Florida Digital Humanities Consortium 2024 - 10th Anniversary Conference (#FLDH10)
On Thursday and Friday of this week, I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium 2024 or FLDH. This conference was the tenth annual FLDH and the theme was “Humanities in the Age of AI: Celebrating a Decade of Innovation.” On Friday, the opening to the conference was a keynote presentation/talk from Dr. Leonardo Flores, Professor and Chair, Department of English, Appalachian State University, talking on AI. And then Friday the day of panels opened with the grand opening of UCF’s Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR)’s space that I am currently working in, followed by all of the panels. I was able to attend the keynote on Thursday and the first half of the conference on Friday, where I attended two panels, one of which I presented on, relating to the digital humanities/history project I work with, PRINT. It was exciting to not only present, but get to be at the keynote and opening of CHDR. The keynote, which I will talk about below, was extremely insightful. And, I have worked with individuals in CHDR for many years and love getting to work in the CHDR now, and seeing the work space get its grand opening was special.
The conference kicked-off on Thursday night with Dr. Flores’ presentation, “The Digital Humanities in an AI Inf(l)ected World.” First, it was very nice meeting Dr. Flores, I was introduced to Dr. Flores’ work through several classes, including one on Electronic Literature (e-lit) and he has done amazing work in that area. But to the presentation- it was an illuminating presentation. I have always been hesitant to use AI, such as ChatGPT or image-generators. I think a lot of these tools, especially in academia, feel scary to use, at least for me. Is it cheating? Is it plagiarism? Does AI steal artwork from artists? Will it make jobs obsolete? What I really loved about Dr. Flores’ presentation is that Dr. Flores explained that AI tools are neutral. They are not “good” or “bad”, it is how the user chooses to employ them. Dr. Flores highlighted that we need to think about how to use these tools critically, and to learn how to use them to teach others how to responsibly use them. Again, illuminating talk that really opened up my very narrow views on AI.
Jumping to Friday, I discussed the opening of CHDR above, but to reiterate, it was such a wonderful experience and I am glad I was there for it. I want to highlight a keyword that continuously came up during this part of the conference because it was a big part of my own presentation on Friday- collaboration. In Digital Humanities and Digital History collaboration is vital. These amazing projects and programs that come from these two areas really require individuals to come together and make digital humanities and digital history happen. I have worked on so many projects and all of them required multiple people with different skillsets to create and present, including the PRINT project.
I have been on the PRINT project for over a year now and look forwarding to another year. Part of the team, including myself, was thrilled to present on two panels on Friday at the conference. The first panel was “The Challenges of Creating Meaningful Metadata: The Protocols and Procedures of PRINT.” My fellow team members discussed the complex data set we work with, some of our protocols and procedures for working with this data set, and how we create metadata. Our second panel, and the one I was on, was “Visualizing Religious Networks with the PRINT project,” and this highlighted how we use the metadata explained in the previous panel to create visualizations. Originally, when we had submitted for the panel, I had planned to present on our work collaborating with a computer science team on the mapping side of the project. However, we only just started working with a mapping team in the last couple of weeks, so I had to switch gears. I focused on our challenges and key values in pitching the project, and highlighted our use of collaboration in the project and why that is one of our key values.
Overall, both panels went really well. As this conference’s theme was AI, we received some suggestions on how we can incorporate AI into the project. At one point we had discussed using some transcribing AI tools to help us in that area, but ultimately crowdsourced that portion of the project, and doing it manually. This was for a number of reasons, but I am looking forward to seeing how some of the suggestions from the panel on AI come to fruition.
After the second panel I had other obligations and am disappointed I could not attend the second half of the conference. But what I was able to attend was enlightening and exciting, and I am glad I was able to be a part of it. I cannot wait for next year and look forward to hearing what the theme of the conference is, and maybe submitting for it again!
