Overview

Launched in June 2018 after a week of intense collaboration among librarians, faculty, and graduate students, Torn Apart/Separados (TA/S) Volume 1 intervened in United States’ immigration debates with data narratives illuminating the effects of the government’s policy of separating families, which began at the Mexico-U.S. border but, as TA/S revealed, is, in fact, a national landscape of immigrant detention. Volume 2, launched two months later, datamined and visualized U.S.-government contracts awarded by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, following the money behind the vast infrastructure subtending immigration enforcement.

A social justice digital humanities project, TA/S is part of the lineage of mobilized humanities interventions spearheaded by the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities. TA/S mobilized a team, formed by Manan Ahmed, Alex Gil, Moacir P. de Sá Pereira, Roopika Risam, Maira E. Álvarez, Sylvia A. Fernández, Linda Rodriguez, Merisa Martinez, and Rachel Hendery to pool knowledge and expertise to respond quickly to humanitarian crisis. The stories behind TA/S raise a number of questions at the heart of mobilized humanities: how to rally a team to undertake a project at speed, how to facilitate collaboration within distributed networks, how to find data, how to collaborate with media to increase project impact, and how to tell stories with data to engage multiple publics with new ways of understanding a crisis. 

Contributors

Manan Ahmed is an Associate Professor for South Asia in the Department of History at Columbia University. He is a co-founder of xpMethod.

Maira E. Álvarez  is a Ph.D. Candidate and currently a Research Assistant for the Center for Mexican American Studies  at the University of Houston. Her research interests lie in the study of U.S. Latino, U.S.-Mexico Border, and Latin American Literature as well as Women’s Studies, Latinx Art and Digital Humanities. She is a co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography.

Sylvia A. Fernández  is a Ph.D. Candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston and a Research Fellow with Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage. She is a co-founder of Borderlands Archives Cartography.

Alex Gil  is Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is a co-founder of xpMethod.

Rachel Hendery  is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University in Sydney, Australia. She works on language contact and change in Australia and the Pacific, and how mapping, simulation, and virtual reality data visualisation can help us better understand this history.

Moacir P. de Sá Pereira  is a scholar of literature & space, focusing on the way digital techniques can help elucidate novels of the 20th and 21st centuries. He is a member of xpMethod.

Roopika Risam  is an Assistant Professor of English at Salem State University. She is the author of New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Northwestern UP, 2018). She is a member of xpMethod.