The Spanish Paleography Tool’s Development Team and Production Staff
The Project Director of the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool is Dr. Ramona Hernández, Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. She oversees the entire project, attending the planning meetings to provide leadership and supervising the institutional support from CUNYDSI for the project. Dr. John O’Neill, Curator of Spanish Manuscripts and Rare Books and professor of Spanish manuscripts editing in CUNY, is the project’s Executive or Technical Director, leading the strategizing and coordinating the contributions by the different team members. Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, Assistant Director of CUNYDSI and doctoral student in History with vast experience in sixteenth century Spanish paleography, is Assistant Executive Director in planning the work of the team, as well as in communicating with team members and hired staff.
Dr. Marithelma Costa, Professor of Medieval Spanish literature and editor of medieval Spanish literature texts, contributes to the project her expertise in designing and planning the transcription of Spanish documents. Metadata Librarian Cynthia Tobar brings with her knowledge and experience in the functioning and managing of open source content management systems and in metadata implementation. Dr. Pennee Bender, professor in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program at the Graduate Center, and Andrea Ades Vásquez, Associate Director of CUNY’s Center for Media and Learning, serve as technical advisors on issues pertaining to the overall structuring and functionality of the Tool.
Idilio Gracia Peña, Chief Archivist of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s Archives, and Sarah Aponte, M.L.S., M.S.Ed., and Chief Librarian of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s Library, contributed their unique respective expertise in the management and processing of primary sources and in bibliography and bibliographic notation about Dominicans and their history.
Monacolange, a digital platform programming and production firm, were hired as consultants under the direction of Colin Lange, senior partner, in charge of the more technical digital designing and constructing of the Tool’s internal electronic structure and functioning as well as its interface.
Three archivists-paleographers specializing in early-modern Spanish manuscripts, Jacqueline Abad, Rocío Devers, and Rosa Figuereo were hired as consultants to generate a set of transcriptions of documents selected from CUNYDSI’s Dominican Colonial Documents Digital Collection that have been used as central contents of the Tool’s final prototype.
Finally a team of senior undergraduate and graduate students from The City College of New York-CUNY, composed by Eduardo Dueñas, Jhensen Ortiz, Melbin Peralta, and Antonio Pérez were hired as Project Assistants to implement the painstaking coding and ‘mapping’ of the digital copies of the manuscripts that connects them to their respective transcriptions. They were accompanied in this role by two professionals from the New York Dominican community known by their long and distinguished record of work in education and civic organizing, Dr. Marilú Galván and Dr. Manuel Acevedo. Hunter College graduate Mariel Acosta, and City College senior Laura Rivas assisted in the alphabet sample construction and the glossary/translation development, respectively. CCNY Arts senior student Carlos Taveras was in charge of designing the strategy for the construction of the alphabet samples as well as the double documents composed by manuscripts and side-by-side transcriptions featured in the Paleography Tool. Some moments of their work may be seen by clicking this link.