Co-organized by the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, the Africana Studies Program, and the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), this roundtable examined several digital projects at UNF that relate to the African American history of North Florida, as well as the African Diaspora more broadly. These include the Viola Muse Digital Edition (violamuse.unfdhi.org), the Red Hill Cemetery Project (history.domains.unf.edu/redhillcemetery), Editing the Eartha M.M. White Collection (unfdhi.org/earthawhite), and the Antioquia Negra Digital Archive (colonialab.org/anda). Participants also discussed recent digital collaborations with Lincolnville Museum and Cultural Center, as well as two projects currently in development — one focused on the bilingual (English/Spanish) Black communities of Jacksonville in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a digital oral history project that will gather and preserve Haitian folktales. We provided a brief overview of each project, and then engaged in a broader conversation around the ways these endeavors point to possibilities for applied, interdisciplinary research in the humanities involving both faculty and students. We also discussed the implications of this work for public history, public humanities, and community-engaged pedagogy in our region and beyond.
Dr. Tru Leverette, Director of Africana Studies, Dr. Sarah Mattice, Director of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs, and Dr. Anne Pfister, Director of the DHI, co-chaired the session. It took place on Tuesday, April 26, 10:00-11:30, as part of Research Week.