My research interests include: Digital Libraries, Digital Humanities, Information Visualization, Genetic Algorithms, and Multidisciplinary/Multicultural Collaboration. I am also interested in information science, and how it can be used for discovery and innovation.
In the early years of my PhD program I was involved with the Cervantes Project directed by Dr. Eduardo Urbina. In this project we apply computational techniques in the analysis of literary works, mainly but not limited to the original surviving copies of the first edition of Cervante's masterpiece Don Quixote.
A couple of years later, during a research presentation, Dr. Enrique Mallen—from the now Hispanic Studies Department—showed interest in the possibility of using some of our tools and techniques in a digital collection of artworks of Pablo Picasso. The initial idea led eventually to a collaborative effort with the On-line Picasso Project, a comprehensive digital catalog of Picasso's artistic creation along an extensive historical narrative of his life. My interest in this projects is to study how technology can help art critics and historians in studying the artistic creation and life of an artist.
Our participation in joint projects involving literary works, historical narratives, and collections of images, drew the attention of Dr. Gary Stringer from the English Department and a John Donne's scholar. After numerous discussions and ideas, a collection of Donne's poems published in 1633 saw the light in the cyberspace; the Digital Donne had just been established.
Late in 2004, after a casual conversation with my friend Wendy van Duivenvoorde—a PhD student in Nautical Archaeology at that time—I got interested in exploring the possibility of applying some of the computing techniques we have developed in our digital library research projects to Nautical Archaeology. In conjunction with Drs. Filipe Castro (Nautical Archaeology) and Richard Furuta (Computer Science), we obtained a NSF research grant for our project, thus the Nautical Archaeology Digital Library was born.
My dissertation work entitled "A Digital Library Approach in the Reconstruction of Ancient Sunken Ships," aims at developing a computer-based framework to be used by nautical archaeologists in the reconstruction of ancient sunken ships; a task that can be seen as an incomplete jigsaw reconstruction problem. In a broader sense, my interest in this area is twofold; on the one hand, how a computational approach can enhance the process of reconstructing a composite object (ship) from fragmented, incomplete, and damaged pieces (timbers and ship remains). And on the other, how supporting materials (shipbuilding treatises, historical narratives, and other excavations' findings) have to be structured, organized, segmented, indexed, and integrated in order to be useful for nautical archaeologists.
An adventure that started with a writer (Cervantes), shifted toward an artist (Picasso), encountered a poet (John Donne), and eventually made me board a ship (Nautical Archaeology), has been a fascinating research journey for me. I am thrilled to see what might the next encounter be; until then, as people during the Age of Exploration uttered sailors before sailing—to quite often treacherous and unknown seas—"buen viento y buena mar" (good wind and good sea).