Ramiro Santa Ana Anguiano
Publisher & Designer
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.
My Digital Corner
Palabrertijos
Nieve de Chamoy
M.A., Philosophy, The
Creator and the Created
(Spanish)
National Autonomous University of Mexico
August 2017 – May 2022
Mexico City
Philosophy of culture · Intellectual property · Commons · Authorship
B.A., Philosophy, The
Founding and Settlement of Colima
(Spanish)
University of Colima
August 2007 – October 2011
Colima, Mexico
Philosophy of history · Hermeneutics · Historiography · Regional
history
Introduction
to Web Accessibility
World Wide Web Consortium
August 2026
Introduction
to Python Programming
The Georgia Institute of Technology
June 2026
Accessible
Publishing Concepts for Publishers
World Intellectual Property Organization
June 2025
Copyright
and Related Rights
World Intellectual Property Organization
July 2016
General
Course on Intellectual Property
World Intellectual Property Organization
February 2016
Copyright
With a Focus on the Digital Media Landscape
Universidad del Noreste
October 2016
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
Colima
State 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.
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.