Digital Projects

Created as the first chapter of my dissertation, the Environmental Comics Database is a digital humanities project that catalogs over ninety environmental children’s and young adult comics, graphic novels, and zines. These texts demonstrate how comics can serve as powerful pedagogical tools to teach young people about climate change and other environmental issues. However, environmental comics can also perpetuate systemic issues of representations of age, gender, sexuality, social class, and race, leading to two important questions: Who gets to save the world in an environmental comic, and who gets left out of these narratives? To address these questions, the digital project includes data visualizations that analyze representation in children’s environmental comics. 

ImageText is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that advances the academic study of an emerging and diverse canon of imagetexts. As the Production Editor of ImageText, I created a new, more accessible website for the journal and helped develop the innovative From the Classroom section, which showcases exemplary undergraduate imagetext projects.

Currently, I serve as the Co-Managing Editor of ImageTexT.

This exhibit primarily draws from the extensive collections housed at the University of Florida’s Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature. Our project seeks to inform educators, scholars, and interested members of the public about the complicated history of Helen Bannerman’s once beloved—and now highly controversial—picture book The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), as well as the larger impact that it had on popular American culture.  Incorporating over 70 texts from the Baldwin, along with other examples, this exhibit contextualizes both Bannerman’s original book and its hundreds of adaptations alongside the larger shifts in the children’s literature field to  erase, sanitize, or suppress Little Black Sambo’s troubled genealogy. By analyzing the evolution of Little Black Sambo, it is our goal to correct the erasure of both Sambo’s past and, by extension, the larger history of racism in children’s literature. Thus, this website seeks to serve as a comprehensive reference of The Story of Little Black Sambo’s historical context in order to allow visitors to better understand the Sambo phenomenon that captured the hearts and minds of America’s children for nearly all of the 20th century.

Co-created with Brandon Murakami as part of the Digital Humanities Capstone Studio course. The project was originally built in Omeka, and it also uses the annotation tool Hypothes.is to examine the historical, literary, and social context of the original text.

As the Coordinator of the University of Florida Center for Children’s Literature and Culture, I created Recess Media, a public-facing, online archive for Recess Radio, a daily, nationally-distributed radio program that aired on NPR from 2001 to 2007. Working with two undergraduate interns, I digitized and edited over 2,000 episodes of the radio program, built the website, assembled transcripts, curated the programs into searchable categories, and wrote new content.