The Archives, Memory, and Preservation Lab (AMPL) is a digital humanities lab at UCSB's Center for Latin American and Iberian Research. We work with archives, libraries, and communities in Latin America and the United States to preserve historical materials and make them available to the people who need them. Undergraduates take part in every stage of this work, and we recruit at all levels of experience.
Interested in archives, memory, or historical preservation? Work with a collection you'd like to help protect, or share with new audiences? Get in touch! We're always looking for opportunities to collaborate.
AMPL is always looking for interested and motivated undergraduates to join the team. Undergraduates have the opportunity to be involved in all aspects of our research, including archival digitization and description, the development and testing of tools and methods, the production of public-facing narratives, and even helping formulate new research questions. Research assistants are expected to work approximately 3–6 hours per week in the lab (or remotely, depending on the project), including a weekly lab meeting, and can receive course credit. For some projects we require a two-quarter commitment. Roles are also listed on the URCA Undergraduate Research Directory.
Have you ever wanted to read a document written more than four hundred years ago, such as a will, a lawsuit, or a petition, in the hand of the person who wrote it?
Want hands-on experience with real historical collections? At AMPL you will handle, digitize, and catalog newspapers, photographs, and personal papers from Latin America and the United States, alongside the communities and organizations whose histories they hold.
How do you bring a four-hundred-year-old document to life for people who have never seen one?
Put your paleography to work. Once you can read colonial Spanish manuscripts in our paleography reading group, you can help catalog documents that have not been described since they were written, and train the machine-learning models that will make whole archives searchable.
Want to help a community preserve its own history? With Professor Jorge Ramirez-Lopez (Global Studies), we are digitizing and describing two collections that document the political organizing of Indigenous migrants from Oaxaca, Mexico.