Posters

 Emily Norton, USF

Author homes play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of literary history by anchoring authorship to specific places and time periods. This poster presents a project that maps four author homes in Florida to examine how literary heritage is produced, preserved, accessed, and represented through both physical sites and digital platforms. Using GIS mapping and analysis of preservation status, accessibility, and digital and community engagement, this project treats author homes as a comparative framework rather than isolated sites. Mapping heritage sites associated with Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Jack Kerouac reveals uneven patterns of institutional support, visibility, and interpretation. Placing state-supported historic homes, touristed museums, and minimally marked or digitally mediated sites in relation to each other exposes patterns of inclusion, absence, and inequality. This project argues that digital mapping expands public engagement while also revealing disparities in literary preservation.

 Melissa Jerome, UF

This poster introduces an early-stage DH project, envisioned as part of a broader effort to link archival materials to narrate the history of tobacco labor. Focusing on manifestos as a form of labor communication within Florida’s tobacco community, the project asks what these are, what concerns they articulate, and how they address specific audiences. Themes such as labor conditions, political ideology, and solidarity among immigrant and diasporic communities are recurring. The poster will consider the circulation of the manifestos through print culture, particularly newspapers, as a key mechanism through which ideas moved across local and transnational networks.

By situating these materials within the context of Florida’s tobacco industry, this project positions the state as a dynamic site of labor and contributes to broader efforts to examine Florida’s role in the American story through local histories and underrepresented voices. Feedback on methodology, corpus development, and approaches to modeling relationships between texts, people, and places as the project develops is welcome.

 Benjamin Mittler, USF

City directories have long served as essential resources for historians and genealogists seeking information about individuals, households, and businesses in American cities. Spanning from the mid nineteenth century to the present, these directories contain tens of thousands of records for hundreds of cities. Despite their richness, their scale and format often make systematic analysis difficult beyond a limited number of entries. Using Tampa city directories as a case study, this project transforms hundreds of pages of directory listings into a fully searchable digital database. By spatially enabling the extracted records, the project additionally supports neighborhood and community level analysis, allowing spatial patterns and changes within the city to be examined over time.

 Constanza López Baquero, Andrea Gaytán Cuesta, Alma Cruz, UNF

Podcasting has recently emerged as a powerful tool in higher education, especially for heritage language learners. It allows students not only to explore and represent their cultural identities, but also to document their lived experiences as Latinos in the United States. UNF Latinx is a podcast initiative grounded in a culture where collaboration and shared knowledge are central to the learning process. This project, which is part of the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of North Florida, grew out of the Spanish for Heritage Speakers course, which supports students in developing confidence and fluency in both spoken and written Spanish while simultaneously utilizing available technologies to enhance their professional development.

This poster presentation highlights student participation in podcast research, writing and production. Participants share individual projects, showcasing how their personal voices contribute to a larger collective effort. Podcasting creates a space where students actively participate in knowledge-making, combining personal growth with collective understanding.