The Ethics of Digital Archiving in the Amazon: A Case Study of the “Biblioteca Amazónica”
“Data, Power and the Ethics of Knowledge: A Digital Humanities Series” is presented by the Summer Program in Digital Humanities and co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Library, and the School of Information
The Biblioteca Amazónica of Iquitos (BAI) is one of the world’s most important collections of Amazonian history, politics, and culture, yet its archives face a number of threats.
In the heart of the Peruvian Amazon, pages gather moisture and mold. Rodents and insects consume folios. Outdated buildings increase fire risk, and the archive’s location along a heavily trafficked esplanade has led to theft incidents. Given these circumstances, researchers Amanda M. Smith and Sydney Silverstein (Wright State University) have worked for the past five years to digitally preserve BAI resources through two separate Arcadia fund grants.
This talk examines the ethical questions that arise when the digitization and preservation of archives from the Global South depend on funding and scholarly altruism from the Global North. How does such digital work serve communities, and in what ways does it circumvent them? How can inevitable power hierarchies be confronted and negotiated? What sorts of alliances must be formed to undergo this work, and how do the parties involved work together across differences? Who has the right to grant permissions for the digitization of cultural patrimony? Who is the final digital repository for? What is the relationship between metadata decisions and community access?
Rather than resolve these complex issues, this talk will underscore the questions that must remain at the forefront of this kind of work if it is to be done ethically.
Speaker
Amanda Smith
Amanda Smith is an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz. Her research explores cultural responses to environmental crises in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Amazonian and Andean contexts. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), examines how stories told about the Amazon in canonical twentieth-century novels both wrote against and upheld extractivist visions of the region that continue to impact it today. Her next book project, The Nature of Conflict: Rivers, Resilience, and Reconciliation in Colombia, considers a context in which rivers are gaining rights as victims of Colombia's armed conflict and asks how art, literature, and film might exceed, and therefore complement legal language that tries to make sense of nonhuman experiences of war. Other work has appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society; Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; The Journal of West Indian Literatures; ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America; A contracorriente; Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; and Ciberletras. Professor Smith is also a co-editor of The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, former director of a modern endangered archives program grant to digitize the collections of the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, and current director of an Endangered Archives Programme grant from the British Library to continue this work in Iquitos.
About the Series
Data shapes what we know. Power determines who gets to know it. And the ethics of knowledge is not a question the data can answer for itself. We live in a moment when AI is reshaping every field, and the pressure to be proficient has never been greater. But proficiency alone does not tell you what your data means, whose stories it erases, or what you are responsible for when you use it. It is not a gap in technology, but where technology ends, and the thinking begins.
Over six evenings this summer, this series brings together scholars and practitioners chosen for the rigor, depth, and ethical commitment of their multidisciplinary work. The diversity of their backgrounds across academia, industry, public engagement, and across disciplines that rarely share the same room is itself a methodological choice. In the age of AI, the decisions we make about data — how we collect it, interpret it, and act on it, demand collective inquiry and shared accountability.
This series is an initiative of the Digital Humanities Summer Program at UC Berkeley, a space committed to fostering dialogue across disciplines, communities, and ways of knowing. Our goal is not to arrive at answers, but to think together — to ask what responsible data use looks like in practice, what ethical AI means beyond compliance, and how humanistic inquiry can help us navigate the choices that technology alone cannot make for us. We hope every participant leaves not just informed, but challenged and better equipped to act with care and intention in their own fields.
Digital humanities is not a discipline. It is a practice and a commitment to interpretation, to accountability, to the ethics of knowledge production. What does it mean to build digital archives that don’t reproduce the erasures of colonialism? How do computational methods change the stories we can tell and the ones we can no longer ignore? Who gets counted in our datasets, and who disappears? How do we recognize when AI-generated narratives become the infrastructure of misinformation? These are not technical questions. They are ethical ones, and it is precisely the responsibility of Digital Humanities to hold them open, to refuse easy answers, and to ask not just what we can do with data and digital tools, but what we should do, and for whom.
Each event is a free public lecture followed by Q&A, open to the entire Berkeley community. No prior knowledge required. Only curiosity.
Contact
If you have questions about this event, please contact the Summer Program in Digital Humanities at summerdigitalhumanities@berkeley.edu.
Accessibility
If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting, CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about mobility access in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Iliana Morton at ilianamorton@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7–10 days in advance of the event.