With the cancellation of our 2020 conference, we lost the opportunity to meet and connect in person, but FLDH is finding new ways to share our stories across the state. Join us for our Digital Humanities in the Sunshine State (and beyond!) 2020-2021 Webinar Series. Registration for the Spring webinars is now open on the FLDH website. Can’t attend? The webinars will be recorded and available on the FLDH YouTube channel.

Digital Humanities in the Sunshine State (and beyond) 2020-2021 Webinar Series.

3D Digital Literacy: Digital Cultural Heritage as Pedagogy 

Friday, January 29, 2 p.m. 

Matthew Hunter, Digital Scholarship Librarian, Florida State University

The broadly-defined field of “digital cultural heritage” has utilized emerging technologies such as virtual reality and 3D printing to increase access to aspects of our shared human past. Pedagogically, these technologies are often used to present virtual “tourism” where participants can “visit” reconstructed spaces or interact with 3D printed replicas of otherwise inaccessible artefacts. However, these experiences sometimes concede veracity for the sake of usability, and users are often not equipped to critically engage with the choices developers made in creating these experiences. As with many digital projects, the creation of these virtual experiences are exercises in curatorial decision, and the 3D rendering of these spaces often introduces at least some error from either automated computer generation or human artistic choice in hand-correcting of models. 

Digital Humanities’ pedagogical efforts in the realm of data literacy, information literacy, and visual literacy represent one approach to attempting to correct the uncritical reception of these materials. To that end, he has begun to focus on developing methods for engaging students in the critical examination of immersive and 3D-generated cultural heritage materials. 

In this session Matthew will outline his experiences teaching student interns of vastly different levels of technological and humanities experience to engage with cultural heritage objects in digitally-constructed formats through creation and critique in three particular areas: virtual reality, 3D printing, and virtual soundscapes. 

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coloniaLab: Digital Editing with Students at UNF

Friday, February 5, 2 p.m. 

Clayton McCarl, Associate Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities, University of North Florida; Carol Lynne Hemmingway, History/Spanish major, University of North Florida; Emilia Thom, Exercise Science/Spanish major, University of North Florida; Georgina Wilson, Spanish major, University of North Florida; & Alexandra Zapata, Criminal Justice/Spanish major, University of North Florida. 

coloniaLab is a workshop for the collaborative digital editing of materials related to early Latin America, directed by Dr. Clayton McCarl at the University of North Florida. This webinar will feature Dr. McCarl and four of coloniaLab’s student collaborators, who will discuss projects related to colonial-era Florida and nineteenth-century Colombia. Emilia Thom will share her edition of a series of dispatches from St. Augustine to Madrid regarding relations between the Spanish colonists and Indigenous groups. Georgina Wilson will present her work with a map and several archival documents related Fort St. Nicholas, a Spanish fortification that was located on the St. John’s river in present-day Jacksonville. Alexandra Zapata will explain her work on a slave census conducted in the Antioquia region of Colombia in the 1840s. Carol Lynne Hemmingway will discuss her edition of a manuscript by Colombian author Soledad Acosta de Samper. The students will reflect on what they have learned through these projects, and how their involvement may shape their future academic and professional plans.

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Modelling Strong Governance and Un-Colonized Mutual Aid to Uplift Diversity and Inclusivity:  Fostering our Inescapable Network of Mutuality with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) 

Friday, February 12, 2 p.m. 

Laurie N. Taylor, PhD., Senior Director for Library Technology & Digital Strategies, University of Florida, & Brian W. Keith, MBA, Associate Dean for Administration and Faculty Affairs at the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida. 

Power inequities have allowed even well-intended museums and libraries to disrupt people’s knowledge of and access to cultural heritage. Libraries and museums were allies in or at least instruments of the political and legal dominance of one culture over others.  Alternative or mitigative models to this colonization have emerged in response: decolonizing, postcolonial, postcustodial, and slow archives.  This presentation discusses a new alternative model based on the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), which incorporates tenants of shared governance, mutual aid, generous thinking, community building, polycentrism, collaborative pluralism, and mutual dependency.  dLOC is an open access digital library of Caribbean and circum-Caribbean resources, providing access and preservation for materials from archives, libraries, museums, and private collections. Partner institutions are dLOC’s heart, connecting other core communities of scholars, teachers, students and other groups. dLOC exemplifies a transnational digital collaborative community serving diverse populations and under-represented voices, and promoting bridge building, intersectionality, and inclusion.  This session examines dLOC’s robust governance model which created an un-colonized digital library that uplifts diversity, equity, and inclusion. Partners support each other and their international community of scholars, students, and peoples. dLOC surpasses many commercial collections, including oral histories, newspapers, official documents, ecological and economic data, maps, histories, literature, poetry, musical expressions, videos, and artifacts, with over 3.3 million pages.  A significant resource for teaching, research, and cultural and community life, dLOC developed as a socio-technical—people, policies, communities, technologies—platform, developing and enhancing communities of practice through shared goals, joint action and procedural justice. 

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Funding Digital Projects: The View from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Friday, February 19, 2 p.m. 

Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Program Specialist in the NEH Office of Digital Humanities

The National Endowment for the Humanities has been funding digital research since its foundation in 1965, and today offers more than fifteen programs that can support digital research, teaching, and publication. In this presentation I will speak about the history and state of the field for DH funding, and offer insight into the application process at the NEH.

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The Who, What, Where, When, but Mostly Why of Faculty Publishing on Their Own Domain

Friday, February 26, 2 p.m.

Andy Rush, Course Media Developer for the Center for Instruction and Research Technology (CIRT), University of North Florida

This is a story about the University of North Florida’s implementation of a “Domain of One’s Own”. The Who is you, and the What is easy – a faculty domain is an opportunity to create academic publishing spaces using modern web applications such as WordPress and Omeka. There is no question of should, of course you should. But it’s more a question of Where, and dare we ask Why? A faculty domain can function as a hub for a professional scholarly presence. The service provides for common needs such as book websites, portfolios, and podcasts. It is a gift to you. It’s a sandbox and permission to play in it. And while the Center for Instruction and Research Technology (CIRT) at UNF completely supports faculty in making the “perfect” website, we also advocate for exploring the possibilities of free and open source tools. We want envelopes pushed. Heck, we will even encourage the breaking of things. And we’ll say “Good, you broke it.”

We see a faculty domain as a logical home for Digital Humanities projects, because it’s a space where you have total control and ownership. It’s a place where you manage your digital identity, and share your research, share your book, and share YOUR story. We see a Domain as part of a community of practice focused on collaboration and sharing. Come learn about Why you need your own domain. The When is Now!

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Making Digital Humanities Tools Part of a World Language Class

Friday, March 5, 2 p.m. 

Eugenia Charoni, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages, Flagler College, Maguire Maria Jose, Assistant Professor of Spanish, Flagler College, & Juliet Frey, Flagler College student

In this panel the presenters are professors and a student who worked together to integrate two digital tools, the Social Book and ArcGis Story Maps, in two foreign language classes. Because of the increasing interest in Digital Humanities and the way this approach disseminates knowledge in an effortless way while it connects language learners inside and outside the classroom, the professors incorporated into course assignments these two digital tools. Their objective was to engage students in reading discussions inside and outside the classroom, motivate them to conduct research and present their findings in an interactive way and after all use the target language in a meaningful yet productive way.

There will be two presentations, one from the professors and one from a student. The professors will explain the importance of language learning with the use of digital tools and share their practical approach in the classroom. The student will share their experience working with digital tools for the first time and will walk us through their projects.  

Register for this webinar here. 

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Novel Strategies and Challenges for the Johnson’s Dictionary

Friday, March 12, 2 p.m. 

Beth Rapp Young, Associate Professor of English, University of Central Florida; Abigail Moreshead, Texts & Technology PhD. student, University of Central Florida; Carmen Faye Mathes, Assistant Professor, University of Regina; William Dorner, PhD., Instructional Specialist, University of Central Florida; Amy Larner Giroux, PhD., Associate Director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, University of Central Florida; & Connie Harper, Software Developer, University of Central Florida;

When Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755, it swiftly became the language’s most influential dictionary, and this dictionary is still widely used. For all its importance, though, the lack of an
authoritative text and usable interface have made this resource more difficult to use than it should be. 

Our three‐year Johnson’s Dictionary Online project, funded by the NEH, seeks to remedy this problem by creating an online, searchable edition of this Dictionary (including both 1st [1755] and 4th [1773] folio print editions) with functionality comparable to other modern, scholarly dictionaries. Nine months in, we have accomplished a great deal, but we have encountered some important challenges. Our panel will describe these challenges and explain how we are working through them. We hope attendees might learn from our experiences—and we hope to learn from theirs.

Register for this webinar here.