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Center Affiliates Win NEH Grant, Put Feminist Technology Practices into Action

In August 2018, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced that they awarded $231,093 for Migration, Mobility, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities Advanced Institute. The investigator team for the project includes Center Affiliate members: Dr. Laurie Taylor, UF’s Digital Scholarship Librarian and the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s (DLOC) Director, Dr. Hélène Huet, European Studies Librarian, Dr. Paul Ortiz, Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program in the Department of History, and Dr. Leah Rosenberg, Professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English.

In partnership with the DLOC, we proposed this collaborative project to host a weeklong, in-person workshop and five additional monthly virtual workshops on collaborative Digital Humanities (DH) and Caribbean Studies. This grant proposal and project developed from our shared feminist technology practices, where we approach and utilize technology to best meet community needs. Feminist technology practices are transdisciplinary, recognize the importance of people in relation to technologies and technical practices, and are socio-technical, encompassing people, policies, communities, and technologies together. As such, this project begins by acknowledging distributed and diverse expertise in our communities, respecting diversity and difference, and affirming the power and value of our communities and networks, including both working collaboratively together as members of the investigator team as well as working in relation to our connected communities.

For this project, we will open a call to select participants for the program. We expect to select a mix of faculty, graduate students, and information professionals who are engaged in teaching Caribbean Studies. Participants will gain DH teaching experience and in-depth knowledge of how to utilize digital collections in teaching. The Institute will provide training in tools, processes, and resources for developing lessons, modules, and/or courses. This Digital Humanities Advanced Institute is the most recent of ongoing initiatives for building capacity and community for Caribbean digital libraries, from digitization for access and preservation, to building upon digitized materials for research and teaching. In addition to our team of investigators, our team includes others from across UF and the Caribbean region who will be instructors for this Institute. We look forward to collaborating over the next two years with the 26 participants selected for this program. We are particularly excited to connect together following feminist technological practices for mutual aid, shared benefit, and community building.

Please see the full grant proposal for more information and for details on all instructors.