Global Digital Networking in Spanish. The COMUN-ES Platform

COMUN-ES is the first platform designed to foster collaboration among researchers on Spanish language. Its creation came at a key moment: just before the COVID-19 pandemic, which in 2020 caused 90% of educational contexts to stop face-to-face classes and switch to the virtual mode (UNESCO, 2020). This had concrete implications for teaching, but it also impacted the field of research. It meant the cancellation of events, scientific meetings, and congresses that were unique settings to meet other researchers and implied the transfer of these discussion forums to the virtual environment (Gironzetti, Lacorte & Muñoz-Basols, 2020). If we learned anything from this experience, it is that, despite mobility restrictions, it is possible to develop digital networking and collaborate with researchers from all over the world.

The idea of COMUN-ES or “Spanish in common”, which is the same, came up during a residence I made in 2017, after obtaining a competitive scholarship USAL en red (University of Salamanca’s Network) for international researchers at the International Center for the Spanish Language of the University of Salamanca.

Talking with Carmen Fernández Juncal, from the School of Philology, who was at the time director of the center and co-principal researcher of the project, we realized the need to support research being generated around Hispanic language and cultures, and that there was no common global space for Hispanism as an epistemic community (Fernández Juncal, Ghezzi & Hernández Muñoz, 2021). In other words, the increasing interest in the Hispanic language, literatures, and cultures in recent decades should be supported by the creation of synergies between Hispanists around the world.

So, COMUN-ES was created with the aim of unifying and gathering in the same space people who use the Spanish language as a raw material, to create a virtual community and to vindicate the role of Spanish as a language for science and knowledge. We have been working on this digital humanities project since that moment, creating a meeting place for the three main axis of today’s Hispanism: a) literature and cultural studies, b) Hispanic linguistics, and c) Teaching Spanish.

COMUN-ES seeks to unify in the same space people who use Spanish as a raw material, to create a virtual community and to vindicate the role of Spanish as a language for science and knowledge

Teams from the universities of Salamanca and Oxford have collaborated over the past four years in the planning and development of the platform. Support from the International Center for the Spanish Language of the University of Salamanca, from the Spanish School of the University of Oxford, and from two Hispanex grants for the promotion of language and culture abroad, from Spanish Government’s Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport, have been decisive in carrying out the project. In addition to the teams from Salamanca (principal co-researcher Carmen Fernández Juncal and Natividad Hernández Muñoz, Maddalena Ghezzi, María Nieves Sánchez González de Herrero, and Jesús Fernández González) and Oxford (principal co-researcher Javier Muñoz-Basols, with Jonathan Thacker, Enrique del Rey Cabero, Laura Acosta-Ortega, and Daniel Cabeza-Campillo), we have researchers from four delegated universities, strategically selected for their research tradition on Hispanic language and cultures, and for being located in key areas of influence for Hispanic studies: Cairo University (Middle East and Africa; Doaa Samy), the University of Hong Kong (Asia and Oceania; Rocío Blasco and Mercedes Vázquez), the University of Maryland (United States and Canada; Manel Lacorte and Elisa Gironzetti), and the National Autonomous University of Mexico and its network of Centers for Mexican Studies around the world (Latin America; Andrés Ordóñez, from UNAM-Spain, and Ana Elena González Treviño, from UNAM-UK). 

Spanish as a Science and Knowledge Language 
We are not aware of a virtual community for researchers of any other language. Among the objectives of COMUN-ES is the idea of eliminating the so-called impostor syndrome, which has fostered the belief that there is not much research in humanities because specialists do not work in laboratories, wear white coats, or invent vaccines. Research in humanities is one of the fundamental pillars of any society and is equally important for its contribution to linguistic, cultural, educational, and, especially today, artificial intelligence. For COMUN-ES it is essential that each Hispanist registers on the platform, as it is an opportunity to place each researcher on the map of Spanish language research. Through this visibility, the aim is to empower the profession (Gironzetti and Muñoz-Basols, 2022), and to seek mechanisms that create a joint working space for research. In this sense, the creation of the COMUN-ES platform is allowing the identification of talent and the creation of transdisciplinary work teams that bring together diverse experiences and enable research to be carried out regarding language. 

Working with Spanish involves using the language as a true raw material: designing speech recognition devices, creating automatic translators, language proofreaders and digital content, developing literacy programs, online teaching of language and literature, or the important work of appreciating the diversity of our language or the development of cultural industries.

These are just a few examples of the importance of language research and how it is increasingly closely related to artificial intelligence, an area that is already an intrinsic part of our lives and ways of working. COMUN-ES is here to reclaim this space, to give a voice to researchers and to ensure that conversations about this science (research on literature, culture and language) take place in Spanish. 

Connect, Share, and Collaborate with Researchers around the World 
COMUN-ES’ philosophy and, therefore, current research needs can be summarized in three key actions: connect, share, and collaborate. 

• Connect: It is essential to contact other researchers to foster a global dialogue on research in Spanish.
• Share: We live in the era of shared knowledge and we must take advantage of this opportunity to share ideas and information.
• Collaborate: After connecting and sharing, the next step is for collaborations to emerge, from co-authoring an academic paper to implementing international research projects on language.

More than 1250 researchers from all five continents have already joined the platform.

As can be seen in the map, one of the most interesting parts of COMUN-ES is to see interest in Spanish in very distant places and with such different traditions around Spanish, such as Germany, Australia, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Singapore, or Thailand.

The platform is helping to show the evolution of Spanish language research worldwide, including more traditional regions such as Europe and the Americas, to emerging contexts such as Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Registering in COMUN-ES means placing oneself on the map of research on Spanish.

COMUN-ES’ Role on Spanish Language Research
COMUN-ES is presented, then, as a tool designed to facilitate the work of any researcher and to form a global digital networking space. In addition to giving visibility to scientific research and to researchers’ profiles and interests, the platform has six main objectives, all of them related to the course that research on Spanish should take in the immediate future: 

1. To link researchers around the world in the era of shared knowledge and open science. 
2. To contribute to giving visibility to research on Hispanic language and cultures, and, thus, to enhance its value. 
3. To encourage the discovery of knowledge and new areas of research. 
4. To promote the implementation of international projects related to language, as a showcase to disseminate information and obtain a complete picture of global Hispanism, and to identify language research needs. 
5. To vindicate the role of Spanish as a language for knowledge: more research on Spanish and in Spanish. 
6. To generate a positive and global social impact: not only to transform Hispanism as we understand it today but also to create synergies between its different fields to join forces regarding language as a raw material. 

Comun-es recommends the creation of communication networks among researchers at all levels

All these purposes are aligned with the proposal of the Ibero-American General Secretariat (2022) Workin Group, which has begun to design lines of action to promote the visibility of Ibero-American science. This group recommends the creation of communication networks among researchers at all levels, the transfer of research results to generate economic, social, and cultural impact, the transmission and dissemination of scientific knowledge, and that scientific communication among scholars should make use of languages such as Spanish and Portuguese.

We hope that this initiative will contribute to fostering the creation of collaborative networks around the language and to vindicate the role of Spanish as a language for science and knowledge in the 21^st Century.

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