Hi! I am a bilingual digital publishing and product professional with
several years of experience spanning scholarly publication production,
K-12 educational materials, and fiction books. I am specialized in
designing, managing, and developing workflows for transmedia content
production. I thrive in ambiguity, in environments that involve
reimagining how operations work and testing new technologies. I enjoy
programming with Python and making functional prototypes as much
as I enjoy reading philosophy and writing essays and short stories.
Archivo de la Palabra
Perform a full-text search of the Mexican Academy of Language’s
Spanish corpus. I made the system and product design.
#visit#git
Women Deprived of Freedom
Read and listen to the poetry of incarcerated women. I made the
web, book and cover design.
#visit#git
A Larger Reality
Play or read English-Spanish transmedia sci-fi stories. I made
the website and the text-based video game.
#visit#git
My Digital Corner
Check out this hacked tablet for kids featuring media and video
games, with harmful sites blocked. I made the proof of concept.
#git
Palabrertijos
Practice your French with this flashcard app I created for my
French exam. I made the app.
#visit#git
Nieve de Chamoy
Watch my first steps in cross-media product design and
creation. I was a co-founder of this independent publishing
company.
#visit
Education
M.A., Philosophy, The Creator and the Created (Spanish) National Autonomous University of Mexico
August 2017 – May 2022
Mexico City
Intellectual property · Commons · Free and open source software ·
Authorship
B.A., Philosophy, The Founding and Settlement of Colima (Spanish) University of Colima
August 2007 – October 2011
Colima, Mexico
Hermeneutics · Historiography · Philosophy of history · Regional history
National Endowment for Culture and Arts Mexican Federal Government
May 2022
Master Research with Honorific Mention National Autonomous University of Mexico
May 2022
Stimulus Program for Artistic Creation and Development ColimaState Government
February 2022
Peña Colorada Award for Valedictory Honors University of Colima
November 2011
Case Study
Archivo de la Palabra
Full-text search Spanish corpus built with Django and Python.
Overview
Members of the Mexican Academy of Language and target
users.
The Mexican Academy of Language is the correspondent
academy in Mexico of the Royal Spanish Academy. Like the
other member academies, its principal function is to
ensure the proper usage of the Spanish language. Archivo
de la Palabra is one of its projects, and its objective
is to offer an open-access Spanish corpus platform for
academics and researchers.
My role began as a consultant and instructor. Over time
I was brought on to design their XML Schema, and
eventually became the lead designer and developer of
their platform.
Search engineComputational linguisticsOpen Access
Requirements
Metadata and document management
Enabling the ability to add, remove, and edit documents and
their metadata within the platform.
Easy to use for everyone
Reducing the conventional cognitive load found in linguistic
everyday tools.
Minimalistic by design
Prioritizing functionality without sacrificing aesthetics.
XML workflow
Validating, tokenizing, and indexing XML files seamlessly
into the corpus.
Process
01 – CQPweb & FreeLing Trials
The user wanted to use
CQPweb
as the front end and
CWB
as a corpus search engine. During the trials, we
discovered that CQPweb lacked metadata and document
management support, and its UI/UX design made the
platform difficult to use or customize. The user also
wanted to use
FreeLing
for natural language processing (NLP). Unfortunately,
during our trial, we found that FreeLing’s development
had stalled and its APIs were outdated or
non-functional.
02 – DjangoCWB Development
Under these circumstances, I proposed developing a
Django CMS platform to replace CQPweb while keeping CWB
as the corpora engine. For NLP tasks, I suggested using
spaCy or
NLTK. Since Django is a Python framework and spaCy and NLTK
are Python packages, they share a common language across
the front-end, document management, and corpora search,
reducing the skills required for future devs.
03 – DjangoCWB System Design
To allow more flexibility when managing documents, I
designed DjangoCWB around three main objects: corpora,
locales, and documents. With this structure, every
document is assigned to one locale, enabling a
multilingual corpus, and to one or more corpora,
avoiding duplication and allowing different document
metadata per corpus.
04 – Linguistic Data Display
In all the corpora platforms we reviewed, linguistic
data wasn’t present in the interface and users were
expected to already know where to find it. To address
this UX issue, I designed modal windows that display the
data and allow users to apply it directly to their
search in just one click.
05 – Query Made Simple (in progress)
CWB has its query language,
CQP, with a 76-page manual. Due to copyright concerns,
most of this language can’t be used in DjangoCWB, and
yet it still has a steep learning curve, requiring
constant instruction for users to find the linguistic
data they need. For these reasons, I am currently
designing a query interface similar to
GitLab’s work items search bar
(prototype) where users can easily select the type of tokens they
are looking for, without needing to learn CQP syntax.
06 – Markup Made Simple (in progress)
XML markup also has a steep learning curve that has
prevented the markup team from producing more documents
and training new personnel efficiently. Taking advantage
of the fact that markup is for documents, I am currently
working with the markup team so they can create valid
XML files without knowing XML at all, using
Editor.js
as a visual editor instead (prototype).
Outcome
Search result in DjangoCWB.
The platform has been
live
since 2026 as a minimum viable product. Thanks to the
results, we were granted additional funding that allowed
us to hire a software engineer. Currently, in my spare
time, I focus on the design while leading the engineer
towards better performance, deployment, and
maintainability. This year, the objective is to finish
the products in progress and design a user panel. In the
medium to long term, the Mexican Academy of Language
plans to offer the platform to other academies as a path
toward the self-sustainability of Archivo de la Palabra.
Through this project, I was able to design every aspect
of a digital product while learning about systems
design, user-centered design, object-oriented
programming, and computational linguistics.
