Associate Professor of History
Editor, Florida Historical Quarterly
Director, RICHES
The Regional Initiative for Collecting History, Experiences, and Stories (RICHES) completed its ninth year of operation at the end of 2018. From the first meeting in fall 2009, when Dr. Larry D. Davis Jr., Dr. Rosalind Beiler, and I began to brainstorm ideas for an interdisciplinary, interactive database, we knew that the project had enormous potential. Today, the project works with 65 partners, sustains 36 interdisciplinary and community projects, has created two digital tools, and receives 120,000+ views per year. Our first big data project, the digitization and OCR of a century of the Sanford Herald newspaper is nearing completion. RICHES works with the ongoing National Cemetery Administration’s Veterans Legacy Program to host images and documents collected in researching the life stories of veterans buried in Florida National Cemeteries. Community partners remain at the heart of the RICHES projects. Three partnerships, that are currently very active, include the LGBTQ Museum of Central Florida, Jones High School, and the Truth and Justice Organization of Orange County. In the best example of a more democratic history, individual families, businesses, and organizations contact RICHES to document their history and make it available to the public.
RICHES also offers opportunities to engage the public in documenting and curating history and regularly presents at academic conferences. RICHES sponsored THATCamp Florida for nine years and attracted a full-slate of academic and community presenters from across the state every year. The oral history workshops led by Dr. Barbara Gannon are always a filled. RICHES has conducted ten History Harvests that garnered hundreds of items for the database and offered its first History Harvests community workshop. RICHES has presented at the annual conferences of the American Historical Association, the National Council on Public History, and the international alliance of Digital Humanities. In 2018, RICHES conducted a sell-out, 4-hour workshop on History Harvests at the NCPH annual meeting in Las Vegas.
RICHES continues to attract an interdisciplinary cohort of undergraduate and graduate interns who gain skills in writing metadata, planning and writing grants, conducting History Harvest, planning and executing focus group feedback, and design and programming.
Finally, RICHES is grateful for the UCF Department of History and College of Arts and Humanities for its continued support, the interdisciplinary faculty members who partner with the project, the community partners who are the backbone of the project, and the National Endowment for the Humanities for its grant funding support.