Presentations

 Hélène Huet, Melissa Jerome, Sarah Tew

For this presentation, we will discuss the connection between the Latin American and Caribbean Digital Humanities Symposium (LACDH) and FLDH and how the LACDH model can be used as an inspiration for FLDH members.

We will first discuss how LACDH was created back in 2022 from a conversation between long-term FLDH members from the University of North Florida and the University of Florida. Recognizing a need for an inclusive platform focused on digital humanities research in Latin America and the Caribbean, they proposed a joint effort that has led to annual international in-person and online gatherings. The inaugural 2023 event, held in‑person at UF and followed by an FLDH‑hosted webinar series, inaugurated an annual, rotating conference in locations around the Americas that is organized by a core number of faculty at UF, UNF, and the Universidad San Francisco de Quito.

What are the implications for FLDH members? The LACDH model demonstrates how a shared intellectual agenda, sustained partnerships, and adaptive event formats can spark new collaborations at the state level. FLDH members can emulate this approach by:

- Identifying regional topics that resonate with local communities;

- Forming cross‑departmental working groups to co‑organize mini‑symposiums or webinars;

- Leveraging existing institutional networks to secure joint funding and resources;

- Developing shared digital platforms (repositories, annotation tools) that invite statewide participation.

By adopting this framework, Florida scholars can create interconnected, interdisciplinary ecosystems that mirror LACDH’s success, broadening the reach and impact of digital humanities research across the Sunshine State.

 Howard Beck, Naomi Ballard, Nashid Madyun

An interdisciplinary team including the University of Florida, Alachua Conservation Trust, and Florida Humanities is collaborating on developing a platform and applications on environmental humanities at specific sites in Florida. An urban landscaping project with UF/IFAS encourages homeowners to plant yards that are compatible with Florida native plants and habitats and uses digital reconstructions of homes and neighborhoods to foster community building and draw connections between people and their environment. A virtual reality reconstruction of ACT's Marjorie A. Hoy Memorial Park at Orange Lake Overlook in Marion County, FL, incorporates geology, ecology, botany, historic citrus groves and a citrus museum. Users can explore an art museum featuring the works of local artists and listen to oral histories from the local community. FORUM Magazine, produced by Florida Humanities since 1988, with over 100 issues available electronically. Artificial intelligence analysis of these publications was used to create a knowledge graph, with nodes representing thousands of entities such as people, places, events, photos, and recordings, and links expressing connections between related entities. The graph spans a rich collection of articles over many topics and can be browsed through virtual reality, creating a digital museum of Florida humanities. The platform includes a graph database that stores the knowledge graph, and all digital assets (text, images, sounds). It supports real-time data gathering and active editing and curation of the collection by the local community. Digital archiving guarantees permanent protection of community data.

 Kelly Baker Josephs

In a 2020 essay on “Caribbean Writing on Social Media and Other Digital Platforms,” I considered the resources necessary to make Caribbean literary digital publications successful. As I wrote then, “Such resources include not only time and funding, but also networks, experience and quality submissions.” In this presentation, I would like to return to that question of the analog resources required to build meaningful digital projects.

Launched in October 2024, the digital publishing project Manchineel + Seagrape is dedicated to publishing open access editions of Caribbean plays. Just as the manchineel and seagrape trees help to protect the coasts of the Caribbean and Florida, this project aims to safeguard Caribbean dramatic texts and make them available for scholars and students of the region. Supported by the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) and LibraryPress@UF, with a founding editor on faculty at the University of Miami, Manchineel + Seagrape is very much a Florida digital humanities project. In part, this presentation aims to share how I have been able to leverage Florida-based resources to establish the project, such as publishing tools available via the Florida Virtual Campus (FLVC). But primarily, I focus on the human resources required for digital humanities work. In particular, in the case of Manchineel + Seagrape, I focus on the cruciality of personal networks, geographic access, and the very Caribbean practice of “visiting with” in building a digital project.

 Afolasade Ola ('Sade)

This study is an ongoing study that examines the experiences of first-generation international graduate students (FGIGS) in U.S. higher education, a population often overlooked when “international” and “first-generation” identities are treated separately. Using FGIGS at the University of Florida as a case study, it explores how overlapping identities shape access to academic resources, institutional support, and informal knowledge networks. Grounded in intersectionality and social capital theory, the study shifts attention from individual deficits to structural inequalities, arguing that FGIGS are often excluded from mentoring networks, peer support, and the “hidden curriculum” that shapes academic success. Methodologically, it adopts a qualitative digital humanities approach, combining focus group data with tools such as NVivo, Voyant, and Tableau to analyze patterns of inequality and resilience. A key contribution is the development of a multimodal digital repository using Scalar, which curates narratives, visualizations, and analyses to enhance accessibility for scholars, institutions, and policymakers.

 Thomas Lombardi, Matthew J. Burner

Asturian is a minoritized language that lacks official status in Spain, contributing to a greater resource gap for Asturian over the last several decades. We maintain that focusing on Digital Humanities tools is at least one way to provide useful resources for those working to preserve and promote Asturian on its path towards official status. Though a certain degree of language revitalization has been attained in recent decades, few digital resources are readily available that would assist with continued linguistic research, language documentation, and cultural preservation. In general, the limited tools only include corpora of varied quality, webscraped text, or lists of unvetted language models.

In this project we survey the digital humanities tools available to Asturian. We apply a taxonomy of language classes to assess the quality and viability of these tools for supporting the language. We find that variables such as the resource availability, number of speakers, and digital data quality affect the long-term viability of natural language processing projects in under-resourced languages. This theoretical framework supports our assessment of large language projects in Asturian, which will allow us to develop a gap analysis of these resources. We argue that this is the key to identifying the viability of Asturian in the realm of large language models.

 Hiromi Kaneda

This paper reframes the beginner and intermediate Italian language classroom as a site of digital humanities practice, where students engage with culture, identity, and lived experience through interactive and multimodal tools. Drawing on communicative and constructivist pedagogy, the study examines how platforms such as Canva, Kahoot, and Mentimeter can be used not only to support language acquisition but also to foster participatory approaches to cultural interpretation and knowledge creation.

In this approach, students move beyond traditional exercises to produce digital artifacts that reflect engagement with Italian culture, including visual narratives, collaborative storytelling projects, and interactive responses to cultural themes such as food, regional identity, and everyday life. Canva enables students to design multimodal projects that function as accessible, shareable forms of digital storytelling. Kahoot introduces game-based interaction that reinforces linguistic and cultural knowledge while promoting real-time engagement. Mentimeter facilitates collective interpretation and peer learning through live polling and audience-driven discussion.

Through classroom-based examples and reflective analysis, this paper demonstrates how integrating digital tools can transform language instruction into a dynamic, learner-centered environment aligned with the goals of digital humanities. In particular, it highlights how these practices expand access, encourage inclusivity, and position students as co-creators of cultural knowledge. By situating language learning within broader conversations about participation and public engagement, this study suggests that even introductory-level classrooms can serve as meaningful spaces for digital humanities work that connects linguistic development with cultural understanding and creative expression.

 Gabriele Belletti, Sadie Hundemer

SHINE: Digital Ecopoetry, Florida Springs, and the Work of Environmental Memory

SHINE (Sciences, Humanities, Intelligence, Nurturing Emotions) is an interdisciplinary project that brings digital humanities into dialogue with environmental communication and public pedagogy through a focus on Florida’s freshwater springs. At a moment when America 250 invites renewed reflection on local histories, regional identity, and public memory, SHINE asks how digital storytelling can help preserve and reactivate ecological memory in places central to Florida’s environmental imagination. Addressing Environmental Generational Amnesia—the process by which each generation accepts a more degraded environment as normal—the project explores how immersive media can make slow ecological loss newly visible, affective, and discussable. At the center of SHINE is an original ecopoem integrated into a 3D spring environment developed through field visits, historical and scientific documentation, and artistic design in Unreal Engine. Guided audio, soundscape, and timelapse-based visual transformation allow participants to experience decades of environmental change in a compressed and accessible form. This presentation will discuss SHINE’s humanities framework, creative and technical design, and broader public-facing applications. It will also reflect on its evaluative dimension, developed in collaboration with social scientists, which considers how immersive ecopoetry may support environmental awareness, sense of place, and community engagement. By connecting regional ecosystems, cultural memory, and accessible digital practice, SHINE offers a replicable model for representing Florida’s changing environments in public humanities contexts.

Aaron Rodriguez

This paper discusses the development of a digital exhibit designed to decouple William S. Burroughs's cut-ups from the archive, re-envisioning them as a performative act. Digital remediation provides a unique opportunity to engage with Burroughs' work through active manipulation rather than static observation. By shifting the focus from a conservative archive centered on preservation to an operative archive focused on execution, the exhibit functions as a space where the cut-up is perpetually re-enacted. Included is a breakdown of the project’s technical infrastructure and an analysis of the editorial frameworks—specifically the Lisa Samuels’s and Jerome McGann’s concept of "deformance"—used to translate research and creativity into a dynamic digital environment.

Creation and analysis of the digital exhibit necessarily takes a media archaeological approach. Within this framework, the digital edition and archive are viewed as types of new media without a necessarily teleological relationship to the artifact being digitized. Geert Lovink notes that "new media are traced back to earlier concepts" to allow one to read "traces of digital technologies into history, not the other way around" (193). Through this lens, we discover that Burroughs’s cut-ups functioned not merely as literary experiments, but as a proto-digital protocol that anticipated the algorithmic logic of the modern interface.

 Philip Allen

This paper presents an in-progress digital humanities preservation project centered on the life’s work of Dr. Francis C. Hayes, a University of Florida scholar whose research on Spanish proverb culture survives not only in academic journals, but also in a large analog card catalogue of typed and handwritten note cards housed in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies. Hayes’s published work demonstrates both the breadth and the interpretive value of this archive: in "The Use of Proverbs as Titles and Motives in the Siglo de Oro Drama," he shows how refranes structure titles, characters, and dramatic action, while "Una miscelánea de refranes" preserves a wide-ranging selection of proverbs on topics such as money, agriculture, students, religion, and everyday life.

The project asks what is gained when a vulnerable, local, analog humanities archive is transformed into a sustainable digital resource. I discuss the first stages of the work: scanning the cards, organizing them for cataloguing, and designing the foundations for a searchable database that will preserve both the textual content of the proverbs and the structure of Hayes’s collection. The paper also reflects on the challenges of metadata, legibility, classification, and responsible representation when converting a scholar’s research system from decades ago into a digital public resource.

By recovering a Florida-based archive, this project connects institutional memory, Hispanic studies, and digital preservation, demonstrating that department-level collections are meaningful public humanities resources, opening new possibilities for research, teaching, and community access while safeguarding scholarly legacies that might otherwise remain hidden in drawers or disposed of.

Angie Neely-Sardon

The Brackett Preservation Lab (BPL) is a three-part project made possible through the Patterson Endowed Teaching Chair in Humanities Award. The Brackett Preservation Lab is located within the Brackett Library, a joint-use Indian River State College branch campus and Indian River County Library System branch library. The BPL is available to students and community library users by appointment. The BPL allows the College and broader community to digitize and preserve local, family, and personal knowledge, footage, and memories currently in analog or print formats. It is essential to take on this work now before these artifacts deteriorate or the hardware required to use them becomes increasingly rare and unavailable. These digitized memories will be protected from decay, obsolescence, and other dangers such as floods, fires, hurricanes, and theft. Digital files are easy to label, organize, store, and share, significantly increasing the accessibility of these memories.

The first part of the project is offering the equipment and infrastructure for students and community library users to digitize and preserve their personal and family artifacts by appointment. The Brackett Preservation Lab is a self-service space that provides equipment and software for library users to digitize their analog and print memorabilia. The BPL provides equipment for digitizing VHS, VHS-C, DVD, Hi8, Mini DV, 8mm, and Super 8 home movies, digitizing audio cassette tapes and vinyl records, and scanning photographs, negatives, slides, yearbooks, scrapbooks, maps, and more. It is available as a self-guided model. Step-by-step instructions and hands-on help are provided, but the user controls the process from start to finish. This space and service are free, making personal archiving accessible to people who cannot afford the prices charged by private companies to digitize materials or the cost to purchase scanners and other equipment and software for home use.

The second aspect of the project involves local cultural heritage preservation through collaboration with the Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation and other local groups. The Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation is the literary hub of Indian River County and a foundation dedicated to preserving the legacy and home of the local poet. Jackson’s artifacts and items the Foundation has created over its more than 40-year history are being digitized and described for inclusion in Indian River State College Libraries’ Islandora platform. Using a spreadsheet or Google Form with the MODS fields listed, the librarian or student determines and enters the metadata values. This is done during the digitization process and by students and student volunteers after digitization to provide this learning opportunity to online students and students based at other campuses.

The third component of the project is to involve students and community members in digital humanities through presentations, workshops, information literacy course lessons and assignments, and internship and volunteer opportunities. Students and community members benefit from engaging in this work by acquiring digital literacy skills. Students develop 21st-century technology, research, and critical-thinking skills that employers value. One focus of workshops offered to all is developing life story projects by combining digitization of personal and family artifacts with metadata creation and storytelling or memoir writing. Research shows that lifelong learning and reminiscing about personal and family pasts promote brain health among elderly people.

The 60-minute presentation will explore all three components of the project. The need to take on preservation projects sooner rather than later will be discussed. The importance of descriptive metadata, even for personal or family use, will be explained. Ideas and suggestions for replicating the project at other institutions will be offered.

Anthony Cheney

Millions of primary sources sit in archival darkness; uncataloged, undigitized, invisible to the LLM/AI systems increasingly mediating access to cultural heritage. Materials vanish twice. First into backlog darkness. Then from the LLMs training the world to forget they ever existed. This is what I call double invisibility. With every model trained on these absences, AI's version of human culture drifts further from reality.

This presentation draws on twelve years as steward of an archive documenting the classical music heritage of 1960s Puerto Rican nation-building: the Luis Muñoz Marín era, the establishment of the commonwealth (Estado Libre Asociado), and Camelot-era ties to the Kennedy White House through Pablo Casals's residency there. It is a chapter of America 250 that calls us to revisit, and one underrepresented in AI-mediated knowledge.

When a cataloging grant fell through, necessity led me to build Acervo, an AI-assisted platform that automates OCR, named entity recognition, subject heading classification, titles, abstracts, and authority matching to transform archival documents into structured, discoverable metadata.

Every extracted entity is paired with a confidence score, and the output is evaluated against ground-truth sets. These mechanisms make AI's nondeterministic nature legible rather than going off "vibes."

This is not a product demo. It is a case study in what becomes possible when an archivist builds the tool, disciplined by humanist skills cultivated for centuries: discernment, cultural and linguistic fluency, and critical thinking. Without them, AI will encode at computational scale the very erasures humanists contest.

Chris W. Baynard, Robert D. Richardson

This project applies GIS and photogrammetry techniques to enhance visitor engagement and site interpretation at Kingsley Plantation in northeast Florida. Part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve, and managed by the National Park Service, this site was owned by Zephaniah Kingsley between 1814 and 1837. One of the most unusual features of this former plantation is the semicircular arrangement of slave quarters facing an open area and anchored by an overseer cabin in the center. Originally consisting of 32 cabins, many of the wall structures remain due to their solid tabby construction. Today, Kingsley Plantation is considered one of the most historically significant sites in Florida. While the walls of 16 cabins located east of the main road remain standing, seven on the west side did not. For part one of this project the Park Service asked for support to find and map their former location to establish ghost structures so visitors could envision the full array. We applied GIS mapping and field methods to identify and mark their location and low wall structures were established. In part two, we employ photogrammetry and geospatial techniques to provide complete and high-resolution 360º imagery for each cabin and ghost location. We anticipate these visualization products will enhance the cultural heritage value and increase visitor interest physically and virtually.

Daniel Fandino, Shyla Nuxol, Reliance Enwerem

At the dawn of the space age, the thrill of space exploration was brought to earth as manufacturers produced and developed playground equipment styled after rockets and spacecraft. The placement of space-related equipment into local parks intentionally sought to define the new realm of space as an American domain, to encourage excitement about the final frontier, and to create a new element of the childhood imagination. The parks made the outline of rockets and space vehicles familiar sights in neighborhood, and not distant images on television screens. Even past the heyday of the space age and with changes in playground safety that made much of the equipment obsolete, nostalgia for the parks as symbols of local communities have resulted in preservation efforts. Rocket Parks is a digital humanities project that is mapping out the locations of space playgrounds across the United States using ARCGIS starting with Florida, using VR and immersive technologies to recreate the park environs, and incorporating Omeka to catalog equipment and oral testimony. The project examines the social and cultural impact of the space race on public spaces and childhood, and how Floridians responded to the state’s new image as the nation’s center for space exploration through the creation and reaction to rocket parks. It is also envisioned as a long-term teaching project to introduce undergraduates and graduate students to the fundamentals of cooperatively working on an ongoing public digital initiative using new technologies, facilitated by UCF Libraries’ Digital Exploration Center.

Ryan Tenner

Just outside the City of Miami is Kendall: an enormous unincorporated suburban sprawl striding eleven continuous miles west into America’s Everglades. Neither city nor neighborhood, Kendall is a conglomeration of individual suburban developments that together comprise a land area larger than Miami itself, where 12% of Miami-Dade County residents live. Virtually no scholarship exists describing Kendall or its development. Thus, this paper chronicles Kendall’s radical transformation from a modest rural village into the swelling suburban sprawl that it is today. First, it examines Henry Flagler’s developmental and agricultural interests in Dade County, as he extended the Florida East Coast Railway from Miami to Homestead. Then, it explores the monumental infrastructure projects that suddenly descended on Kendall in the early 1960s, catalyzed largely by aluminum magnate Arthur Vining Davis and his land development company Arvida. Through these projects, the county government implicitly encouraged westward suburbanization despite internal efforts to decelerate it. Several historical methodologies shaped this paper. Because there is no secondary literature on Kendall, the paper is heavily reliant on primary sources, largely zoning records and newspaper reports. The research is also supplemented by oral histories with Kendall leaders, residents, and developers. Its digital component is a StoryMap that visualizes the written research in a publicly accessible manner. Housed within it is a digital map of Kendall’s development by decade, from the 1950s to the present day. Based on online property records, the map delineates approximately 40 square miles of Kendall based on the decade that each subdivision was built.

David Arbesú

This paper reflects on how the rapid improvement of digital archival repositories is transforming research on early Florida and enabling new historical discoveries. Drawing on work conducted in archives in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, it shows how the increasing availability of high-quality digital facsimiles, searchable catalogs, and interoperable platforms has made it possible to identify previously overlooked manuscripts related to the life and writings of Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, chaplain to Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and a central eyewitness to the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. Rather than focusing solely on the content of these documents, the paper emphasizes the methodological shift that made their discovery possible. Digital repositories have dramatically expanded access to dispersed archival materials, allowing scholars to trace connections across collections that were once difficult to consult in tandem. This expanded accessibility not only accelerates research, but also challenges long-standing narratives by bringing new evidence into view. Situating these findings within the broader aims of digital humanities and the America 250 commemoration, the paper argues that improved digital access to archives is reshaping how Florida’s early colonial past is studied, interpreted, and shared. By facilitating both scholarly inquiry and public engagement, digital archives are helping to recover a more nuanced and inclusive account of the American story.

Sarah Tew

Recetas de las Américas is a dataset and web portal of historical newspaper recipes compiled, translated, and published by Melissa Jerome and Sarah Tew. First launched in 2022 with 53 recipes, work is currently in progress to expand the dataset to over 1,000 recipes published in Diario las Américas in Miami, Florida from 1953 to 1963.

This talk will focus on evaluating the use of AI to clean, structure, and translate the recipe data. The talk will compare the different levels of AI use, from no AI use (as was the case with the 53 recipes processed in 2022), to a hybrid approach of using AI to assist in writing code for traditional NLP and data cleaning in Python, to full AI-driven attempts to process and transform raw OCR into a finished, bilingual spreadsheet. Evaluation criteria include the speed, efficiency, and financial cost to the project of completing these tasks with and without AI; how existing user skills fit into efficient AI usage; and the effect of AI usage on user skills development.

This work is currently in progress and will be completed in Summer 2026. Findings so far show good results in hybrid data cleaning and restructuring with Google Gemini (now built-in to Google Collab), very good results in translation (Microsoft CoPilot), and poor results in AI-only data structuring and output formats.

Mark L. Kamrath

In February of 2026, Readex published “Expanding Early American Scholarship with Readex Text Explorer: Readex Case Study. ” The article featured my research with Readex Text Explorer (RTE) and Early American Newspapers, 1690-1922 and the ways I was able to detect patterns of usage, compare literary descriptions with contemporaneous newspaper discourse, and use sentiment analysis and word frequency to identify patterns of meaning relative to Charles Brockden Brown and his depiction of Irish immigrants.

My presentation focuses on two courses that I teach--HUM 3830 Introduction to Digital Humanities and AML 3031 American Literature I—where I introduce use of Readex Text Explorer (RTE) and then also use the tool more fully to identify an 1850 lecture by Frederick Douglass regarding slavery and to discuss how black history and literature is taught today in the State of Florida.

Axel Presas

In this paper, I propose that, although most people are acquainted with the symbolic gifts of poetry, they have not pondered on its meaningful philosophical value. I suggest that since we have abandoned ourselves to the postmodernist belief that narratives are tangibly valid, and beyond the practice of ethical responsibility or reasonable evidence, poetry has suffered dooming trivialization. In present-day cultural politics, the use of language has been implemented to voice opinions and thoughts that are inclined to disinformation, and not to the facilitation of knowledge and truth. Language, in the voice of the so-called influencers, podcasters, and social media commentators, has become a means to an end aimed at superficial success and financial reward. Jean François Lyotard’s reflection of “anything goes” in his assessment about Postmodernism has been ruthlessly ill-treated. Therefore, this extends into the unethical manipulation of Large Language Models (LLMs). With the writing of Adversarial Poetry—i.e., the creation of a particular poetic structured language—A.I. Learning Machines can become highly vulnerable. For example, in the year 2025, reports spread of AI Learning Machines “fooled,” with the use of Adversarial Poetry for the testing purpose of building atomic bombs. Hence, the implementation of Adversarial Poetry becomes another language mechanism for the instability of social institutions. However, how Ethics and A.I.’s LLMs could share a space in the proliferation and usage of A.I. more articulate and reliable languages? To present my ideas, I will use Martin Heidegger’s philosophical reflections on “Poets and Poetry” and Alain Badiu’s notion of “Postmodern Ethics.”

Seul Lee

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not simply a new tool in the classroom; it is quietly redefining what it means to know, to reason, and to trust information. Students now routinely interact with systems that produce fluent, authoritative-sounding answers without transparent reasoning, stable truth conditions, or consistent accountability. While higher education has begun to respond in diverse ways, a significant portion of current approaches tend to focus either on restricting AI use or on teaching it instrumentally, emphasizing prompting and output generation, while leaving less attention to a more fundamental question: how individuals interpret and act upon knowledge produced by opaque, probabilistic systems?

This project argues that the central challenge of AI literacy is not only technical fluency, but also what we term interpretive governance, the capacity to interrogate AI outputs as situated, probabilistic constructions shaped by data, design, and institutional values. Rather than treating bias and error as edge cases, the project examines them as structural features that shape how AI systems represent the world.

Positioned within Florida’s higher education ecosystem, which is a uniquely diverse and large-scale environment where students encounter AI across academic, professional, and everyday contexts, this research treats the classroom as a site where public understanding of AI is actively formed. Using a combination of large-scale analysis of generative AI outputs and empirical studies of student interpretation and decision-making, the project investigates how individuals calibrate trust, recognize uncertainty, and act on AI-generated information.

These insights inform the design of pedagogical interventions that foreground interpretation, judgment, and accountability over mere use. The project will develop assessment models that capture AI literacy as observable decision behavior and produce a scalable, open-access toolkit for higher education. By reframing AI literacy as a question of how knowledge is constructed, contested, and acted upon, this work advances a more critical, equitable, and publicly grounded foundation for engaging with AI in an increasingly mediated world.

Jamin Wells

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) at the University of Florida holds one of the largest oral history collections in the United States. Yet much of this collection has remained effectively inaccessible, buried in an organically grown, unevenly organized archive. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the urgency of making these voices documenting Florida’s place in the American story accessible to the broadest possible public has never been greater. This presentation documents our recent efforts to engage with emerging AI tools and workflows to change that, enhancing our archival processes from accession and transcription to metadata creation and data management.

This paper presentation focuses on three areas of active experimentation—bringing order to our legacy digital archive, mass transcribing our digital collection, and leveraging AI tools to create metadata and finding aids—with a shared goal: providing access for scholars, students, and the public. Enhanced metadata and AI-assisted finding aids reduce processing time that has historically kept interviews off our public online portal. Mass transcription potentially opens the collection to full-text search for the first time, transforming discoverability while raising new ethical concerns. The presentation explores SPOHP’s emerging methodology, the practical challenges of scale, and the ethical dimensions that arise when AI tools encounter sensitive oral testimony. Sharing the workflows, tools, and decision-making frameworks we have developed, and reflecting on what this process has revealed about the collection itself, the presentation concludes with next steps toward a more fully discoverable, accessible, and ethically managed archive.