Reframing History

In this episode, I spoke with my colleagues in the Consortium for Critical Diversity in a Digital Age Research (CEDAR).

Christina Boyles, Assistant Professor of Culturally-engaged Digital Humanities in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC). Christina’s work explores the relationship between disaster, social justice, and the environment.

Kristin Arola, Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures (WRAC). Kristin’s work focus on the intersections between American Indian rhetoric, multimodal pedagogy, and digital rhetoric.

They join Sharon Leon, Associate Professor in the Department of History and previous guest early in the season.

CEDAR is a new research collaborative at Michigan State University. As you will hear, as a group we embrace the idea that CEDAR can be a catalyst to think about the digital humanities rooted in community engagement.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Robert Cassanello. Cassanello is an associate professor of history at the University of Central Florida. He describes himself as a “social historian interested in public history.” He has published several books on race, labor and politics in the United States. In addition, he has curated exhibits such as The Long History of the Civil Rights Movement in Florida and From Kin to Kant: Turpentine Culture in Central Florida. Cassanello co-produced numerous media projects such as the films, The Committee and Filthy Dreamers with his UCF colleague Dr. Lisa Mills. I reached out to him because of his activism around podcasts as public history form. He produced The History of Central Florida Podcast which won the Hampton Dunn Internet Broadcasting Award from Florida Historical Society. In our conversation we spoke about his vision for a digital public history and it’s implications for teaching and scholarship.

In this episode, I spoke with Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of English and the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University. Dr. Risam’s research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media. Her book, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. She is co-editing two volumes: Intersectionality in Digital Humanities with Barbara Bordalejo for Arc Humanities Press and The Digital Black Atlantic with Kelly Baker Josephs for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press). Along with Carol Stabile, she is co-director of Reanimate, an intersectional feminist publishing collective recovering archival writing by women in media activism. Her scholarship has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Debates in the Digital Humanities, First Monday, Popular Communications, and College and Undergraduate Libraries, among others.

In our conversation, we discussed the origins of her digital praxis and how her vision for digital humanities animate the projects she pursues and her persona as a public intellectual.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Dhanashree Thorat, Assitant Professor of English at Mississippi State University. Dr. Thorat received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 2017. She is a founding Executive Council member of the Center for Digital Humanities in Pune, India. She serves as the lead organizer for a biennial winter school on Digital Humanities and advises the center on digital archival projects and DH curriculum development. Dr. Thorat has written about her experiences with building DH networks in the Global South as a HASTAC Scholar (2015-2016) and as a postdoctoral researcher in Digital Humanities at the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, at the University of Kansas from 2017-2019. While at the University of Florida, she has served as co-convenor of the Digital Humanities Working Group and was the lead coordinator for the first THATCamp Gainesville. She was also part of the committee that developed the Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate at UF. She has organized and led DH workshops on various topics including digital archiving, feminist digital humanities, and digital pedagogies. She situates her research at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Postcolonial Studies, and Asian American Studies. Her work investigates the manner in which digital spaces, specifically digital archives and social media, codify hegemonic narratives of Muslims in the post-9/11 moment, and how Muslims use these same spaces to articulate political agency and intervene in mainstream conversations about their racialized bodies. We spoke about her pathway to her current work and the implications for how we understand the potential for digital humanities.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Connie L. Lester, Associate Professor of History at the University of Central Florida. Professor Lester is the Director of Regional Initiative to Collect History, Experiences, and Stories (RICHES) of Central Florida. In operation since 2010, RICHES is a community-centered digital humanities project. As such, it speaks to the potential of the digital humanities to support scholarship about community that might be overlooked. In our conversation we discuss the origins of the project, it evolution, and the possible pathways as it continues to evolve.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Laurie N. Taylor. Taylor is the Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies and Chair of the Digital Partnerships and Strategies Department and Editor-in-Chief, LibraryPress@UF at the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries. She also serves as the Digital Scholarship Director of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).

Dr. Taylor earned her Ph.D. in English/Media Studies and Digital Humanities in 2006 and received a Master of Arts in the same discipline in 2002, both from the University of Florida. Dr. Taylor’s scholarship focuses on the socio-technical (e.g., people, policies, technologies, communities) aspects of scholarly cyberinfrastructure to support the continuing evolution of digital scholarship.

We spoke about the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), its origins, and the transformative potential of this project.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Brooks Hefner, Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at James Madison University. Hefner along with Ed Timke received a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Advancement Grant for Circulating American Magazines, a data visualization project designed to make 100 years of circulation figures for major American periodicals publicly accessible. I spoke with Brooks about the origins of the project and how he sees his digital humanities practice as means to expand scholarship, engage students, and reach out to the public.

In this episode I spoke with Dr. Hilary Green, Associate Professor of History in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama. Her research and teaching interests explore the intersections of race, class, and gender in African American history.
Dr. Green’s digital humanities project Hallowed Grounds began in the Spring of 2015. What she describes as her “side project” has grown into a unique example of a digital humanities project that engages students and the public around questions of race and memory.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Kathryn Tomasek. Dr. Tomasek has been exploring the use of digital tools to enhance student learning since 1992. She began to use XML compatible with the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative in assignments requiring transcription and markup of primary sources in 2004. As part of the Wheaton College Digital History Project, students in her courses do original research with documents from the founding period of the college. Tomasek’s research project, Encoding Financial Records, received a Start-Up Grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011. In this episode, we spoke about TEI, teaching, and complexities linked to digital humanities in the classroom and beyond.

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Maryemma Graham from the History of Black Writing Project at the University of Kansas. Graham is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English. Dr. Graham and her project is a fascinating case study in the complex legacy linked to race and digital humanities. She turned to “digital” methods before it was “digital humanities” and as such her project has a long, but surprisingly not well known history. In 1983 she founded the project with the goal documenting black literary works. The project moved to the University of Kansas in 1999. In our conversation, she recounts the origins of this project and the potential impact on our understanding of the black literary legacy in the United States.

In this episode, I spoke with Robert K. Nelson, the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia. Nelson has been at the forefront of some of the most dynamic projects linked to digital humanities in the public sphere. The DSL has developed multiple visualization projects under the umbrella of the American Panorama (AP) project. AP is described as “a historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century” and combines in-depth research with interactive mapping techniques. The maps on AP present data-rich visualizations that explore questions around redlining, migration, and electoral politics. As a result, the DSL has become a point of entry for digital humanities for many people.

In this episode I spoke with Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Dr. Fitzpatrick is Director of Digital Humanities and Professor of English at Michigan State University. Prior to assuming that role in 2017, she served as Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication for the Modern Language Association. In addition, she was managing editor for PMLA and other MLA publications. Her most recent book, Generous Thinking: The University and the Public Good was published in 2019. She is also project director for Humanities Commons, an open-access, open-source network serving more than 10,000 scholars and practitioners in the humanities. In our discussion, Dr. Fitzpatrick outlined why public humanities matter and we discuss how digital praxis can help academic engage with the public.

In this week’s episode, Scot French (University of Central Florida) and Julian C. Chambliss (Michigan State University) discuss the critical role of memory in shaping perception of community history.

In this week’s episode I spoke with Rachel H. Simmons, the archivist for the Winter Park Public Library (https://www.wppl.org/). Working with the community to craft a more holistic narrative that weaves the collective experience together relies on the support of archivist. In thinking about the project that inspires this podcast, we recognize it as public scholarship to enhance civic discourse. Public Scholarship is defined by Imagining America (https://imaginingamerica.org/). IA help to define public scholarship as projects that promote mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sphere. Under that framework community institutions like the local library and academic institutions (Rollins College [https://www.rollins.edu/history/] and the University of Central Florida [http://history.cah.ucf.edu/]) can do much to bridge the gap between knowledge creation and community engagement.

In this conversation, Ms. Simmons talks about h

A Conversation with Diedre Faith Houchen about Black Education and Liberation



In this week’s episode, we delve deeper into the black social world by examining a liberatory tradition in education. Historically, achieving education and economic stability were priorities for African Americans after the Civil War. The effort to achieve access to education is one defining aspect of the collective activism we see in black communities since Reconstruction. Those struggles continue, but to learn more about the legacy of education activism I spoke with Diedre Houchen, a postdoctoral associate for the Center for the Study of Race and Race Relations in the Levin School of Law ( https://www.law.ufl.edu/areas-of-study/centers/csrrr) at the University of Florida at Gainesville. Houchen's work exploring black teacher activism in the early 20th century sheds light on the hidden network of black educators that shaped the civil right narrative in Florida.

About Diedre Faith Houchen, Ph.D.

Diedre F.

This week I spoke with Walter D. Greason. Walter is the Dean of the Honors School and an historian in the Department of History and Anthropology at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. His recent works include Planning Future Cities (a co-edited collection on urban development with Anthony Pratcher II), Cities Imagined (a co-edited collection on the Africa Diaspora in media and culture with Julian C. Chambliss), and Industrial Education (a co-edited collection on race and industrialization with David Goldberg). Greason’s groundbreaking cultural history, Suburban Erasure, won the prize for Best Non-Fiction about New Jersey in 2014. He also serves as the Treasurer for the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). A life member of the African American Intellectual History Society, Dr. Greason’s #RacialViolenceSyllabus reached millions of readers after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, contributing to an ongoing public debate

In this episode we discuss what we mean by New South and the implications of thinking about Winter Park, Florida as a window on southern history after Reconstruction.

In this episode Julian Chambliss (Michigan State University) and Scot French (University of Central Florida) talk about the knowledge gleamed from doing digital history in a local context.

In this episode Julian Chambliss (Michigan State University) and Scot French ( University of Central Florida) discuss how they approach the idea of changing the community history for Winter Park, Florida.

In this episode Dr. Julian Chambliss and Dr. Scot French discuss the process of re-imagining a community history narrative.

In this episode Julian Chambliss ( Department of English and History at Michigan State University) and Scot French (Department of History, University of Central Florida) discuss finding the pathway to rethinking the local history narrative for Winter Park, Florida.

A podcast exploring community history.