George A. Smathers Libraries receives National Endowment for the Humanities grant

In partnership with the Digital Library of the Caribbean, UF researchers have been awarded nearly $250,000 by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to host a weeklong in-person workshop and several monthly virtual workshops on collaborative digital humanities and Caribbean studies.

The project — called “Migration, Mobility, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities Advanced Institute” — will open a call for participants in October. Participants will gain digital humanities teaching experience and an in-depth knowledge of how to use digital collections in teaching. The program will provide training tools and processes and additional resources for developing lessons, modules and courses for 26 selected participants.

The institute is the most recent ongoing initiative between UF and the Digital Library of the Caribbean for building capacity and community for Caribbean digital libraries, from digitization for access and preservation to building upon digitized materials for research and teaching. The core of the Digital Library of the Caribbean, which is a cooperative digital library offering resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean, are its partnerships with other institutions. This program, the first advanced institute between UF and the digital library, will enable greater engagement with more community members on critical needs and opportunities in the digital age for research and teaching.

Laurie Taylor, UF’s digital scholarship librarian and the Digital Library of the Caribbean’s digital scholarship director, will serve as lead investigator and collaborate with co-principal investigators Hélène Huet, European studies librarian; Paul Ortiz, director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program in the Department of History; and Leah Rosenberg, professor of Caribbean Literature in the Department of English.

For more information, contact Taylor at laurien@ufl.edu. Photo courtesy of the NEH.