Castanheira, Maria Zulmira Bandarra de Sousa Veríssimo

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Integrated doctoral researcher

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Castanheira

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Maria Zulmira Bandarra de Sousa Veríssimo

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Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Mapping travel writing: A critical digital humanities perspective
    2024 - Moreira, Luciano; Castanheira, Maria Zulmira Bandarra de Sousa Veríssimo
    Travel writing reflects placed subjective human experience and participates in the collective processes of assembling stable, consensual, or polemical geographical entities and identities. In this chapter, we reflect on the contributions of Critical Digital Humanities to the communication of travel writing studies. Using R language, we are exploring the Anglophone Travelers in Portugal databases—which provide annotated information on almost 200 foreigner travel accounts in English published since the eighteenth century—to visualize geographical entities, analyze topics, and design visualization tools for non-expert audiences. In the process, four contributions of Critical Digital Humanities became evident. First, toponymical and semantic sources of ambiguity require us to develop a strong understanding of data as an artifact or capta (Drucker, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1–21, 2011) construed in the annotating process that may affect the accuracy of automatic geocoding and processing based on named entity recognition. Critical digital humanist scholars, even if aware of such issues, lack creative solutions to express ambiguity as informative per se of the liquid nature of social labeling. Second, digital humanities open doors to enhanced interactivity (for instance, web applications) but require thoughtful, parsimonious solutions to express complexity which raises issues related to minimal computing (Risam and Gil, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, 2022). Third, Critical Digital Humanities helped to understand that communicating foreign perspectives may impact the audiences’ understanding of the traveled territory, but also of the travelers as an exogroup, a social category built on stereotyped views. Fourth, Critical Digital Humanities allowed us to better communicate the entangled nature of traveling and socio-historical circumstances. The challenge is to use such information to promote meaningful, centrifugal travel experiences rather than centripetal, massive travel itineraries. In the future, the project aims to grow via participatory citizen science (crowdsourcing) and to extend its scope to online digital sources related to travel (for instance, blogs). These new steps will foster the need to examine web scraping and text cleaning techniques and develop suitable storytelling approaches to engage people and create narratives that reflect their inputs in a critical way.
  • Publication
    Digital storytelling in travel writing communication: Critical-creative paths
    2023-05 - Relvas, Isabel; Moreira, Luciano; Castanheira, Maria Zulmira Bandarra de Sousa Veríssimo
    Under the “Anglophone Travellers in Portugal” project, we are exploring communication avenues with digital humanities methods. We realise that we can use the hybrid, multimedia narrative form of digital storytelling not only as a communicational approach, but also as a heuristic self-reflective approach to use iteratively during the research. The approach, amongst other benefits, would engage the audience with the project, promoting readers.