Recovering the Hispanic History of North Florida through the Collaborative Digital Edition of Colonial-Era Documents

This presentation examines collective efforts to explore the Hispanic history of North Florida through the digital edition of textual material produced during the two periods of Spanish rule (1513-1763, 1783-1821). This work takes place in the context of coloniaLab, an initiative at the University of North Florida (UNF) focused on the collaborative online publication of archival materials related to colonial Latin America. Participants transcribe documents and encode them in TEI-XML for dissemination through an Omeka website as interactive, metadata-rich digital editions. The materials related to Spanish Florida edited by coloniaLab are located at the General Archive of the Indies in Seville and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. To date, coloniaLab has concentrated on items addressing three topics: interactions between the Spanish and Indigenous peoples in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the defense of North Florida against the threat of invasions from the United States during the Second Spanish Period, and the judicial processes set in motion in St. Augustine by the Real Pragmática de Casamientos, a royal decree from 1776 regulating marriage.

The poster for this presentation will be organized into six sections. The first will introduce coloniaLab and its work related to Spanish Florida, and the second, third, and fourth will describe the three categories of documents mentioned above. The fifth section will provide an overview of the collaborative editorial process that coloniaLab employs, including a discussion of public workshops and the incorporation of transcription and editing projects in undergraduate courses. The sixth section will conclude the poster by reflecting on the importance of such campus-based public history efforts in light of the normalization of anti-immigrant discourse in Florida, as well as legislative attacks on curriculum and programming related to diversity and inclusion in higher education in the state. The poster will include images highlighting selections from sample documents, QR codes leading to the corresponding editions online, and a short bibliography of related publications by the author.