Interviewed and written by Helen Wu
Arturo Victoriano-Martinez.
When Ramón (Arturo) Antonio Victoriano-Martinez was researching 1960s novels and poetry books in the Dominican Republic, he visited second-hand bookstores that specialized in old editions. In a garage bookstore on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, he stumbled upon a stack of aging newspapers—an unexpected discovery that sparked a major project: the Unión Cívica archive.
The newspaper Unión Cívica was published during a critical period in Dominican history—the years following the 1961 assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo. The political movement behind the publication played a key role in shaping the country’s democratic transition. Yet, copies of the newspaper are exceedingly rare, largely absent from both libraries and archives in the Dominican Republic.
“It was very difficult to get printed copies because it didn’t circulate much and was not reprinted,” said Arturo. “When the owner of the bookstore asked me if I wanted it, I jumped on it. We went through the whole process of fumigating and binding them, and I used part of my funding to bring them to Vancouver.”
Over the past months, Arturo, an assistant professor of Spanish at the Department of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies at UBC, has been archiving the newspaper alongside Zohra Faqiri, a graduate student of Archival Studies and Library Information Studies. Together, they’re digitizing and preserving these rare publications to make Dominican political history accessible to the world.
Assisting with the technical side of the project at UBC’s Digitization Centre, Faqiri used a Tarsia Technical Industries (TTI) machine. The process involves taking the newspapers, putting them on the TTI machine, adjusting the camera settings to capture the clearest view, setting up LED lights to evenly illuminate the item, and saving the images in TIFF format.
“We import them to Photoshop to clean up the edges and fix any other image issues,” said Zohra. “The images are processed onto the content manager that uploads them to UBC Open Collections. We’re also creating metadata using Dublin Core with publisher name, dates, and notes such as ‘the copy is badly damaged.’ Running optical character recognition (OCR) is another part of the process, which makes it easier to search the newspaper by text.”
Figure 1. Zohra Faqiri using TTI machine to capture images of the newspaper.
Looking ahead, Faqiri and Arturo anticipate a growing role for artificial intelligence (AI) in digital scholarship. As OCR enables pattern recognition, AI could help accelerate the transcription of digitized texts. “There’s this whole thing of distant learning, using machines to read a huge amount of data,” said Arturo. “For this newspaper project, it might be beneficial to have AI do some distant reading and see what results it produces.”
At the heart of the Unión Cívica project lies a commitment to open access and preservation. For Arturo, digitization is not only about archiving—it’s also about protecting physical materials and enabling digital knowledge-sharing.
“These physical books are very fragile. The materials I brought from the Dominican Republic were damaged by humidity,” said Arturo, who also emphasized accessibility. “If we can make digitized books more accessible, we are opening lines of inquiry. Scholars and researchers don’t have to go all the way to the Dominican Republic or search for it like I did!”
Faqiri echoed this comment, reflecting on her own experience. “When I was doing my history MA, I’d have a topic I wanted to research, but the items were in a physical archive far away and not available digitally. So, I moved on to a different topic that was more accessible for me. Having it available digitally opens it up to people who can’t physically go somewhere.”
And this is just the beginning. Arturo is already eyeing a new project: digitizing a collection of 1970s Dominican magazines, in 13 three-inch binders containing approximately 700 pages. “Some of the magazines have already been digitized,” he said, “but the servers at the institution where they are held are not reliable. So I’ve been acquiring these old issues. It’s a lot of work—they’re printed on acidic 1970s paper.”
Faqiri added that UBC’s Digitization Centre is well-equipped for such tasks. In addition to guiding researchers through copyright considerations and evaluating the scholarly value and feasibility of digitization, the Digitization Centre also offers specialized scanners designed to handle delicate, acidic materials like those in Arturo’s collection.
As the project continues, Unión Cívica stands as a powerful—but far from the only—example of how digital scholarship can preserve and shed light on overlooked histories. What began as a chance find in a garage bookstore has become an open resource for research that spans generations and continents. More of the Dominican Republic’s cultural memory may soon find a permanent, searchable home online.