The Portugueses de Papel grant was originally funded by a CU Boulder Research & InnovationSeed Grant in 2017-2018. Associate Professor Tania Martuscelli in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese in partnership with ALTEC and CU Libraries then applied for a Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant through the . They received recommendations to resubmit with revisions in light of the rise of digital humanities and the importance of Portuguese as a critical language in the U.S.
This project was an extraordinary effort with eight core members writing the proposal and further broke boundaries with its multidisciplinary, multinational, multigenerational and multi-ranked faculty, staff, graduate students and community.
Portugueses de Papel aimed to develop a digital database of Portuguese characters throughout Brazilian literature. This work fills the need of the Portuguese academic research community throughout the world who are completing literary analysis of thousands of novels and need a way to collect and run statistics on this gathered information. The platform created by ALTEC allows researchers to access information about a novel’s characters, such as their location, gender, race and social, economic, and employment status. This tool will be instrumental for researchers needing to analyze, for example, the professions of Portuguese immigrants in Brazil after the abolition of slavery in 1889, thus allowing the categorization of immigrants in a variety of ways.
After collecting literary analyses from over 100 researchers around the world, the project team translated the analyses into English and then used ALTEC’s recording studio to record audio of all submitted analyses in both English and Portuguese so that the research was accessible in both written and audio formats in two languages.
ALTEC then developed a database platform to enable indexing of all analyses and data. The project team is enthusiastic that this lays the groundwork for future derivative research to take place and is an example of how to engage in digital humanities research.