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New developments in digital humanities allow for more successful dissemination of information. Today’s library patrons make use of the cumulative innovations to optimize their research. Many valuable tools can be synchronized by creative minds to aid in that endeavor. Innovations such as SobekCM facilitate the spread of information in organized and easily accessible forms. Open Access is the general socio-cultural push for the democratization of information. Advanced scanning technology, as well as word processing and image processing programs, allow for the integration of information in a comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing manner.
As the collection manager intern for the IR, over the last six months, I have been in charge of creating and organizing Dr. T.J. Walker’s collection, found at ufdc.ufl.edu/tjwalker. Given my academic background in the humanities, organizing a STEM professor’s 58 years of research material seemed a daunting task. Challenges, such as adopting a new scientific vocabulary, tracking down lost materials from decades ago, making sense of the material enough to make an organized and intuitive collection, researching rights statements and copyright permissions and heading a pilot program in this effort, were overcome by creatively using the technologies at hand. In my presentation, I would like to demonstrate the work so far, discuss these challenges and how they were overcome, generally gauge the interest people may have in viewing or creating such collections of an individual researcher’s materials, and gather any other feedback. If anyone is working on similar projects or would want any questions answered, they would be welcome to bring those up.

I propose a Make session to create various Games to learn, play, and interact with content using various mobile apps.  We will make one game in pairs using Tiny Tap, Quizlet, Socrative and Kahoot!

Bring your own device, ideas and creativity. We will discuss tips, best practices and ideas to promote the maker movement in our classes.

I will discuss how I used these apps this semester to develop the learners language skills.  I will share what I learned from the experience.

This session addresses the opportunities and challenges posed by digital projects as final, collaborative assignments by examining “The Swinging Bridge, Ramabai Espinet,” a digital reference and teaching guide to Ramabai Espinet’s novel The Swinging Bridge produced by Kayli Smendec, Berta Gonzalez, and Christine Csencsitz. This project was begun by four groups of students as part of LIT 4192 “Migration, Money, and the Making of Modern Caribbean Literature” (Spring 2014) and then completed by Smendec, Csenscitz, and Gonzalez as an undergraduate research project the following semester. They combined the original collaborative projects, revising and adding to their colleagues’ work to produce a website that functions as a reference guide to The Swinging Bridge. The project contains a map of key locations, a glossary of historical and cultural references, short essays on key themes, a list of key passages organized thematically, and an annotated bibliography. Their digital project constitutes a unique resource for the novel as there now exist only biographical information and specialized scholarly articles. The project has particular value because it addresses the work of an Indo-Caribbean woman author, who represents a new and often overlooked literary tradition that needs a scholarly infrastructure, in order to retain and increase the presence of that tradition in scholarship and curricula. In other words, this body of work is at risk of going out of print and disappearing from circulation unless a significant body of criticism remains available — open access. The goal is to make the project available through the open access Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com) and thus to help students and instructors and at the same time help to build the infrastructure necessary to assure the presence of the novel in future scholarship and curricula. Berta Gonzalez, Kayli Smendec, and Leah Rosenberg will discuss the objectives and challenges of creating such digital projects as class assignments from students’ perspectives from that of the instructor.

Leah Rosenberg, Kayli Smendec, and Berta Gonzalez
Contact: rosenber@ufl.edu

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.

You’d expect that Gainesville’s history would be on Wikipedia, but not much is. In case you didn’t know, Gainesville was fundamental to the national women’s movement, anti-war, and anti-racist movements in the 1970s and has a rich history of other Civil Rights activism.

I think it’s important to share this history and to make it available to everyone on Wikipedia. I propose that we hold an informal, yet structured, Edit-A-Thon to add information to Wikipedia articles about the history of Gainesville. Edit-A-Thons are events designed for people to work together to make changes to a specific genre or region. Attending these events are a great way to learn more about Wikipedia and how to write articles with others on the largest and most popular encyclopedia available.

Have you edited Wikipedia? Great! Never edited before? Don’t worry about it! We’ll work through the kinks together and make some helpful contributions about our history. We can use primary source materials from Florida Memory, the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, the Florida NOW Archive, and UF Digital Collections. If all goes well, this session will result in the creation of great articles that will continue to be edited and watched after the session.

This is an open discussion about what makes the contents of a digital archive (letters, papers, diaries, etc.), either easy to use or frustrating to use. I thought we might look at the Bexar Archives (UT-Austin), Free People of Color in Louisiana (LSU), the Papers of Andrew Jackson (UTenn-Knoxville), and UFDC’s own Pioneer Days in Florida.

Bexar Archives: www.cah.utexas.edu/projects/bexar/index.php

Free People of Color: cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/search/collection/p16313coll51

Jackson: thepapersofandrewjackson.utk.edu/

Pioneer Days: ufdc.ufl.edu/pioneerdays

James Cusick
Curator, P.K. Yonge Library of Florida History, UF

The TRACE innovation initiative is a research endeavor developed and maintained by the University of Florida’s Department of English. TRACE works at the intersection of ecology, posthumanism, and writing studies. Invoking the mission of TRACE, Sequentials recognizes the unique capability of images to relay knowledge by soliciting and publishing interpretations of various academic subjects or themes drawn and explained through the comics medium. This session will be of particular interest to anyone interested in visual rhetoric, graphic storytelling, and comics.

By “comics,” we loosely mean illustrated, sequential images that may or may not incorporate words and may or may not be bounded within panels or other boundary markers. Because the term “comics” is still a contested one and has thus far evaded definition, this TRACE project asks contributors to (re)imagine the meanings of both the subject they are drawing about and the form that their interpretation takes. By encouraging contributors to conceptualize their work in a distinctly visual way, this project highlights the unique creative capabilities of the comics medium and reflects TRACE’s overall focus on innovative research and production.

A large focus of the Sequentials project is on developments of form. Given that chosen submissions will be published online, the framing of the page and screen will inevitably provide boundaries to what can be presented or created. We recognize the limitations of this two-dimensional space, but believe in the enormous creative potential of the comics form. Therefore, we ask contributors to consider how the form of their illustrations and panel structures might influence how viewers receive creative interpretations. The Sequentials team will circulate a CFC (call for comics) bi-monthly and will publish submissions accordingly. Subjects will range from theoretical terms like “deconstructivism” to fields of study such as “ecocriticism” or “animal studies.” In seeking visual submissions, we hope to destabilize the notion that words alone are the most effective way of conveying knowledge; we encourage contributors utilize the comics medium to its fullest, exploring how meaning can be displayed in creative ways. Contributors from all academic disciplines, regardless of their level of experience or illustration “skill” are welcome to submit. Further, submissions are encouraged from non-academics as well, and the editorial team will consider all submissions equally.

The TRACE innovation initiative is a research endeavor developed and maintained by the University of Florida’s Department of English. TRACE works at the intersection of ecology, posthumanism, and writing studies. Augmented reality criticism (ARCs),or  the use of augmented reality (AR) applications as a medium in critical public discourse, is one of several distinct projects supported by TRACE. This session will provide a forum for discussion of novel applications of AR and how these can be used in academia and beyond.

Novel applications of augmented reality (AR) continue to emerge alongside the unprecedented rise in mobile computing technologies. Museums and historical sites are beginning to integrate AR content into their displays, companies are promoting AR apps in lieu of print or even web-based catalogs, and engineering firms are creating AR applications that reveal their often invisible work. Although such uses of AR are certainly interesting in their capacity to redefine the role of technical and professional writing for many disciplines, they do not utilize AR’s potential as a medium for social and cultural change.

Digital artists and activists continue to lead the pack when it comes to shaping AR’s future as a medium for critical public discourse. For instance, artists working as part of the Manifest.AR collective have been pursuing AR “interventionist public art” since at least 2010. During the Occupy movement, artist/activist Will Pappenheimer created an AR application that uses text from Occupy protester’s signs to generate digital skywriting. According to Pappenheimer’s website, the project, titled Skywrite AR, seeks to give everyday citizens an opportunity to “occupy” a space of public writing “normally out of [their] financial reach.”

In its unique rhetorical capacity to promote compelling interactions between physical and digital content, AR is the perfect platform for creating critical, digital texts whose salience is more clearly discerned when placed within specific physical locations. Indeed, as mobile/ubiquitous computing continues its ascendance and eventual merger with predicted advances in wearable augmented/virtual reality technologies, this type of “writing” will only continue to proliferate. Trace ARCs seek to build upon the AR work of digital artists by more explicitly situating AR within writing studies scholarship as an emerging medium for creating and disseminating critical public texts.