Research at the Intersection of Humanities and Technology
Since 2001, the UCF Texts & Technology Ph.D. program has combined humanities scholarship with digital methods and practices. T&T faculty and students don’t just study technology’s effect on culture. They publish, present, and build in response to it. Students pursue specialized research across six areas: Digital Humanities; Digital Media; Editing, Publishing, and Interdisciplinary Curating; Public History; Rhetoric and Composition; and Scientific and Technical Communication. Below you’ll find some of our latest scholarship, our students’ and alumni’s work in the field, and the dissertations that anchor our research community.
Faculty and students engage in research across humanities disciplines like English, History, Writing and Rhetoric, and Philosophy, combined with technologies like digital archiving and editing, visualization, web design, and game design. Student dissertations explore diverse topics ranging from neuronarratives that centralize brain or consciousness in storytelling, to Digital Humanities applications in community college libraries, to the pedagogical use of Instagram in first-year composition courses.
Work in the program uses a variety of methods, with students and faculty employing approaches from critical code studies and digital archives to augmented reality language learning technologies. T&T students and faculty also work on projects such as ELLE: The EndLess LEarner language learning games project, the Veterans Legacy Program to create biographies of veterans buried in national cemeteries, and People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel (PRINT), which traces 17th and 18th century communication networks among European religious minorities. This work is supported by the resources of a major research university, but takes place in a program small enough that faculty and students collaborate closely across projects.
Alumni of the Texts and Technology program have gone on to such positions as: Assistant Professor of English, Assistant Professor of Digital Media, Director of Course Design and Production, Dean of Distance Learning, and Managing Editor.
“Texts and Technology is a unique program, almost like building your own academic adventure based on your research interests. It emphasizes the importance of publications and research from the very first semester, but also provides opportunities for students to prepare for roles outside of academia, such as user experience research.