“Fires of Industry: Environmental Inequalities in Mid-Century America” is a digital humanities project developing, mapping, and visualizing a new dataset of environmentally burdensome sites in American cities circa 1950. Juxtaposing this data with racial demographics and income, it explores historical environmental disparities and their ongoing impact on health inequalities.

This paper describes a digital/AI literacy toolkit developed as part of a collaboration between researchers and mask artists, basket weavers, and musicians in Burkina Faso. The toolkit covers four main themes - Awareness, Promotion, Innovation and Protection - to address diverse aspects of community-led digital data governance for cultural heritage.

Drawing on case studies and participant testimonies, we demonstrate how CSUF DEFCon has fostered a new paradigm for digital scholarship that prioritizes cultural preservation, community engagement, and social justice. The paper outlines future directions for grassroots digital ethnic studies and for communities of practice that amplify diverse cultural perspectives.

This presentation tackles the difficulties and inequities that prevent digital humanities from intersecting with fields like postcolonial literature. It follows three different attempts to launch projects that perform text mining on postcolonial literature and the main obstacles encountered in the first stage of obtaining or constructing a viable corpus.

This study examines negativity in early colonial Nigerian newspapers through comparative analysis of lexicon-based methods and LLMs. Results show LLMs better align with human evaluation, revealing negativity primarily manifests as anger and disgust, consistently coexisting with high anticipation—suggesting a more nuanced emotional landscape than previously recognized in historical scholarship.