Workshops

 Uzi Baram, Frederick Pirone

This workshop examines the intersection of archaeology, heritage, and digital humanities through a series of projects centered on the Sarasota–Manatee region of Florida. Situated along the Gulf Coast, this area is characterized by a deep and layered past, though relatively unknown to the public with challenging heritage narratives.

The workshop explores how digital tools have illuminated Indigenous, maroon, and contemporary histories while highlighting professional ethics, engaging representation, and access to new audiences. And this workshop suggests new avenues for public engagement.

At the core of digital landscapes is an effort to document, interpret, and disseminate archaeological and historical knowledge in ways that are publicly accessible and socially meaningful. The Sarasota–Manatee region provides a case study due to its rapid urbanization, diverse communities, and contested representations of the past. Many archaeological sites have been lost, and more are threatened by development and rising sea levels, and local histories still privilege minutiae over socially meaningful narratives. Digital humanities methodologies offer a means to address these imbalances by creating platforms that foreground multiplicity, dialogue, and transparency.

Presenting the development of online tours, video games, and virtual worlds, the ethics for representation and engagement will be discussed followed by new initiatives using LiDAR within a community-based framework that encourages undergraduate experiential learning opportunities. Based at a small liberal arts college, digital humanities projects provide students with opportunities to engage directly with local heritage while developing technical and critical skills, with community engagement addressing concerns with student loneliness and retention. Students participate in research, data collection, and content creation, contributing to publicly accessible projects that extend beyond the classroom. This experiential learning model fosters a deeper connection to place and encourages students to see themselves as active participants in the production of knowledge.

Ultimately, this workshop offers digital humanities approaches to archaeology and heritage in Sarasota–Manatee that can serve as a model for other regions facing similar challenges. In bringing together archaeology, digital humanities, and public scholarship, this research contributes to broader conversations about the role of the humanities in contemporary society. It suggests that digital platforms are not merely tools for dissemination but are active sites where knowledge is produced, contested, and reimagined. In the Sarasota–Manatee region, as elsewhere, the digital turn offers both opportunities and challenges—inviting us to rethink how we engage with landscapes, histories, and communities in an increasingly interconnected world.

 Casey Wolf, Kailey Freeman-Depelisi, Adaeze Nwigwe, James Silveria

This workshop session will transform the audience into investigative researchers as they peruse the diverse correspondence within PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel). PRINT is a digital humanities project that illustrates the communication networks within documents by migrating religious minorities (Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists) between 1630 and 1730. In this period, religious dissenters made transatlantic journeys amid persecution during religious revolutions in Europe and the Americas. Their journeys established some of America’s earliest colonies and belief systems that continue to impact traditions today. PRINT’s team is building a research portal to capture their stories contained in 2,700 letters across five archives from four countries. This interactive and collaborative portal will aid in visualizing the dynamic lattice between these travelling religious minorities while simultaneously introducing revolutionary insights into practices within digital archives such as name standardization and metadata creation. The portal not only serves as a digital archive with visualization methods but also supports an iterative process for contributing to digital humanities datasets as audiences continue to engage with the project. Our workshop will introduce the project through unique challenges that arose during development in an effort to confront issues stemming from the translation of the complexity of human lives into digital humanities datasets that can contribute to increased interactivity with and understanding of the historical record.

The session will engage the audience in three different interactive activities to gain knowledge in issues that arise in digital archive spaces along with unique solutions developed by the PRINT team. The first activity, titled “The Name Game,” is a challenge in name recognition to reveal the complications of standardization across languages in collections. This activity asks participants to identify which names of historical figures are and are not related to each other. Simultaneously, this endeavor will introduce alternate spellings referring to the same person within the documents of PRINT. This task illustrates the importance of including alternate search options in digital archive collections to capture the diverse cultural makeup of early modern America. Next, a discussion into an elaborate scam artist shows participants the process of collecting metadata from misleading documents. Through Dutch and German documents, the audience will investigate Anabaptist donation records in “Find the Fraud” to discover a thief in one of PRINT’s threads of letters. During this pursuit, participants will be guided through the process of Linked Open Data, how to input research into PRINT’s database through Excel, and how PRINT stores materials in our digital archive. This activity also reflects the limitations of more automated digital tools in accounting for misleading or spurious information within historical documents. The last activity titled “Finding Violet” will be a prompt exercise in critical thinking to identify an obscure name within the records. This endeavor will display unique research considerations developed through PRINT’s experiences with parsing biographical information from limited knowledge within the correspondence.

By taking the audience through these shared activities, this workshop will illuminate the novel considerations that arise from the implementation of digital tools to reconstruct past lives through their lived experiences. PRINT encourages continuous participation with uploaded source material and subsequently seeks to foster stronger connections to the past, offering opportunities for contribution to the historical record that shapes narratives and academic understanding of America’s early modern period. Most significantly, the aim of accessibility to these vast stories and experiences embodies the spirit of America 250 by facilitating the expansion of historical narratives beyond the Great Man theory—creating digital records of an individual's life to spur recognition and understanding of the numerous, previously unidentified every-day people who contributed to the fabric of the nation.

 Matthew F. Simmons, Jessica Heady

Reimagining the Black Freedom Struggle in Florida: Interactive Digital Tools for the Classroom

Our workshop centers on the question of how to increase classroom awareness of how African Americans in Florida and the Gulf South have contributed to our nation’s democratic experiment. Through the utilization of an innovative website platform this project seeks to share stories and new ways of storytelling with students to help them better understand how the struggle for freedom and equality has changed over time within the Black community in the Gulf South. During this workshop participants will be provided with an overview of the project, a live demonstration of the tools we have developed, and an opportunity to practice using these tools. Through this digital platform we hope to bring to life the stories of African Americans from the Gulf South and situate those lived experiences within our national story.

This project draws on the Joel Buchanan Archive of African American Oral History at the University of Florida. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of interviews with African Americans in Florida and the broader Gulf South. This collection includes hundreds of interviews with African Americans from the Gulf South collected by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program over the course of decades covering a range of topics from Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to the election of the first Black president of the United States.

Our project, “Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South,” draws on this vast collection to bring these stories of African American struggle, resilience, and contested identity to life through an innovative website platform geared for K-12 public school students. This interactive workshop will explore the functionality of the website and its innovative interface including not only interviews and transcripts, but also interactive mapping and data visualizations including topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The core of the website is an engaging curriculum designed to help K-12 students situate the African American experience in the Gulf South within the broader context of American national history.

We are currently developing new curriculum modules that showcase the significance of the 2008 election of the first Black president in United States history to the Gulf South Black community. This next phase in our curriculum development will highlight the election of Barack Obama as an historic milestone in the struggle to implement the promise of equality for all as expressed in our nation’s founding documents. These new modules will draw on the memories of Black elders who lived through the perils of Jim Crow and lived to see the election of the first Black president and how they perceived and characterized this historic moment in our national history.

Central to our project is the study of African American Language (AAL). This is a language variety spoken by African Americans across the United States and is distinct from standard American English. In addition to the delivery of historical content through educational modules, our website includes tools and content related to African American English, providing a new way of understanding African American identity through language with the goal of raising awareness of AAL as a legitimate language variety. Not only will students hear Black voices, but they will learn how to better understand the meaning behind the words they hear, unlocking a new appreciation for the experiences and lives of African Americans in the Gulf South.

Consequently, our website includes linguistics-centric tools such as Lingview which allows users to see oral history transcripts synchronized (or time aligned) with oral history audio for a deeper understanding of those transcripts. It also includes an education game titled Voices of the Vernacular which helps students understand the structure of AAL by listening along with audio excerpts of oral histories and earning points by correctly identifying linguistic features. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis are two new tools currently in development that will allow students to see visual representations of interview content. To sum up, our website teaches students about the lived experiences of African Americans in Florida and the Gulf South through audio and written transcripts, but also through innovative tools which allow students to better understand the meaning behind those words. The end result is a more interactive and engaging learning experience for students.

By the end of this workshop, participants will (1) gain familiarity with a suite of digital methods for teaching oral history and African American studies, (2) develop strategies for integrating interactive and participatory methods into their own teaching or public humanities work, and (3) leave with concrete ideas for adapting the platform’s resources to their specific educational or institutional contexts. Below is a proposed workshop structure:

Project Background: Origin and Goals (6 minutes)-Introduction to the Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South project and how it integrates oral history, linguistics, and digital humanities.

African American English explained (3 minutes)-Introduction to African American English (AAE) and its linguistic features.

Curriculum (6 minutes)-Overview of our existing curriculum focusing on Jim Crow, Civil Rights, and the significance of the Obama Presidency for Black communities in the Gulf South.

Mapping (6 minutes)-Overview of our mapping feature utilizing Named Entity Recognition (NER) to highlight geographic locations from the interviews.

Lingview (6 minutes)-Overview of Lingview, which allows users to access and work with time-aligned oral history interviews.

Voices of the Vernacular (6 minutes)-Overview of Voices of the Vernacular, an interactive linguistics game which allows users to identify linguistic features in oral history interviews and earn points.

Topic Modeling/Sentiment Analysis (6 minutes)-Overview of our newest feature which includes visualizations of topics/themes across interviews and analysis of emotional registers based on word usage.

Audience Interactive Exploration (7 minutes)-Attendees engage directly with different website elements and features on their own.

Q&A and attendee feedback (10 minutes).

 Perry Collins, LeEtta Schmidt

Digital humanities practitioners analyze, publish, and adapt materials ranging from digitized archival collections to geospatial data, historical literature to oral histories. To manage and reuse these assets effectively, researchers should have a solid grasp of copyright law and other legal or ethical topics that define ownership and shape the circulation of knowledge.

Drawing on examples from the field, this workshop will cover:

Copyright in the Archive: Including an introduction to duration and fair use applied to evaluating historical materials for legal and ethical reuse

Contracts and Other Obligations: When to work with your archivist to understand contractual restrictions in archival collections, privacy rights, and other unique situations

Text Mining and AI: What’s protected, what’s not, and how contracts impact your work

Sharing Your Work: Understanding your rights and the basics of open licensing and Creative Commons

To encourage engagement and interaction, after a 7-10 minute overview of each topic, we will turn to a hands-on activity. Each table in the room will have several folders containing surrogate copies of materials for discussion; laptops and phones may be useful for additional context but will not be required. For instance, attendees may be asked to review several copies of items held by university special collections, and to talk about what steps they would take before incorporating these items into a public project.

In addition to the discussion materials, attendees will receive a list of frameworks, guidelines, and resources curated will be provided based on the interests in the room as a take-away.

 Euge Helyantus Stumm

What is this workshop

In this hands-on workshop, I will walk participants through the steps of how to produce a digital archive utilizing CollectionBuilder. One of the main challenges that humanists currently experience is the lack of technical knowledge on how to publish online their research corpus or develop visualization tools to visualize their research corpus. Addressing such a need among humanists, I propose this workshop to assist scholars without previous training in computing or web development to develop digital archives utilizing CollectionBuilder. CollectionBuilder is a free, open-source web framework for visualization of collections, articulating temporal, geographical, and archival metadata. Utilizing CollectionBuilder, humanists can catalog through a spreadsheet the information of multiple cultural artifacts and later on take advantage of the framework to automatically generate webpages, cross-referencing multiple entries of their research corpus. As CollectionBuilder integrates with Google Docs, scholars can simultaneously edit online spreadsheet files from different places and visualize their changes occurring on their website with just-in-time renderization.

What is my expertise with CollectionBuilder

This workshop is a product of my doctoral dissertation and my engagement as co-convenor of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Group (DHIRG) at the University of Miami, where I collaborate with Elizabeth Cornick under the supervision of Professor Susanna Allés-Torrent. On multiple occasions, I have trained librarians, graduate students, and faculty on how to utilize CollectionBuilder. Recently, I presented a similar workshop at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, in Chicago, and obtained enthusiastically positive feedback from participants. Currently, I am in contact with the team of developers of CollectionBuilder from the University of Idaho to improve the resources of the tool in the development of bilingual frameworks. In my doctoral dissertation, I have received funding from the Center for the Humanities’ Dissertation Fellowship, where I built digital archives to facilitate the visualization of my doctoral research corpus. During the semester I was a fellow, I developed a bilingual version of the digital archive Bajubá Digital Archive (https://eugestumm.github.io/BajubaDigitalArchive/). The pilot version of this project (originally only in English) served for visualizing my research corpus and received 1000 dollars in funding from the University of Miami’s Digital Humanities Fellowship.

What participants will need

Participants will require a portable computer with internet connection and an existing account on GitHub and Google.

How Time Will Be Utilized

• Minutes 0–10: Introduction and Orientation: The first ten minutes will be dedicated to introducing participants to the CollectionBuilder framework and its possibilities for humanistic research. I will briefly showcase a digital archive I built utilizing CollectionBuilder at the University of Miami, highlighting key features such as timelines, maps, and subject browsing, to give participants an intuitive sense of the tool's capabilities before any technical setup begins.

• Minutes 10–45: Setting Up CollectionBuilder (Hands-On Activity): The bulk of the workshop will be dedicated to guided, hands-on setup. Working in pairs, participants will follow along as the facilitator walks through the key steps of the CollectionBuilder Sheets walkthrough. This will include creating a GitHub account, forking the CollectionBuilder-Spreadsheets template repository, connecting it to a Google Sheets metadata file, configuring the repository settings to publish via GitHub Pages, and viewing the resulting live website.

• Minutes 45–55: Metadata Curation and Collaborative Editing: Participants will be introduced to metadata as an interpretive act. I will offer examples of cultural artifacts and we will catalog them together utilizing a spreadsheet linked to CollectionBuilder.

• Minutes 55–60: Reflection and Next Steps: The workshop will close with a brief discussion of how participants might adapt CollectionBuilder for their own research, including multilingual applications and long-term maintenance. I will also share my contact information and links to further documentation, promoting future collaboration.

 Raul Martin IV, Elizabeth Cornick, and Prishanti Pathak

Listening in/to South Florida (LSF, https://rm4-25.github.io/lsf_3/) explores how soundscapes connect us to the environment and serve as data for interpreting our relationship with nature. Sounds are ephemeral, yet they mark temporal and ambient relations through sensorial data as the acceleration of climate change impacts coastal and island regions. The project considers the ever-evolving environment as a readable text that enriches both our attention to and our relationship with place and sound. LSF draws from digital environmental humanities and sound studies to offer visitors a chance to interact with environmental stories through aural and visual narratives. The project connects visitors to soundscapes through a digital repository map that mixes urban, elemental, and animal sounds in South Florida. The maps are accessible and interactive, encouraging visitors to tune into and “catch” soundscapes as users or contributors.

LSF begins by asking how do recorded South Florida soundscapes connect us to the environment and help us interpret our relationship with nature? The LSF project collects and stores otherwise ephemeral sounds as social memories, thereby archiving soundscapes that cross languages, cultures, and even species. By calling specific attention to sounds that emanate from certain physical spaces, LSF asks visitors to question their ontological position amidst an environment teeming with sounds that influence their personal experiences of local environments in ways that they may have not previously considered. Regionally, a South Floridian may then ask: “When I close my eyes, what does my neighborhood sound like?” The project team hopes that this relational emphasis with sounds archived in a digital space invites pause and opportunity for the visitor to aurally engage their surroundings and contribute to the archive.LSF’s public engagement documents soundscapes of South Florida to spark dialogue on climate, culture, and the precarious ecological future of coastal and island regions while simultaneously modeling methods for building local archives with long-term cultural and environmental value.

As a contribution to the America 250 and Florida Digital Humanities conference, LSF would like to conduct a 60-minute interactive workshop. The first half will overview LSF’s purpose and rationale, demonstrate digital tools used, and segue into a 15-minute discussion with the audience about how their local and regional soundscapes influence their lives. By explaining the logic and tools behind LSF, the team will demonstrate how this project may be replicated for other neighborhoods or regions of Florida. The discussion will be led by at least two members of LSF’s team and discussion will be guided by the following questions: What does data sound like? What do we hear when we listen to our surroundings? How do overlapping sounds complicate our expected interactions with the environment? What do we seek out, if anything, when we listen to South Florida? What is absent from the digital sound record? For the final 15-minutes, LSF will invite participants to record and submit soundscapes in and around University of South Florida as part of their visit. Through participatory humanities, LSF offers audience members not just a way to archive their stories through sound but also centers the community's interpretations and interactions with the environment.

The audience of LSF includes scholars, teachers, and students of sound studies, environmental humanities, and digital storytelling, as well as community members of South Florida who contribute to the project. LSF showcases how sounds synthesize teaching, research, and service into one digital home that engenders outreach and collaboration between public and academic institutions and fosters conversations about our shared environment. The digital environment invites us to narrate sounds and listen through archiving, reimagining how we interact, see, and treat the changing environment.