Week 10: Focus on Digital Methods @ UCF's Florida Historical Society Symposium

 Week 10: Focus on Digital Methods @ UCF's Florida Historical Society Symposium

This week UCF had the honor of hosting the Florida Historical Society Symposium where numerous panels and dialogues were created to promote discussion of digital and non-digital projects pertaining to Florida History. I had the honor of attending two separate events, one regarding a digital history project pertaining to central Florida's Hungerford school and another regarding central Florida's historic Greenwood Cemetery. 

M.A. Student Michael Richardson.
Central Florida's Hungerford school: Historical Significance.
Eatonville's historically black Hungerford School has a rough history in the fact that it's digital and material recollection is practically nonexistent. When the school was demolished, a communal uproar for the protection of their history emerged sparking students from UCF to collect materials and cumulate a database of artifacts to preserve the history of the community. UCF students did this by creating a visual narrative; Visualization came into play through digital methods by showing daily routine, understanding the board of trustees, changes in agriculture, legal history, communal values in yearbooks, timelines, developing digital archives, guided walking tours, biography of the founder, and even maps to understand the spatial history of Eatonville's history. In their discussion, students mentioned multiple programs they used to educate themselves and others on the spatial and political history of the Hungerford School. For example, they used ChatGPT for writing game coding, Python and PyCharm for actual production, CORE modeling software, Zotero for a resource bank and adding to the existing bank, Timeline JS for embedded digital tools, Scalar for combining multimedia sources to create a narrative, GitHub to create a digital archive, ArcGIS with Florida Stories to create a tour of Eatonville and map of the founder's life, and Tableau for overall visualization. The project was spectacular to watch in motion, seeing each student's addition to understanding the overall themes surrounding the history of the school and what made it unique to the community.
M.A. Student Sarah Boye's Poster Presentation.
Walking Through History: Greenwood Cemetery Digital Tour

M.A. Student Sarah Boye's "Walking Through History: Greenwood Cemetery Digital Tour" was a poster board presentation that showcased
a project dedicated to the preservation and expansion of the central Florida Greenwood cemetery. Boye spoke of her intention to promote presence, but also the historical narrative found in the gravyard; The project was designed to bolster Greenwood Cemetery's historical presence, increase public engagement, and showcase the history of Orlando by designing a digital walking tour of the cemetery grounds. To do this, she utilized the program known as Cleo to provide a platform for the guided tour. Prompting further about the usage of Cleo as a digital tool, she exclaimed that Cleo is free, making it the best choice for her project. Cleo is ultimately accessible and to be used by historians, creating a  "one place" and easy to use software that allows for multiple features like text to audio without difficult programing. 


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