On September 20, 2024, UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research hosted a grand re-opening of its new research lab, complete with cutting-edge tools for conducting vital digital humanities work. Also serving as the opening of the FLDH 10 conference, the event featured remarks from Bruce Janz, Co-Director, CHDR; Jeffrey Moore, Dean, College of Arts and Humanities; Rachel Vacek, Associate Dean for Digital Strategies, Impact, & Visibility, UCF Libraries; and Alexander N. Cartwright, President, University of Central Florida. The delivered remarks were recorded and can be viewed on YouTube.

The CHDR lab was realized through an Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

(Watch the Remarks ➔)

In November 2022, tribal leaders from the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes traveled to St. Augustine to lay to rest their captured ancestors who were taken from their families in 1875 and imprisoned in Fort Marion for the remainder of their lives. At the hosted events, tribal leaders shared training sessions with the National Park Service and also shared information at nearby Flagler College. Researchers from UCF, including Dr. Amy Giroux of CHDR, attended and presented research about the final resting places of these lost warriors.

Lost Warriors is a short documentary about these events in November 2022 that was produced by Cheyenne and Arapaho Productions and is available on YouTube.

(Watch the Documentary ➔)

Prof. Craig Saper offered a series of tentative definitions of DH as well as discussed models of reading and literacy in an age of big data sets, algorithmic mining, and AI-chat-bots. Since UCF has generated so much important research in the study of texts and technology, Saper also highlighted a few of earlier UCF faculty projects in an effort to reconcile what look like very different premises about the impact of computation on literacy, intelligence, and culture.

Professor Saper is the Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC in Baltimore where he continues research begun in texts and technology at UCF on reading machines and changes in literacy.

The talk, which was given in CHDR’s new space, will be avaiable online soon.

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During the Plains Wars of the mid-1800s, thousands of indigenous peoples were forced from their homelands. Dozens of their leaders and warriors were imprisoned over a thousand miles away from home in Fort Marion (now known as the Castillo de San Marcos) in St. Augustine, Florida. Today, UCF researchers are collaborating with the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, the National Park Service, the Florida National Guard and Flagler College to help restore the lost prisoners’ experiences for their descendants and the public.

After five years of digging through U.S. Army records and correspondence dating back more than a century, Amy Larner Giroux, associate director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, discovered the names of 10 chiefs and warriors from the Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche tribes who were imprisoned and died in Fort Marion between 1875 and 1878.

Giroux’s research led to her and fellow researchers—Mike Shier (CHDR), Marcy Galbreath (Lecturer Emeritus, DWR), and Jeremy Carnes (postdoctoral scholar in DWR)—participating in cultural events and research presentations with future tribal events being planned.

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Established through the National Cemetery Administration (NCA), between 2017 and 2019, the UCF Veterans Legacy Program harnessed UCF student research efforts to create biographies of veterans buried in national cemeteries in Florida. In piecing together veterans’ stories, students gained historical insight while honoring forgotten legacies.

Now, thanks to a new grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs, that impact will extend beyond the university. Starting in 2023, UCF students and faculty will partner with teachers at Florida K-12 schools to create VLP classroom projects. These projects will connect younger students with veterans’ stories through their local NCA cemetery.

“As the digital humanities research hub for the College of Arts and Humanities, our center developed and maintains the VLP website,” said Amy Giroux, director of CHDR. “The current K-12 curricular materials will be expanded by our new institute.”

(Full Info ➔)