This session looks at how we make transitions work for us rather than becoming moments of failure in archival and digital history work. Donors and communities rarely share the same expectations of a relationship with an institutional partner as an archivist, a scholar or project designer. After the project starts, we start to see that the words we use actually mean different things. “Preserve” can equate to a sense that an artifact will be permanently displayed. “Create access” can suggest that physical objects should be loaned out for community events. Donors may interpret deviation from their own perspectives to be a betrayal of the promise to “tell the story” of a community.

These mismatches are teaching moments, even opportunities for reconciliation between social groups in a community, as well as between community people and those of heritage institutions. Professionals and scholars engaged in documentary projects with non-academics who help us to preserve, create access to and tell the stories of a community’s past need to be resilient enough for handling difficult discussions with our partners. Only through those conversations can we find agreement about our common vocabulary and how to put it into practice.

Bring your stories of how your projects have earned trust or missed opportunities because critical connections were not made, as well as what you have learned about deciding when to sunset or dramatically revise a community project. What conversations and skills can make that an honorable process?

Proposed by Haven Hawley, who has experience working in a community museum and with ethnic archives, and who is currently chair of Special and Area Studies Collections at UF.

I propose a session to share ideas about engaging students in course themes through digital means (hey, that rhymes!).

Currently I teach a course on analytical thinking and writing that explores the child as Other. Through the Challenge Project, a participatory out-of-class engagement project, we ask students to explore course concepts, essays, and materials in a way that is meaningful to them. Some of my students have used social media outlets like instagram and Twitter or collage/archiving programs like Storify and Pinterest to explore ideas and characters. Originally this assignment was developed by Jamie Marks (anthropology graduate student) to address participation for those students who were apprehensive about participating during classtime but who still had questions and ideas to explore.

And this project is the catalyst for this session. I would like a roundtable discussion about how we can encourage and guide students through engagement activities that make use of the digital ways they communicate.

I imagine participants sharing their stories about learning the platforms and developing course assignments.

I imagine participants sharing challenges they face and questions they have.

I imagine participants offering suggestions, critiques, and expertise.

I imagine participants leaving this session with practical ideas to engage their students outside of class.

In August of 2013, the UF George A Smathers Libraries received a $325,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to digitize 100,000 pages of historic newspapers. The UF libraries are working in conjunction with the library system at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras to participate in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a program created from a partnership between the NEH and the Library of Congress. As part of our participation in the program we are digitizing newspapers from both Florida and Puerto Rico that were published between 1836 and 1922. With this session I hope to inform you of what the project entails, the overall process, as well as update you on our progress thus far.

Using my recently completed dissertation as a starting point, I’d like to explore how the approach I’ve adopted might be improved upon, extended, or simply serve as a discussion point for other projects.

For my dissertation, I digitized and marked up a 1794 English blank-verse translation of Virgil’s Aeneid using a customized TEI schema to identify common poetic figures and tropes used by the translator. Once complete, the XML document was rendered separately within two different content management systems (also customized) to display the various encoded features for assistance in poetic analysis.

How viable is the sharing of my schema with other texts or projects for poetic figure analysis? I know how I would apply it to more texts, but knowing how others might use it could vastly change the customization (most likely for the better!). If the schema itself lacks applicability to others’ projects, at least the project’s single-source model and the process I followed could prove of use to others, specifically: 1) digitization of a physical artifact; 2) production of a custom TEI schema; 3) production of a TEI-encoded document; 4) insertion of said TEI-document into content management systems such as XTF and TEI Boilerplate; and 5) customization of content management systems to display desired textual features.