Webinar Schedule Spring 2021
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.
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.
The introduction to Emilia’s project: https://nfew.org/exhibits/show/prototype-online-archive
“About this Edition” page, with links to the documents: https://nfew.org/exhibits/show/prototype-online-archive/about-this-edition
The introduction to Georgina’s project, with links to the documents: https://nfew.org/exhibits/show/fort-st-nicholas
The text of the slave census: https://unfdhi.org/colonialab-editions/anda/content/ahsf_censo.xml Alexandra’s section begins on folio 19v.
Lynne’s draft edition: https://unfdhi.org/colonialab-editions/sse/content/Soledad_Acosta_G_2888_27.xml
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Project Link: https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com
Fall 2020 Webinar Archive
Using an Interactive Timeline to Contextualize Art History
Friday, October 23rd, at 2 p.m.
Jesslyn Parrish, University of Central Florida, Ph.D. student
Art museum patrons have varied reactions upon their first visit to the museum: those with an established art education and love of art can spend hours examining each piece and reading the information plaque beneath each piece. However, an average visitor spends less than ten seconds looking at each piece, and these visitors rarely leave the museum with a deeper understanding of the history living within the galleries. In this talk, I propose using an interactive 3D timeline as a way to create a new medium for visitors to interact with curated pieces as well as learn about the history of the pieces.
In this presentation I will be discussing the interactive timeline of Orlando Museum of Art’s (OMA) American Journey gallery I created using an open source software developed by knight lab. My goal in this timeline is to provide each work of art with a historical context, and curator insights in order to help visitors to have a more engaged experience in the museum. The timeline will be displayed on a webpage that visitors can access through a browser on a tablet, or a mobile device. This Digital Humanities project will provide museums with a new mode of engagement, increase visitor engagement, and provide a new means of informal learning in the OMA gallery.
Don of a New Age: A Digital Exploration of Don Quixote
Friday, October 30, 2 p.m.
Melissa Garr, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Spanish & Marina Morgan, MISt., Metadata Librarian, Florida Southern College.
Applying new technologies to pedagogy in the humanities is becoming increasingly necessary to connect with learners in the digital age. Digital exhibits are one such tool; in addition to the digitization and dissemination of museum collections for learners and researchers to explore, researchers and teachers have been creating their own collections and exhibits to disseminate innovative research openly and to provide new learning environments for students to explore creatively. Most of the research on the use of digital exhibits in the classroom, however, has focused on their use as a learning tool for acquiring information by accessing exhibits made by others, rather than the creation of digital exhibits by students as an experiential, engaged learning pedagogy.
In this presentation, we will examine a case study of a student-created digital exhibit from an upper-level Spanish literature class. We will discuss our decision to use Omeka as the primary tool for creating and hosting the exhibit, and the training necessary to facilitate its use in this project. We will also discuss the learning objectives, pedagogical framework and practices we used to engage with students and guide them toward successful creation of the exhibit, as well as the challenges we and the students encountered during the project. Finally, we will discuss larger research questions and practices for future projects. It is clear that digital exhibits have many pedagogical applications; our project seeks to establish a clear framework for best practices in using digital exhibits as a creative learning tool for students.
Documenting Africa: Digitally Storytelling African Cultures Through Space and Time.
Friday, November 6, 2 p.m.
Mary Anne Lewis Cusato, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of French & Francophone Studies, Co-Director, Global Studies Institute, Ohio Wesleyan University; & Nancy Demerdash-Fatemi, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History, Albion College.
During the fall of 2018, Drs. Mary Anne Lewis Cusato and Demerdash-Fatemi received funding from the Great Lakes College Association (GLCA) to begin a project called “Documenting Africa.” Through two courses—Dr. Cusato’s “Fourteen Kilometers: Mediterranean (Im)Migrations in Contemporary Francophone Literature and Film” course at Ohio Wesleyan University and Dr. Demerdash-Fatemi’s “Introduction to African Arts” course at Albion College—the instructors endeavored to challenge students to reconsider the stakes of representing African peoples, literary traditions and visual cultures via digitally curated, interactive maps. The conceptual and theoretical overlap across these courses was rooted in some key learning outcomes: firstly, we expected our students to have more nuanced notions of how African peoples’ worldviews and self-understandings are shaped by their oral histories, literary traditions and cultural practices, cross-cultural encounters and exchanges, and visual/material cultural patrimonies; secondly, in encouraging our students to confront and ask difficult questions about the biases and mythologies that permeate our popular culture about Africa, African peoples and cultures, our students became more attentive to the problems of history, and that for alternative future histories to emerge, we underscored the need for historiographic revisions; and thirdly, these questions of the historiographies of African arts and cultures, in the end, pointed our students to the high stakes and direct impact posed in how these diverse peoples are not only represented, but remembered. Student groups within both Dr. Cusato and Dr. Demerdash-Fatemi’s classes created their own StorymapJS maps along differing thematic lines. In their own curation of these digitally interactive maps, students were asked to draw out their own questions and re-situate African oral traditions, literary works, and art objects of visual culture within a virtual gallery that was georeferenced on a map. This paper and interactive presentation delivers the outcomes of this joint effort and offers insights on digital pedagogies that ignite students’ comparative thinking across cultures, spaces, and times.
Primary Source Literacy: Teaching a Diverse Florida through Online Public History Collections
Thursday, November 12, 2 p.m.
Molly Castro, Digital Humanities Librarian, Florida International University, Rachel Walton, Digital Archivist, Rollins College, & Christopher Davis, Professor, Florida International University.
When students engage with local primary source materials in the classroom, they have the ability to look at their community and its role within the context of larger historical movements and moments of national significance. This experience has the potential to provide value-added learning to a classroom environment; it offers not just a multiplicity of historical perspectives but also fosters personal connection with what might be an otherwise detached historical topic. Pedagogically, analyzing and interpreting primary sources at any grade level hones critical thinking skills, as students can ask their own questions, draw conclusions based on evidence, and construct meaning, in a way that facilitates independent learning. This panel will bring together three presenters in a discussion about pairing archival collections and research with digital tools to teach: (1) primary source literacy skills, (2) critical digital competencies, (3) and the local histories of a diverse Florida. Panelists will discuss working with different groups of students, both as content creators and content consumers, when assembling collections of primary source materials online, as well as how digital humanities tools, methods, and teaching contribute to these aims. In addition, panelists will address the opportunities and challenges of leading grants, working with students at various levels/abilities, and collaborating with faculty and community partners to develop and execute DH projects.
Beyond “Compare”: Exploring Drafts, Translations, and Variants in a University Repository Service.
Wednesday, December 2, 2 p.m.
Sarah Stanley, Florida State University, Digital Humanities Librarian
In 2018, the Florida State University Libraries created a digital interface for comparing versions of texts described according to the recommendations laid out by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This interface was created as a tool for displaying genetic editions, which provide a dossier of multiple drafts and explore the revision process. However, the module, which was developed in Islandora for the Burroughs Archive, has the potential to be used in other contexts, such as variorum editions, critical apparatuses, (which are both used to show variant versions of texts) and even to compare translations. This presentation will provide an overview of the current Islandora module and how the data is created and formatted. We will discuss some of the tools that the University Library has created to convert TEI files into the format needed to create a full genetic edition. We will also introduce the next-steps the libraries are taking to create tools for other types of textual comparison. The presentation will also provide an overview of some of the best practices for creating these types of comparative editions using the TEI. We will also explore the reasons you—as a textual scholar, librarian, or other researcher—may want to create a comparative edition of one of your texts.
Curating Lincolnville: Old Friends New Collaborations
Dr. James Beasley (UNF) recorded this video as part of the final zoom meeting of his ENC 4415 Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities course. This course featured the collaboration with both the St. Augustine Historical Society and the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center to create an Omeka site of the historic Richard Twine photographs. This presentation highlights how this course has created unique collaborative opportunities within Lincolnville and St. Augustine for future students yet to come. The participants are Gayle Phillips, Executive Director of the Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center, Jeanette Vigglioti, the social media director of the St. Augustine Historical Society, and Dr. Elaine Sponholtz, who consulted on the Lincolnville Lifeways exhibit of the Lincolnville Museum.
