That’s where UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) comes in. The center is made up of a group of faculty members and staff who help train humanities researchers to properly digitize what they are studying and make it readily available anywhere in the world. Sometimes thinking about how information and artifacts can be displayed digitally will mean collecting it a certain way, so getting faculty to think about electronic displays and communication is key to effective digital preservation.

Since 2007, the CHDR has helped strengthen several project proposals that have gone on to win funding and garner attention for innovative approaches to preservation. The effort has been successful. As  of July this year, the center has been involved in $2.7 million worth of funded grants. And this year, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the center a $193,736 Infrastructure and Capacity Building Challenge grant to expand its work. The independent federal agency is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States, disbursing $30.9 million so far in 2020.

The NEH grant, which requires UCF to contribute matching funds, will enable the expansion of a digital humanities collaboratory in UCF’s Trevor Colbourn Hall and update CHDR’s equipment to support collaborative research, digital preservation, digital access and public programming.

“The grant will help increase the number of faculty and students learning design, programming and digital archiving skills; generate new collaborative projects and scholarship; and accelerate institutional and public humanities programming,” says Bruce Janz, a humanities professor and co director of the center with Professor Mark Kamrath.

Examples of projects that benefited from CHDR expertise include the:

• Veteran’s Legacy Program
• Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive
• RICHES Mosaic Interface
• Zora Neale Hurston Digital Archive
• An online version of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, another NEH-funded project currently underway

CHDR also manages many of the journals within the College of Arts and Humanities. The CHDR team allows researchers to focus on their area of expertise without becoming technical experts.

English Professor Beth Young, who leads the Johnson’s Dictionary project, says CHDR support has been critical to the project from start to finish.

“Meeting with CHDR inspired me to apply for this grant in the first place,” she says. “As I planned the project, the team helped me figure out what kind of technological infrastructure would be needed. And now that we are immersed in building the online dictionary, CHDR has been enlisting students in computer science to build software tools that will not only make our project less labor-intensive, but will help future researchers as well.”

In order to receive the challenge grant money, UCF must raise an equal amount in philanthropy. With the help of the Provost’s Office, the College of Arts and Humanities plans to identify “donor champions” with interest in the humanities. Anyone wishing to contribute should contact Kara Robertson, director of advancement for the College of Arts and Humanities.

UCF faculty and staff also involved in the grant include Scot French, Amy Giroux, Connie Harper, Connie Lester, Mark Kamrath and Mike Shier.

The center also recently received approval as a “Type 3” center within UCF acknowledges four types of centers and institutes. Previously CHDR was a type four, meaning it was based at the college. Moving up to three means it is recognized as a university-wide center.

“CHDR is well positioned to be a driving force for future-facing research at UCF because of the college’s interdisciplinary research focus, the research and grant success of our faculty, and our students’ desire to participate in digital humanities work through dissertation research and faculty-led projects like the Samuel Johnson Dictionary project,” Kamrath says. “CHDR has played a leading role in the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium and will expand its public programming in the coming years.”

The conference for the annual Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory [organizers pronounce the HASTAC acronym as “haystack”] will be hosted in Orlando for the first time by UCF and the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. The 10-year-old conference previously was held at Duke University, UCLA, University of Illinois, York University in Toronto, the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru, and elsewhere around the world.

“This conference is a venue where digital humanists from across the world and across disciplines come together to share their research, their pedagogical methods, and their experiences. This sharing of knowledge in both the practical and the theoretical allows us to broaden our own world,” said Amy Giroux, managing director for the conference and a UCF computer research specialist at the university’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research.

This year’s conference theme, “The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities,” highlights new opportunities for digital humanities and allows attendees from the more than 400 member organizations an opportunity to discuss and explore new research and creative work. The program will include scholars from around the globe interested in topics such as the humanities across disciplines, gaming, social media, archives, and other fields. There will be roundtables, demonstrations, maker sessions, workshops, media art projects, and other sessions.

“Having the HASTAC annual conference at UCF allows us to see the superb work being done in the digital humanities around the world, and to show off what we’re doing here at UCF to help interpret our meaningful world using digital tools,” said philosophy Professor Bruce Janz, conference director and co-director of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research. “HASTAC has always focused on the ways education and society have changed and must adapt in the Information Age, and this fits into the forward-looking and socially conscious orientation of programs at UCF such as Texts and Technology, Digital Media, and Digital History.”

One of the conference sessions asks: What can other disciplines learn from Digital Humanities and what can Digital Humanities learn from other disciplines?

“This particular panel is made up of a group of scholars who work both in traditional academia and also on the cutting edge of innovative digital spaces,” Giroux said. “They hope to foster a good discussion on how digital humanities practitioners can grow within institutions which may not be as interested in supporting digital humanities work and how the current institutional level research infrastructure may need to be modified to allow digital humanities research to flourish.”

Many digital humanities projects draw from a number of disciplines including history, anthropology, computer science, data science, digital media, traditional media, and other fields.

For example, Giroux said, one project her team will present at HASTAC is ELLE, the EndLess Learner, a second-language learning video game in which her colleagues from the Office of Instructional Resources (Don Merritt), the Games Research Lab (Emily Johnson), and modern languages (Sandra Sousa and Gergana Vitanova) teamed up with a group of computer science undergraduate students to create a database-driven learning game.

“It is this type of inter/multi-disciplinary project that allows the digital humanities to emerge from many different fields,” she said. “The five of us will be doing a roundtable discussion on the project and the undergraduate students will be displaying the 2-D and 3-D versions of the project.”

Other UCF students will showcase their research and work in front of the international audience and will serve as moderators at many of the conference sessions. HASTAC also has a scholars fellowship program, whose digital-age members blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events. UCF’s three HASTAC scholars – Nicholas DeArmas, Jennifer Roth Miller and David Morton from the Texts & Technology doctoral program – will host a professionalization workshop for conference attendees.

Some of the conference speakers are: Purdom Lindblad, assistant director of Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; T-Kay Sangwand, librarian for UCLA’s Digital Library Program, and Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor of English and director of the Futures Initiative and HASTAC @ CUNY at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Tours for registered attendees also are scheduled for the Orange County Regional History Center, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and the Wells’Built Museum of African American History and Culture.

The conference will be presented at several venues around campus and is open to everyone. Advance registration is encouraged, but registration also can be done at the door at Classroom Building I. For the schedule and registration, visit .

The project, led by Amelia Lyons, associate professor of history and director of graduate programs, will engage UCF students in research and writing about veterans’ graves and monuments. In addition, UCF faculty and students will collaborate with Central Florida schools to produce interactive curriculums for K-12 students and organize a field trip to the cemetery in Bushnell, which is the county seat of Sumter County.

Involving students of all ages in the project will engage the community with the service and sacrifice of veterans, and will give undergraduate and graduate students a real-life lesson in professionalization, Lyons says.

“This experience with primary research — from identifying the subject and stories, to analyzing the sources to produce a narrative and becoming a published author — is like no other,” Lyons says.

“Learning about the lives and stories of these soldiers is also teaching our students what a historian does,” she says. “It makes history real for them.”

Luke Bohmer, a history graduate student, recently participated in a field research day at the cemetery. “It is vital to go to where the history is, whether it’s a cemetery or an archive. This is more humanizing and palpable than any statistic could ever be,” he says.

Janelle Malagon, an undergraduate, says that she has “always had an interest in military history, and the VLP was a great hands-on experience where I had the unique opportunity to learn the stories of individual soldiers throughout American history.”

The corresponding website exhibit created by the research team — including Scot French, digital historian; Amy Giroux, a computer research specialist in ; and graduate student assistants — will use software to map the research virtually, and UCF’s RICHES Mosaic Interface to create a digital archive.

The public will also be able to participate in the project through an interactive element at the cemetery. Giroux will lead the team in the creation of an augmented-reality app, which will include student-authored biographies of veterans for visitors.

Students are already aware of the impact the program will have. Malagon says the digital components will allow relatives to learn something about their veteran in a way that would not have been possible without the technology available today.

The Florida National Cemetery is one of 135 cemeteries overseen by the VA. Team members recently visited the site to begin their research.

UCF researchers have already begun integrating assignments for the project into their graduate and undergraduate courses.

Students, including those in Lyons’ Modern Europe and the First World War class and Professor Barbara Gannon’s War and Society classes, are conducting research, searching for any documented history on the veterans whose graves will be selected.

Undergraduate students are excited to participate in the project.

Kristina Himschoot comes from a family with deep military roots.  Her parents met in the U.S. Air Force, and both her grandparents served.

“The VLP is becoming more important to me every time I learn something new about it,” she says. “I have the utmost respect for this project.”

Anson Shurr expects he’ll draw a deeper, more personal connection with veterans through his research.

“Seeing their graves in person, epitaph and all, is personal enough. But once you realize that in many cases they lived in the same town or street as you, or you see a surname you know, it really hits home,” he says. He was particularly struck by the fact that people his own age put their lives and dreams on hold to fight in a war.

Kenneth Holliday, who is both a student and U.S. Army veteran, says that because April 6 marks the 100th anniversary of the nation’s entry into World War I, the research is especially timely.

”We are in the centennial of World War I. There is no better time to recognize the service of these veterans,” Holliday says.

Graduate students in Professor Caroline Cheong’s Seminar in Historic Preservation course are helping to identify the graves and monuments to be included and are photographing the sites for both the webpage and the app.

French, associate professor and director of public history, is having students in his Viewing American History in the 20th Century class create interactive digital materials for use on the website. John Sacher, associate professor of history and liaison with public schools, is integrating the results of the project into K-12 curriculum that will be available for use in schools across the U.S.

In May, the UCF team and local middle- and high-school students will travel to the cemetery as a kickoff event for the program. UCF student researchers will interact with younger students at the cemetery, providing what Holliday sees as “a much more personal connection on an individual level. Instead of remembering the major battles and the big names of military and political leaders, the students and local residents can remember that at the heart of the conflict were average people that all of us can probably relate to in some way.”

Gannon, who is also coordinator of UCF’s Veterans History Project, says that because the university engages with veterans and rich history in creating extensive interactive exhibits and web-based tools, the funding doesn’t come as a surprise.

Other schools selected by the VA’s National Cemetery Administration for the project are San Francisco State University and Black Hills State University.

“The award of these three contracts signifies the VA National Cemetery Administration’s dedication and commitment to providing enhanced memorialization and lasting tributes that commemorate the service and sacrifice of veterans,” says Ronald Walters, interim undersecretary for memorial affairs.

The contracts are the first of many planned initiatives to engage educators, students, researchers and the general public through the Veterans Legacy Program. For more information, visit the on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ website.

Established through the National Cemetery Administration (NCA), between 2017 and 2019, VLP 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.

“I brought someone back to life who had been forgotten in life and in death,” Lyons recalls a student who worked on the program saying.

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.

“We are so pleased to be continuing our partnership with the NCA,” Lyons says. “We are expanding our work significantly, working to bring our successful pedagogical model for doing veterans history to K-12 and university faculty around the state of Florida.”

In June 2023, about two dozen Florida teachers will be invited to the UCF Veterans Legacy Program Institute, a 10-day workshop held at the headquarters for the Florida National Guard, located in the historic St. Francis Barracks and the adjacent St. Augustine National Cemetery. Participants will create veteran biography assignments and design a tour of their local NCA cemetery using the St. Augustine National Cemetery as inspiration.

“We hope that holding this institute in St. Augustine, the state’s first settlement, will aid teachers in creating engaging lesson plans for students learning Florida history,” says Barbara Gannon, associate professor of history.

Alison Simpson, command historian for the Florida National Guard, is partnering with VLP to provide the setting for the institute. She will also share expertise about St. Augustine’s history for participants planning class field trips to the area.

“I am really looking forward to this project, to collaborating with the team from UCF, both faculty and students, and sharing with educators from around the state some history of the Florida National Guard as it relates to their [local areas],” Simpson says.

Each teacher’s local cemetery tour will be unique and versatile, highlighting individual veterans whose histories fit with their grade level’s larger curriculum. The final learning materials created at the Institute will be posted on the maintained by (CHDR).

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

At the institute, UCF alumni who previously worked on VLP will share their expertise through panels and one-on-one discussions. Meanwhile, current students will collaborate with teachers to prepare curriculum and conduct research on veterans buried in St. Augustine.

According to Lyons, this exemplifies how an education in the humanities prepares students for future careers.

“VLP is an excellent teaching tool. Students learn real-world skills doing research and writing about veterans connected to their local area … [and] history,” Lyons says. “Our UCF students who will be part of the 2023 UCF VLP Institute will gain professional skills, network with educators in our state and be part of a federal grant program. We are a great example of how connecting classroom education and real-world skills prepares our students for jobs and careers.”

According to Lyons, this program is especially impactful because it allows veterans who served our nation in life to continue their service by educating new generations. Meanwhile, it helps students understand the cultural context of the time a veteran lived.

“VLP and this institute allow us to tell America’s story through the eyes of the veterans whose sacrifices made that story possible,” Gannon says.