Decolonizing International Research Groups: Prototyping a Digital Audio Repository from South to North

This article reflects on what it means to create a digital humanities (DH) project in the “Global South,” while it ponders some lessons it can offer to DH practitioners across the world, particularly from English-speaking academia. As a case study it considers the Digital Audio Repository for Latin American Sound Art and Poetry an initiative coordinated by PoeticaSonora, a research group formed by faculty members and students from Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM, Mexico City) and Concordia University (Montreal). The prototyping process has brought out some reflections on the correlation between access and participation through information and communication technologies (here termed “knowledge democratization”), in order to expound PoeticaSonora’s theoretical-political positioning, drawing not only from decolonial thinkers and their critics but also from feminist, new materialist, and border studies on technology, art, and society. Then it discusses how the coloniality of knowledge pervades the international distribution of labour in the digital world and academic milieus, particularly through what Leanne Simpson calls “cognitive extractivism.” After proposing some strategies to avoid an extractivist workflow while designing a DH project, it finishes by offering three insightful lessons learned from the PoeticaSonora prototype: online access does not equal universal access; well-intended digital projects are not beneficial per se for the target community; and we must bring back to discussion the political dimension of digital labor and the social practices around it. Cet article se concentre sur la signification de la creation d’un projet d’humanites numeriques (HN) dans les « pays du Sud », tout en reflechissant a des lecons qu’un tel projet peut offrir aux universitaires de HN du monde, en particulier a ceux du milieu academique anglophone. Comme etude de cas, cet article considere le Digital Audio Repository for Latin American Sound Art and Poetry, qui est une initiative coordonnee par PoeticaSonora, un groupe de recherche consistant en des membres de faculte et d’etudiants de l’Universite nationale autonome du Mexique (UNAM, Mexico) et de l’Universite Concordia (Montreal). Le processus de prototypage a produit des reflexions sur la correlation entre l’acces et la participation a travers les informations et technologies de communication (appele ici « la democratisation du savoir »), dans le but d’exposer le positionnement theorique et politique de PoeticaSonora, s’inspirant non seulement des intellectuels decoloniaux et de leurs critiques, mais aussi des etudes feministes, de nouveaux materialistes et des transfrontalieres sur la technologie, sur l’art et sur la societe. Nous discutons ensuite des facons dont la colonialite du savoir se repand dans la distribution internationale de travail dans le monde numerique et dans les milieux academiques, notamment a travers le processus que Leanne Simpson appelle « extractivisme cognitif ». Apres avoir propose des strategies d’evitement d’un flux de travail extractiviste dans la conception d’un projet de HN, nous finissons cet article en fournissant trois lecons perspicaces tirees du prototypage de PoeticaSonora : l’acces en ligne ne signifie pas un acces universel ; des projets bien intentionnes ne sont pas benefiques, en soi, pour la communaute ciblee ; et il faut revenir a la discussion des aspects politiques du travail numerique et des pratiques sociales qui les concernent. Mots-cles: extractivisme cognitif; depots numeriques; democratisation du savoir; audio litteraire; prototypage; groupes de recherche’


Introduction
During the last few decades, Digital Humanities (DH) projects have become a viable strategy to secure much-needed funding for research in arts and humanities, in a moment when important bastions of scholarly life, such as tenure or disciplinarity, are being radically altered due to the advance of neoliberal policies in the world.
Despite being offered as a paradigm shift in the current intellectual discursive regime (Quamen 2012, 8), until very recently DH has been mostly practiced in North American and European academia, and not in the southern hemisphere, contradicting any claim of universality based on the idea that the reach of networked digital technology is global. Quite often, projects about a place, aspect or culture in what is known as the Global South are developed by a university or cultural institution from the Global North. These projects explicitly evidence the infrastructural differences Meza: Decolonizing International Research Groups Art. 7, page 3 of 28 among various regions in the world, and they risk deepening existing gaps between developing and developed countries, reflecting the current "geopolitics of knowledge" (Miskolci 2014)-that is, the tacit distinction between knowledge generated by the Global North and South. It seems as if information and cultural products from non-Western nations and communities acquire value only when a Western or Westernized university, and its money, take part in a project that makes them visible. This paper reflects on what it means to prototype a DH project as a collaboration between researchers from a developing country and a developed one, Mexico and Canada, offering some lessons about international collaborative research to DH practitioners, particularly in English-speaking academia. As a case study, it considers PoéticaSonora (http://poeticasonora.mx), a research group formed by students and faculty members from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (or UNAM) in Mexico City and Concordia University in Montreal, in order to develop a digital audio repository for Latin American sound art and sound poetry. Its main objective is to operate as "an articulating node among the many Mexican initiatives […] that put an emphasis on the study, production, archiving, or distribution of practices related to the voice, as employed in poetic and sound creative works" (PoéticaSonora 2016).
Among the many debates in DH to which PoéticaSonora's experience can contribute, this paper will focus on the correlation between access and participation through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), a phenomenon referred to as "knowledge democratization." It then outlines PoéticaSonora's theoretical, ethical, and political positioning, as well as the methodological process carried out by this international and inter-institutional research group.

PoéticaSonora: the project
Several Mexican venues and institutions, either state-run or private, have been responsible for facilitating the performance or distribution of what in PoéticaSonora has been referred to as "voice poetics." In Mexico City, this dissemination has mostly been through festivals, museums, and cultural institutions like Poesía en Voz Alta, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Carrillo Gil Art Museum, and Laboratorio Arte Alameda, most of which already participate or are in the process of collaborating with PoéticaSonora.
However, the audio material they have managed to preserve is atomized into several different collections, sometimes inaccessible to the average user, rendering their study difficult. The intention of making them discoverable is tightly bound to the need for disseminating them: these recordings need both a means of discoverability and dissemination or otherwise, they will disappear from Mexico's cultural memory once their technical formats become obsolete.
PoéticaSonora seeks to respond to that need by providing access to a database management system including every recording's full metadata (using a data schema based on Dublin Core and MODS) and a front-end providing specific search and analysis tools. Given that UNAM's main campus is located in Mexico City, along with most of the PoéticaSonora team, the prototype's initial sample of 369 audio files mostly comes from institutions and collectors in this city. We seek to alleviate this centralist bias, troubling in a country where most federal institutions are still located in the national capital, through the ongoing participation of invited curators and provincial institutions in the project, like UNAM's Morelia campus. The Beta version is expected to gather collections from other countries in Latin America as well.
The PoéticaSonora prototype (hereafter PSP; see https://poeticasonora.me/ searchhome) aims to contribute to the dissemination of Mexico's audio heritage recorded and produced since 1960, the year when Voz Viva de México, the first literary audio collection in the country, was founded as part of a preservation campaign by UNAM (González Aktories 2017). The PSP also helps conceptualize listening as a form of legibility, providing methodological and pedagogical tools to analyze sound recordings. Pieces included in the initial sample have been commonly classified under different categories and genres, such as literary audio, sound poetry, sound art, hip hop, and spoken word, among other practices combining sound and word. The  (Table 1). In the context of this project, "voice poetics" does not solely refer to the human voice but to any imaginable way to convene an authorial and aural presence through the use of new The PSP inner workflow is focused on strengthening the reading and writing abilities of participating undergraduate students by applying their knowledge on art and literary criticism to the process of editorializing sound recordings, that is, contextualizing or updating such recordings' referential networks during its remediation and subsequent integration into digital media via web sites, databases, and so on. The task of editorialization seeks to reduce what Bruno Bachimont calls the "fossé d'intelligibilité" (intelligibility gap) caused by the temporal and epistemic distance (or "commensurability plan") between the audiovisual document's spacetime axis and the current one (Bachimont 2017;Treleani and Mussou 2012;Treleani 2014). At an organizational level, PoéticaSonora gives priority to editorializing over curating because the latter implies aesthetic or other selective criteria aimed at limiting the number of chosen pieces-a typical strategy in canon formation.
The common objective for PoéticaSonora students is not to discriminate between different works, but to provide as much contextual information and access to as many audio files as possible. However, the dangers of self-reference and saturation are mitigated by inviting external curators who select specific works, genres, and trends for the PSP. Each invited curator, a specialist in her own field, is accompanied throughout the process by an undergraduate who assists her in editorializing the collection ( Table 2). We expect invited curators to offer complementary, even conflicting perspectives about what is worth preserving and disseminating in the world of sound art and literary audio.

Access and participation: cognitive extractivism and international research projects
This section focuses on a topic from the perspective of a digital project built from south to north, which can significantly benefit ongoing DH debates. It is assumed that one key advantage of DH, not only for academic communities but society in general, is the promise of a free source of knowledge, readily available online regardless of the user's academic degree, profession, or education level. It is an idea shared by several authors, which could be conceptualized as the premise of knowledge democratization. Abby Smith Rumsey, for example, says the main leverage of what she calls translational humanities "is to expand the reach of humanities expertise not only on campus but far beyond to the public and private sectors" (2013). For Andrea Hunter, DH practitioners are part of an academic community in a process of committing to higher levels of social engagement: "By focusing on access and "shifting from ink on paper to digital text suddenly allows us to make perfect copies of our work. Shifting from isolated computers to a globe-spanning network of connected computers suddenly allows us to share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at essentially no cost" (2012, 1).
The problem with these arguments is that they take for granted that ICT access library is a very different, less privileged form of access than a connection at home or work" (2015, 418). INEGI's survey (2014) shows that public spaces were the second most common place of internet access in Mexico, even above working places and schools (Figure 1). Unlike North America, the most common public places are not libraries, but so-called cafés internet (even when, ironically, coffee is not always sold there), private venues meant for renting computers, telephone lines, and video game consoles at fixed rates. Among these varied access differences, the computer literacy needed for making use of any digital tool is not a condition given by technology per se, but a social process based on previous knowledge and socioeconomic privileges enabling or hindering learning conditions. The fact that access to a website, an OA article, or a digital repository seems free is due to the existence of infrastructure, platforms, and standards for file storage and transmission. As Jonathan Sterne reminds us, "An MP3 costs almost nothing to make and reproduce-once someone has invested in a computer, software, a relatively reliable supply of electricity, and some kind of internet connection (because of these costs, we cannot say that it is truly free even when it is not directly purchased)" Disagreed that simply making information and primary sources available, or enabling more people to create historical records is democratizing. Instead, this person argued that what was necessary for a democracy is a group of people rallying around information, using it for political or social means.
Democracy is active, rather than passive, and requires the formation of community (Hunter 2015, 416).
Another Omeka developer claimed that "any agency they [DH tools and resources] afford is done within a safe, uncontested medium that does not challenge power structures in a substantive way" (Hunter 2015, 417). Thus, for a DH project to be relevant, even if only within a limited field or area of study, it must also address questions around that are central for its discipline or study area, and that may begin to be answered through the use of tools provided by such project.
The discourse of knowledge democratization conceals material conditions deeply rooted in ICTs and their differentiated access by gender, race, and social class. Learning to use a digital product or service (and, even less frequently, learning something relevant about a topic or subject through it) implies having adequate material possibilities, enough "social time" (Valenzuela 2009, 21) and knowledge for making use of them, even if content is only temporarily accessed, as in internet being rented by the hour, a much more common transaction in the Global South than in the North. Like the case of Google's "click democracy" shows-which according to Barbara Cassin (2007) is neither a democracy nor is it actually just based on clicks-uncritically labeling an algorithm or a programming function as democratic is dangerous since, just as with any cultural production, it has its own implicit and explicit ideological, political, and aesthetic biases.
Given the degree of ICT penetration in Mexico nowadays, who may PoéticaSonora actually serve at all? It is vital to be clear and honest towards the community a DH project seeks to benefit, as well as to implement effective activation, dissemination, and follow-up strategies. Clearly, even though users from outside an academic milieu are greatly welcomed, based on our fieldwork experience it appears that most PoéticaSonora users will be writers, artists, critics, professors, and liberal arts students. The prototype had to be functional enough for them to access it from practically any computer connected to the internet, without the need to install any additional program or plugin. We have often taken care not to widen connectivity gaps among different user sectors in Mexico further. One of the main pitfalls of knowledge democratization is neglecting the existing inequalities between developing and developed nations, and between poor and rich citizens within them.
Thinking a project is available for everyone just because it is online runs the risk of inadvertently privileging a certain user sector-those with more digital literacy, the social and economic capital. It can also potentially affect the area or region studied, either directly or indirectly, as infrastructure differences sometimes open some "areas of opportunity," in the crassest capitalistic sense (say, cheaper labour force or raw materials, less strict employment regulations, and so on), that can be exploited, inadvertently or not, even within scholarly projects.
Lisa Nakamura's study on the essentialization of Navajo women as naturally gifted chip manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s is a great example of how flexible labour, either local or outsourced, is exploited in digital culture (2014,  only seeing its images but seeing into it, into the histories of its platforms, both machinic and human, is absolutely necessary for us to understand how digital labour is configured today" (2014, 920). These dynamics are also present in scholarly life, as when a Global North institution or university funds research on Global South topics or materials, while most of the project is developed from the institution's, rather than the subject's, perspective. Under this "maquila-like" model, knowledge stemming from Global South communities is treated as raw material that must be turned into a suitable commodity (via articles, book chapters, and digital projects) for an academic market in which, according to Bolivian theorist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "ideas run, In the face of such considerations, it is necessary to avoid reproducing the northsouth flux of the international division of digital labour and academic research, both infused with gender, class, and race biases, during this advanced phase of white patriarchal capitalism, termed "the informatics of domination" by Haraway (1991, 170ff). Other than "a space for collecting data, making ethnographic incursions or applying (northern) theories to particular cases" (Miskolci 2014, 13), the Global South has been portrayed as ideal for prime material extraction or assemblage using cheap labour force (Grosfoguel 2016; Nakamura 2014). Under these circumstances, for a real paradigmatic change to happen, Miskolci argues, "scholars from the North should begin to recognize that their way of producing and circulating knowledge sustains international hierarchies and inequalities, evident in the almost complete absence of dialogue with their colleagues in that part of the world understood to be the Global South" (2014,29).
The complaint about using goods and knowledge from colonized regions without giving anything back to them (a common topic in post-colonial approaches to anthropology) has also been raised by indigenous peoples in the Global North, most notably the Idle No More movement in Canada. It has been well established that extracting minerals, plants and other resources was fundamental for the creation of the current modernity/coloniality system, as well as for the illicit enrichment of colonial European nations (Grosfoguel 2016, 126-131). Nishnaabeg writer and activist Leanne Simpson has noted how extractivism is also manifest within the geopolitics of knowledge through what she calls "cognitive extractivism": "The canoe, the kayak, any technology that we had that was useful was extracted and assimilated into the culture of the settlers without regard for the people and the knowledge that created it" (Klein and Simpson 2016, 133). This concern for extractivist practices is reflected in Simpson's work, engaged with keeping individual and social agency within an occupied territory (Simpson 2011, 11-29), or with generating narratives for a tradition of one's own to explain a world submerged in all the mentioned manifestations of coloniality (Simpson 2013). Under her spotlight, cognitive extractivism stands out as one of many cooptation strategies exercised in the Global North to make otherness look like sameness, erasing in the process any individual and collective identity mark that may diverge from Western-centrist standards (that is, white, Christian, heterosexual, and masculine).
In view of an anglocentric, socioculturally homogeneous discursive regime, and the risk of reproducing extractivist models in scholarship, which lessons can a DH project offer when it is mainly conceived and carried on from the Global South? It is crucial to understand that well-intended projects are not necessarily beneficial to the target community if ethical guidelines or similar tools are not implemented. Making a subject matter discernible while being unaware of its implications on real people is an irresponsible act contributing to the status quo in the geopolitics of knowledgein fact, Rivera Cusicanqui proposes that we rather talk about a political economy of knowledge (2012, 102)-silently legitimating the international distribution of digital labour in the academic world.

The origins and motivations of Concordia University's involvement with PoéticaSonora
There are two main reasons why Concordia University became involved in this project; one is bio-bibliographic, the other subjective. The seed of this project is surely to be found in the courses on sound, literature, and intermediality offered for over 20 years by Susana González Aktories, first in UNAM's National School of Music, where she founded a research group on music and literature, and later in the College of Modern Letters, located at the School of Philosophy and Letters. Nearly every PoéticaSonora participant has taken such courses or has been supervised by her while writing their theses (in Mexico's public educational system, depositing a thesis is usually mandatory for graduation in Liberal Arts, even at the undergraduate level).
My first approach to sound studies and what would later be called "literary audio" was through one these courses, for which I wrote an early version of an essay on Kerouac's jazz recordings that eventually became part of Shuffle: poesía sonora (Meza 2011, 21-43). When I began my Ph.D. in Humanities at Concordia, I was undecided about making a digital version of this book (normalizing information to build a database and adding essential audiovisual material) or rather a large-scale repository for literary audio and sound art, a task I would not be able to manage alone. I asked González Aktories for advice, who had continued mentoring me after graduating from UNAM. At that moment (2015) she was co-organizing a groundbreaking event,

Plataformas de la imaginación: Escenarios de la literatura electrónica en México, along
with María Andrea Giovine, Élika Ortega, Roberto Cruz Arzábal, Cynthia García Leyva, and Ana Cecilia Medina-most of them former students of hers with whom she had also previously founded the Laboratorio de Literaturas Extendidas y Otras Materialidades (LLEOM). When I approached her, González Aktories was committed to dedicating once again her full attention to a twofold topic that has fascinated her for a long time and has driven her most remarkable academic writings: the aural dimension of the word and the materiality of the voice. She invited me and García Leyva as founding graduate student members of PoéticaSonora, and Medina as an undergraduate member, each of us contributing to the project's two main operating axes: activation (organizing performances, exhibitions, and conferences on sound, voice, and legibility) and archiving, mainly focused on building the PSP workflow.
As for the subjective motivations behind this project, in a nutshell, I can say that my participation from a North American university is due to an uncritical submission to coloniality of knowledge. When I first met González Aktories I was doing my BA in English at UNAM, the only program in the country focused solely on Anglophone literature. Studying foreign cultures, immersed in their original language while living in the largest Spanish-speaking metropolis of the world, far from any direct, everyday interaction with English-speaking communities, I suffered from a kind of cultural alienation that I did not perceive as particularly oppressive but instead felt like a privilege. At UNAM's College of Modern Letters, it has never been mandatory that we should go to a country where the language we studied was spoken. However, many alumni did study abroad, both while studying and after graduating, like Raúl Ariza So, the answer to why the collaboration with Concordia was undertaken (or needed) may be that in principle it was not necessary at all, but once the connection with LLEOM and PoéticaSonora was established it had to be critically engaged to avoid the mentioned pitfalls surrounding cultural interaction in academic milieus, both English and Spanish-speaking. Given that compliance to international standards for ICTs like ISO is so widespread in universities across the world, the fact that the PSP is created between Canada and Mexico is merely contingent and does not determine its reason of existence. The prototype might as well have been designed and developed exclusively by UNAM professors and students, but the question remains whether it would have any impact in contemporary DH debates outside Latin America. Indeed, without the participation of Canadian institutions like Concordia and Hexagram we would not have access to much-needed funding which, despite logistic and administrative support from UNAM, is still largely missing in Mexico. Since the project's language of study is mainly Spanish (although not limited to it, for it also includes pieces in English, Spanglish, and Mexican indigenous languages such as Nahuatl, Zapotec, and Tojolabal), it is very likely that its impact in Anglophone academia would have been minimal, particularly if compared with PennSound or UbuWeb, which have greatly inspired PoéticaSonora and have shown us the potential of digital audio repositories.
Integrating a North American university into the project's workflow offered the possibility of essaying new participatory dynamics, seeking to avoid an uncritical cooptation to the political economy of knowledge, and proposing alternatives to extractivist workflows. The aim is to build a locus of enunciation that includes the self-"The self is the One who is not dominated" (Haraway 1991, 177)-within terms that are not their own, out of their comfort zone. For Haraway, a common achievement of feminist theorists Chela Sandoval and Katie King "is learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on appropriation, incorporation and taxonomic identification" (1991,157). This unity by affinity, rather than by identification-a concept carrying a profound colonial heritage (Fuss 1995, 141)raises questions resonating with PoéticaSonora's own path, such as, "What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective-and, ironically, socialistfeminist?" (Haraway 1991, 157). Building a politics/poetics by affinities can be carried out within English speaking academia (and in fact it is), but it might as well come from a compound locus, consisting of different places and temporalities.
By prototyping PoéticaSonora a critical, aesthetic, and political statement is being made. Not only will its implementation make discernible a series of multidisciplinary artistic works in audio format since the 1960s, but also wishes to put those practices in a duly horizontal dialogue with those archived by PennSound and UbuWeb. Of course, a decolonial approach to scholarly research groups (or any other topic, for that matter) does not mean forfeiting every knowledge produced in the context of modernity/coloniality, but rather means understanding the importance of and integrating studies in/from/for the Global South . PoéticaSonora team members have written these relatorías as a means to disseminate our findings during the fieldwork and archival research phase, as well as to help participating institutions evaluate new methods to better classify and preserve such material. In turn, the experiences of undergraduates while exploring these archives and collections have served to find and correct bugs, refine classification criteria and add or remove fields according to the needs they find. These suggestions sometimes have had profound implications. For example, we added an external URL field after feedback from several students pointed that way, a suggestion that allowed us to solve some interoperability problems, as it allows to relate the resource to other unique identifiers, like ORCID, database permalinks, and so on.
The role played by undergraduates is vital both for the PSP and for their development as art or literary critics, a necessary ability for editorialization. It also prepares them, albeit informally, as incoming DH practitioners, showing them how to cope with tools and resources not widely available in the Mexican educational system, despite efforts from several government administrations to bring ICT to public schools. The fact that PoéticaSonora does not directly receive funding other than that already allocated to their members' programs or departments does little to acknowledge the irreplaceable labour made by Servicio Social students. It is clear that, in the big picture, the increasing precarity of academic labour permeates this whole story, but we would not want the benefits of this project for undergraduates to be exclusively in terms of symbolic capital, even if some authors consider accumulation of this type of capital to be one of the most noticeable benefits for Mexican lowincome populations (Mariscal and Martínez 2016, 268).
Regarding PoéticaSonora's positioning towards knowledge democratization, we believe it is important to target the study area as well as the intended users with honesty and modesty. Certainly, ICTs offer modes of distributing knowledge that was unthinkable just a few decades earlier. However, digital literacy is a process heavily burdened by infrastructural differences between the Global North and South, whereas some research in English speaking academia takes findings in a few developed countries as an argument for universality. A good way to test the reach and breadth of an assumption based on infrastructural conditions is to consider similar case studies in areas different from our own (the more contrasting the example, the better). This will hopefully avoid most over-generalizations and will prove a great test for the argument's groundings. Another thing we do at PoéticaSonora to avoid the maquila-like model, as has been said, is sketching the database schema out of findings made during fieldwork in Mexico City, instead of planning everything beforehand and extracting the "necessary" information. This way we ensure that the repository is covering most of the potential users' needs and that we offer necessary tools and background for them to gather relevant information.

Conclusions: towards a Beta version
This article has speculated on the international distribution of digital labour in the context of prototyping an international DH research project. To understand the repository's raison d'être, it was necessary to establish its target audience, even if the PSP mostly focuses on inner workflow rather than end-user interaction. Although it is expected that end-users will have a similar profile to that of PoéticaSonora members (usually affiliated to a university or cultural institution, with a minimum digital literacy), this focus on data entry rather than graphic user interface makes it difficult to evaluate a concern raised by one reviewer, "[outlining] how user preferences will be determined, and how these will drive interface design." Currently, these preferences are limited to the moderator and administrator profiles, who are for the most part Servicio Social undergraduate students performing editorialization tasks.
The only choice they can make so far is switching between the moderator panel, a default interface with limited read/write functions, and the administrator panel (if granted credentials) in which they can edit any piece of information available on the database, whether created by them or not. These two different panels are so meticulously developed that their search bars (one for every important field: author, group, composition, audio track, and series) are more powerful than those available for non-registered users, an issue that will be fixed in a refactoring towards the Beta version.
The same reviewer asked how the recordings should "be made available for the broadest possible utilization, and the most equitable." It has been vital for the project to resolve whether only the recordings' metadata will be publicly available or the dissemination format files as well, and in such case how it will be consulted (via streaming or downloading). These considerations are fundamental not only due to the aforementioned connectivity gaps but also to the copyright and bureaucratic obstacles faced by the PoéticaSonora team during fieldwork and archival research periods.
During the prototyping phase, we did not intend to answer how end-users might access information. Rather, we sought to determine how undergraduate students definitely, coming mostly from modern language and literature programs, could improve their criticism skills working on the project and benefit from technical abilities that, until recently, have not been common in Mexican classrooms. The educational aspect continually proves to be fundamental for the project, and for this reason, we have prepared didactic material (such as user guides and tutorials) to help students reduce the learning curve while working on the PSP. This paper has considered how some current DH debates can benefit from fieldwork carried out by PoéticaSonora. Assumptions on access and participation concerning digital projects in North America were reviewed and contrasted with the ICT penetration rate in Mexico. In order to avoid the conceptual pitfalls of knowledge democratization, I suggest that considering case studies from (sometimes radically) different regions or countries can serve to neutralize most over-generalizations. This led us to consider how to characterize PoéticaSonora's target audience in the most honest, realistic possible way, and to understand how creating this repository is an aesthetic, even political statement, not a passive act of preserving and cataloging.
I also established the project's position towards the geopolitics or political economy of knowledge and paid attention to discussions on cognitive extractivism in the academic milieu. To avoid this conundrum, fieldwork in Mexico City has greatly determined the database design in Montreal and not the other way around, ensuring a more significant impact among target users. On a theoretical-methodological level, there are three things to learn about PoéticaSonora's prototyping process: online access does not equal universal access (not even in developed nations); ethical guidelines must be implemented to ensure target communities benefit from a digital project, and the political dimension of digital labour and its social practices must be brought back to discussion.