Drawing on the Brazilian and Latin American tradition of periferia (periphery), including the literary and artistic movements associated with literatura periférica (peripheral literature), this seminar explores how digital humanities can be rethought through the perspectives, epistemologies, and cultural production of historically peripheral spaces. Bringing comparative literature into dialogue with critical, decolonial, and global digital humanities, it examines how periferia offers a theoretical lens for studying literary and cultural production beyond dominant archives, institutions, infrastructures, and centers of cultural authority.

In Brazil, periferia refers to more than urban outskirts: it is a social and cultural formation shaped by racialized inequality, uneven urban development, and economic exclusion, while also serving as a site of literary innovation, community knowledge, and political activism. Rather than treating the periphery as marginality alone, this seminar approaches it as a generative site of cultural production and critical knowledge.

Building on work in critical, decolonial, and global digital humanities, the seminar asks how digital humanities changes when its objects of study are peripheral archives, community-based cultural production, multilingual corpora, and historically underrepresented literary traditions. Rather than extending existing methods to new archives, participants are invited to consider how the periphery reorients debates on digital methods, archives, literary value, and the production of knowledge through sustainable and community-centered approaches such as minimal computing.

Grounded in the Brazilian tradition of periferia while using it as a comparative lens rather than a universal model, the seminar welcomes conversations across Afro-diasporic and Indigenous communities, borderlands, informal settlements, postcolonial cities, migrant communities, and other marginalized contexts. Rather than assuming equivalence, it places these contexts into dialogue through shared questions of cultural production, spatial inequality, digital infrastructures, translation, archives, and literary circulation.

Possible topics include:

• Peripheral literary movements and cultural production
• Community archives and digital preservation
• Computational analysis of marginalized corpora
• GIS, spatial humanities, and cultural mapping
• Literary circulation, translation, and multilingual corpora
• Platform studies and digital literary cultures
• AI and peripheral cultural production
• Digital infrastructures, accessibility, and minimal computing
• Indigenous, Afro-diasporic, and decolonial digital humanities

By foregrounding the periphery as a site of knowledge production, this seminar argues that peripheral literary and cultural traditions not only expand the archive of digital humanities but also challenge its assumptions about what constitutes an archive, whose knowledge becomes digitally legible, and how digital methods are conceived.