Start typing… Digital Poetry in Latin America
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
In this talk we discuss the process of writing a survey essay on Latin American digital poetics, as a process of co-authorship between two human researchers and the assistance of Google’s NotebookLM. We reflect on this exercise both in terms of our findings in the literature and our reiterative process of working with the model. A salient aspect of the exercise was identifying the recurrent historical trends characterizing the theorizations about Latin American digital literary production as both a factor of citation and one of field formation. Similarly, working with a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system, fed exclusively on our selected corpus of relevant scholarship–including works by Kozak, Gainza, Pitman, Correa-Díaz, Weintraub, and Ledesma–yielded a panoramic view of scholarly tropes that have consolidated the subfield. As the linguistic-cultural-regional specific contours of Latin American digital poetry offer unique insights into global south digital literature writ large, in already the second quarter of the twenty-first century, it can also run the risk of obfuscating the complex and deterritorialized dynamics that human movement and migrant/exiled/diasporic identities currently mark the idea of Latin America and its transnational cultural production. Ultimately, this talk reflects on the intermingling of writing technologies and the poetics of writing. As an exercise of synthesizing a field and an ethical engagement with language models, our presentation also underscores the situatedness and media specificity of scholarship itself.
Start typing… Digital Poetry in Latin America
Narratives & Worlds
In this talk we discuss the process of writing a survey essay on Latin American digital poetics, as a process of co-authorship between two human researchers and the assistance of Google’s NotebookLM. We reflect on this exercise both in terms of our findings in the literature and our reiterative process of working with the model. A salient aspect of the exercise was identifying the recurrent historical trends characterizing the theorizations about Latin American digital literary production as both a factor of citation and one of field formation. Similarly, working with a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system, fed exclusively on our selected corpus of relevant scholarship–including works by Kozak, Gainza, Pitman, Correa-Díaz, Weintraub, and Ledesma–yielded a panoramic view of scholarly tropes that have consolidated the subfield. As the linguistic-cultural-regional specific contours of Latin American digital poetry offer unique insights into global south digital literature writ large, in already the second quarter of the twenty-first century, it can also run the risk of obfuscating the complex and deterritorialized dynamics that human movement and migrant/exiled/diasporic identities currently mark the idea of Latin America and its transnational cultural production. Ultimately, this talk reflects on the intermingling of writing technologies and the poetics of writing. As an exercise of synthesizing a field and an ethical engagement with language models, our presentation also underscores the situatedness and media specificity of scholarship itself.
Bio
Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital poet and Associate Professor of Spanish Literature and New Media at the University of California, Berkeley. She's the author of numerous works on digital art and literature in the Spanish-speaking world. Her digital poetry has been exhibited internationally, and is studied in specialized monographs and anthologies. At UC Berkeley, she serves on the Executive Committee of the Center for New Media and co-directs Spanish Studies (Institute of European Studies). She is a board member of the Electronic Literature Organization, series editor of Electronic Literature at Bloomsbury Academic Press, and part of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. https://www.alexsaum.com/
Élika Ortega is assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her work focuses on digital literature and media, cultural hybridity, reading practices and books, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. Élika is also a botmaker. Her Twitter bots dedicated to the work of Mexican writer and artist Ulises Carrión were included in the Antología LitELat Vol 1 and have been revived on Bluesky as @BotCarrión. Her book Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas was published by Stanford University Press in March 2025. Élika is also part of the editorial collective for the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 5. https://elikaortega.net/