Digital Portobelo: Connecting scholarship and cultural preservation in Panama
A presentation by UNC’s Digital Innovation Lab in spring 2012 began to unlock the possibility of making this wealth of material available to the people of Portobelo and the larger world through digitization.
For more than a decade, the fruits of Renee Craft’s field research — audio and video interviews in technical formats ranging from Hi8 to mini-DV — had been sealed away in “oversized Tupperware tombs” under her bed.
The interviews focused on the Congo carnival tradition of Portobelo, an Afro-Latin community on the Panama coast.
Craft, an assistant professor of communication studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was working on her first book, <>When the Devil Knocks: The Congo Tradition and the Politics of 20<>th<>Century Blackness in Panama (The Ohio State University Press, January 2015). She never intended to make the full content of those interviews widely available. Yet she was bothered by a nagging sense that the project was incomplete.
“Because this tradition was largely absent from discourses on black cultural performances in the Americas, I was clear the book would make a positive scholarly contribution, but I was also clear that it would not be very useful to the local community,” said Craft, who holds a joint appointment in global studies. “What they really wanted was a type of cultural preservation they could more directly access, but I didn’t know how to do that.”
For years, Craft had given copies of photos and tapes to individual community members. Then, a presentation by UNC’s Digital Innovation Lab in spring 2012 began to unlock the possibility of making this wealth of material available to the people of Portobelo and the larger world through digitization.
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