted, edited, in some cases combined, and entered into the project exhibit and/or map by a team: Dr. Benjamin Fraser, Dr. Irina Swain, Camille Kresz, and Laurie Godwin.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the support of the Honors College, the Thomas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, ITCS and the Multimedia Center, and collaborations with the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment as well as the larger digital humanities initiative (DISSH) at ECU.