Making Networks, Building Archives

Every issue of archipelagos asks the same question in a different key: what does it mean to do Caribbean work with digital tools, on digital terrain, under digital constraint? Issue 9 answers in two movements. The first four essays consider how Caribbean communities build networks where none were supposed to exist, that is, on platforms designed elsewhere, for other purposes, other users. The second six look at what happens afterward: how those networks, once made, get preserved, taught, and returned to the people who created them.

Luis Rivera opens the issue by refusing the premise that the Caribbean lags behind in network infrastructure. Club Nintendo culture, BlackBerry Messenger in the Dominican Republic, Cuban DIY internet productions, the meme threads that move faster than any official channel – Rivera reads these phenomena, often perceived as makeshift substitutes for “real” networks, as valuable networks in and of themselves, vernacular, improvised, and produced on the region’s own terms. Jeannine Murray-Román follows with a close reading of Rosaura Rodríguez’s Instagram Stories, tracking how a Puerto Rican artist turns a platform built for aesthetic sameness into a working notebook – fifteen seconds of pigment made from mountain plants, a record of post-María recovery, a practice of place held together by the Highlights feature. Tess Kulstad González then turns the lens on the field itself, running a metadata analysis of anthropological scholarship on Haiti and the Dominican Republic that shows, in hard numbers, what many of us have long suspected: research produced in the islands is cited and indexed less than research produced about them from outside. Juan-Carlos Goilo closes the section with a close look at the digital life of Papiamentu, tracing how a Creole language carries its colonial ambivalence into the feeds and comment sections where it now also gets defended, reinvented, and occasionally flattened into something more marketable than radical.

Read together, these four essays make the case that digital vernaculars of the Caribbean are not merely workarounds. They are methods in their own right.

The process essays in this valence then ask what comes after the network, through the painstaking work of building something that lasts. Gunvor Simonsen, Felicia Jantina Fricke, Heather Freund, and Natacha Klein Käfer offer a fascinating account of a large-scale Natural Language Processing (NLP) model for extracting fugitive-slave advertisements from Atlantic newspapers between 1766 and 1821. Adriana Morales-Díaz looks at ABC_PR, a digital archive built from a grandfather’s four decades of Puerto Rican children’s literature and a granddaughter’s post-custodial care in preserving it. Mirerza González-Vélez and Mila Aponte-González document the Acervos Digitales project at UPR-Río Piedras, an argument for minimal-technology preservation built specifically for Caribbean institutional realities rather than with borrowed infrastructure. Grayson Chong writes at once as artist and archivist, taking us through the process of building a dancehall fashion archive from her personal collection and asking what integrity a garment keeps once it becomes a JPEG. Ra Bacchus, Alexander S. Butler, and Medardo G. Rosario turn the question of Caribbean borders into pedagogy itself, building a quiz map that makes students sit with the discomfort of drawing a region’s edges. Finally, Antonia MacDonald and Leah Rosenberg present two case studies in reparative archival pedagogy – rich virtual exchanges between Grenada and Florida that turn students into collaborators in redressing the archive’s silences, including the long-buried history of Maurice Bishop and the seven revolutionaries executed alongside him in 1983.

If the first section is about making networks, the second is about making them count by building the infrastructure that keeps vernacular practice from disappearing the moment the platform changes its terms of service, or the artist moves on, or the grant runs out. All of these contributions insist that the Caribbean digital work constitutes its own tradition, built to its own specifications, answerable to its own communities first.

Onward, Alex and Kaiama