Patricio Arriagada is a Chilean Linguist and Ph.D. candidate in Spanish at the University of Virginia, and his work bridges contemporary Hispanic literary studies, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. His research focuses on Southern Cone literature and climate change. At the same time, he develops computational approaches to literary and media analysis through text analysis, named entity recognition, GIS mapping, and digital storytelling.
He is currently writing his doctoral thesis titled “Literary Cartographies of the Anthropocene: 21st-Century Narratives and Poetry on Climate Change and Solastalgia in the Southern Cone of South America,” a project that combines close reading with tools such as Voyant Tools, named entity recognition (NER) workflows, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and network-oriented digital methods. This hybrid methodology reflects a broader professional profile: Patricio creates digital research workflows without losing the interpretive rigor of an academic trained in Hispanic literature.
Before and during his doctoral studies, he helped develop the Spanish-language NER system POL, co-authoring the article “POL: a new system for the detection and classification of proper nouns” (Natural Language Processing Journal, 2017) and contributing to computational research on Spanish text processing. He has also created public-facing digital projects such as “Las invenciones de Chile durante el período colonial” (2022). This ArcGIS StoryMaps project demonstrates his interest in spatial humanities, cartography, and accessible scholarly communication.
In addition to his research work, Patricio has taught Spanish courses at the University of Virginia and the University of Wyoming, designed both in-person and online teaching programs, and provided support to students with a wide variety of learning needs. His background highlights a professional identity that is increasingly valued in both academic and public engagement settings: a bilingual humanities researcher capable of teaching, conducting research, designing digital projects, and adapting computational methods for humanists.