Michelle Brannen, University of Tennessee (Knoxville)
Sharing and enriching research through media and design: Tales from the Studio
The Studio in the University of Tennessee Libraries was created in 2001 as a media and design lab. In our short history we have witnessed communication and web technologies transform our society, empowering the average person to become recording artists, film directors, designers, and knowledge creators. We are living in a time that could be considered a renaissance for the communication of information. Today, we see criminology students curating image collections, nutrition students using GIS to study food scarcity, English students creating social media video campaigns, nursing students creating podcasts to share research with rural communities, and graphic design students creating virtual reality games. In this poster we’ll demonstrate some of the ways our library supports the creation of knowledge across disciplines by sharing the range of services we offer while showcasing a selection of real class projects that utilize our resources.
Kayla Campana, University of Central Florida
Nursing Narratives: Mapping Nurses’ Convalescent Homes and Rest Clubs from the First World War
I am proposing a poster presentation on my current digital mapping project, “Nursing Narratives: Mapping Nurses’ Convalescent Homes and Rest Clubs from the First World War.” My project utilizes a primary source base of personal papers, official war documents, and photographs to map and visualize nurses’ convalescent homes and rest clubs from the First World War. The goal of this project is to utilize the visualization of the map to tell the narratives of nurses who entered these facilities as patients, women who worked in the facilities, and the women who worked to open and fund these facilities. This project takes these micro narratives and examines them in a macro perspective centering on nurses from the First World War, nurses’ physical and mental health, and philanthropy during and shortly after the First World War.
Cindy Craig and Colleen Seale, University of Florida
Striking Gold: Using Free Text Mining Tools to Explore Women’s and Gender Studies Literature
This poster will introduce several freely available tools for text mining women’s and gender studies literature that can be used by librarians and other scholars to explore new avenues of research. Text mining allows researchers to analyze large quantities of text pulled from repositories of literature, including digitized books, journals, magazines, manuscripts, and transcripts from television and movies. Digital Humanities scholars can use these tools to enhance thematic analysis, to explore the evolution of discipline-specific terminology over time, to track cultural trends, and to find unexpected relationships among concepts. Text mining tools in this review will include Google Books Ngram Viewer (as well as instances of this tool, such as bookworm: HathiTrust and Robots Reading Vogue), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and JSTOR Data for Research. This poster will provide an overview of the features of each tool as well as visual examples of how each one can be applied to women’s and gender studies research. Beyond the poster, additional corpora, a bibliography, a selected glossary of terms and other published text mining examples may be found here: http://guides.uflib.ufl.edu/tmtools
Buddy Delegal, University of Florida, Mariana Mendieta, Amarilys Sánchez, Emilia Thom, Teri Wilson, University of North Florida
coloniaLab: Update on Editorial Projects Involving Texts from Early Latin America
coloniaLab is a workshop for the collaborative digital editing of materials related to colonial Latin America, directed by Dr. Clayton McCarl at the University of North Florida. At this presentation, five current student and alumni collaborators will discuss their work on editorial experiments involving manuscript and rare print materials. Their presentations will address the following coloniaLab projects: Antioquia Negra Digital Archive (colonialab.org/anda), Compendio histórico (colonialab.org/ch1799), and two small–scale experiments: a digital edition of selections of the Historia general of Bernardino de Sahagún, and an attempt at visualizing the chronological and spatial aspects of the Naufragios of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Participants will also reflect upon ways that their involvement with coloniaLab has shaped their academic and professional plans.
Gabriella Domínguez-Ramos, Michelle Noda López, Laura Rodríguez, Georgina Wilson, University of North Florida
Voces y Caras: Hispanic Communities of North Florida
Voces y Caras: Hispanic Communities of North Florida (vocesycaras.unfdhi.org) is an ongoing digital oral history project at the University of North Florida that engages heritage speakers of Spanish in developing questions and recording interviews with members of the growing Hispanic/Latinx community. The project explores the power of people’s stories, seeks to make visible hidden communities, and enables processes of self-discovery by students of Hispanic/Latinx origin in the U.S. Led by Dr. Constanza López, Voces y Caras is an affiliated project of the UNF Digital Humanities Institute. Since 2012, the project has involved 166 student collaborators, whose work is archived on the project’s website. At this presentation, four students will discuss their involvement with Voces y Caras, and reflect upon what this project means for student participants and for Hispanic/Latinx communities in North Florida.
Nicole Green, University of Florida
Teaching History of Education through Digital Humanities: Using 19th Century Textbooks to Map Current Issues in Education
The rise of the common school, the precursor to the public school, catalyzed the common school movement in the nineteenth century. Because most curricula came directly from textbooks at this time, they have been widely studied by education historians. However, the curriculum for pre-service teachers revolves around certification and leaves little time to read a collection of textbooks from the time when public schools were conceived, despite their significance. In this project, I use a corpus comprised of 19th century-textbooks and readers from The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. Data visualizations from Voyant can be used to teach courses for pre-service and in-service teachers by framing conversations of pedagogy within education history and illuminate textbook trends that have persisted to today. Integrating Voyant and digital humanities can also teach students to think about textbooks, both historical and present-day, and how to choose them with a critical eye.
Carol Hemmingway, University of North Florida
Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection
Editing the Eartha M. M. White Collection is a collaborative digital editing project led by Dr. Clayton McCarl at the University of North Florida that focuses on the personal correspondence and other documents of Eartha M. M. White (1876–1974), the founder of the Clara White Mission and a leader of Jacksonville’s African American community. Participants engage in textual editing of the materials, connecting them with White’s personal history and the African American history of Jacksonville. In the spring of 2020, research intern Carol Hemmingway is working to diversify the base of project contributors through a series of editing workshops and other outreach methods, including the use of social media and the construction of a website using Omeka. This poster presentation will focus on Hemmingway’s efforts to advance the project and, in the process, to think more broadly and to examine questions of race and power in the editing process.
Andrew Kishuni, University of Central Florida
Mapping Flu Mortality in Florida, 1918-1919
The 1918-1919 flu pandemic spread across Florida, killing 4,114 Floridians. The Florida Department of Health tabulated state mortality between September and December 1918 in white and black. The Florida Medical Association concluded that whites died more than blacks. This is reasonable when addressing unprocessed mortality data. Historians have argued the pandemic was a democratic killer across social planes. My undergraduate thesis argued against this theory of an indiscriminate killer flu, and this digital project is a visualization of my quantitative findings. Blacks had higher mortality rates in seventy-six percent of Florida counties, produced with the marginalization and poverty linked to segregation. The results advance the historiography by illuminating the mortality trends of the largest pandemic in modern history, and its social dimensions previously ignored. The project also complicates the historiographical consensus by proposing that there are no democratic killer diseases; rather, they always disproportionately affect the poor and marginalized.
Falon Mansfield and Pamela McCabe, New College of Florida
Nunneries of Bhutan
This poster showcases the digital project, “Nunneries of Bhutan,” which is a research collaboration between New College of Florida and the Jigme Singye Wangchuck School of Law (JSWL). The project is led by Professor Dorji Gyelstshen from JSWL as well as Professor Manuel Lopez and Cal Murgu (MA MLS) from New College of Florida. Pamela McCabe and Falon Mansfield, seniors at New College, are research assistants for the project. The project explores the transformation and changes to religious education and the monastic curriculum in Bhutan over the last century through the creation of a website that includes a map of the locations of the active nunneries in Bhutan and information about their histories, affiliations, and activities. Never in Bhutan’s history have there been as many nuns as at present, and the website attempts to begin to compensate for a relative scarcity of knowledge and research in this field.
Pamela Martínez, University of North Florida
A DH Internship Focused on Organizational Support
In the fall of 2019, UNF international studies/Spanish major Pamela Martínez undertook a for–credit internship with Dr. Clayton McCarl, associate professor of Spanish, related to his research on colonial Latin America. In this role, she worked with Dr. McCarl to support two international scholarly collectives—the Alliance for Digital Research on Early Latin America (ADRELA, adrela.net) and the Grupo de Estudio Internacional “Piratería de la Edad Moderna Temprana” (grupoestudiopirateria.org)—as well as coloniaLab (colonialab.org), a laboratory for digital editing at UNF. In this presentation, she will discuss her experiences and reflect on her learning. She will also share her thoughts on how this internship, focused on outreach organizational support, might serve as a template for similar opportunities for other students.
Andrew Pemberton, Laura Bullard, Francisco Mendoza, Dr. David Sheffler, University of Florida
The Red Hill Cemetery Project
This poster will showcase a small group of UNF interns’ work on the Red Hill Cemetery in Waycross, GA. Red Hill, a once prospering African American cemetery, has fallen victim to negligence, which has paved the way for vandalism and entropy. UNF History has worked with the Okefenokee Heritage Center in Waycross to help preserve the history of this important burial site and pave the way for a full scale historic preservation project. Our poster will showcase the ways in which our interns used Geographic Information Systems (GIS), digital mapping and archiving, and primary research during this project. Additionally, we will discuss the next steps of this project.
Jordan Rich, Florida State University
The Big Bend Quilt Trail
The Big Bend Quilt Trail is a public art project initiated and orchestrated by the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum in 2019 to install large wooden quilt block murals throughout Gadsden and Leon counties. Designed and created by various local businesses, museums, and individuals, each mural is its own unique installation celebrating the local cultural heritage of quilting. The website quilts.gadsdenarts.org provides an online interactive map of the quilt block murals to encourage visitors to travel to, and engage with, the numerous mural sites. Clicking on the locations provides a quick look view. Clicking on the “Info & Directions” button provides more information about the quilt block, such as the pattern’s connection to local cultural heritage, and directions to its location. My responsibility for this project was to coordinate with local participants and gather information for the online map. At present, the quilt trail boasts 26 quilt locations.
Rebecca Weiner, University of North Florida
The Embroidering for Peace and Memory Digital Archive
Embroidering for Peace and Memory is a week-long event that takes place annually in March to commemorate Women’s History Month at the University of North Florida. Students, faculty and staff gather to embroider on pieces of white cloth messages of peace and the stories of people around the world who have endured the violation of their rights. Since beginning in 2012, the project has produced approximately 400 pieces of embroidery in more than 13 languages. In the fall of 2017, UNF international studies/philosophy major Rebecca Weiner designed and built an Omeka website for the project (https://embroidery.unfdhi.org). At this presentation, Rebecca will discuss her process for photographing the pieces, creating metadata, and constructing exhibits within the site. She will also reflect on her experiences collaborating with Dr. Constanza López, coordinator of Embroidering for Peace and Memory, as well as training other students to continue the maintenance of the project going forward.
