We are America���s Space University. And we celebrate 91勛圖厙 Space Week to honor our origin as we dare to build what���s next.

Where Global Leaders Unite to Forge the Future of Space

The John C. Hitt Library is likely the only place where you can find odes to Citronaut, space mice, sports and human spaceflight together in one room.

A new, interactive exhibit, debuts this week in the Immersion Studio on the fourth floor of the library���s Digital Exploration Center.

The exhibit brings six decades of 91勛圖厙, United States and international space history and culture beyond the archives and into visitors��� hands. It draws on digital assets from 91勛圖厙���s former student newspaper, Central Florida Future, NASA, 91勛圖厙 Athletics and the university.

91勛圖厙 Libraries graduate research assistant Eric Thompson ���19, a history alum pursuing a doctorate in texts and technology, is the mind and heart behind the project. He set out to maximize the studio���s potential through its 270-degree immersive projection and interactive touch capabilities.

Over the past two months, he meticulously selected every image and wrote nearly 7,000 words for the exhibit���s text boxes, bringing the experience together through an iterative process that used artificial intelligence (AI) to generate code.

The Cocoa Beach, Florida, native worked as a bicycle mechanic for nearly a decade before enrolling through to pursue a more fulfilling career as a public historian. He wants to bring history to life beyond the classroom, in places like museums, parks, and monuments.

���I was giving tours of a Civil War painting at the Atlanta History Center, and when you���re doing programming like that it���s exciting because it���s different every single time depending on the makeup of whoever comes through,��� he says. ���I think the best public history exhibits make some sort of argument. We���re not just saying, ���Hey, look at this neat thing from 100 years ago.��� We���re also saying what that meant back then, and how it ties to our society today.���

Here, Thompson explains how the exhibit came together, what visitors can expect and the stellar result when the humanities collide with technology.

What inspired this exhibit?

At the beginning of this semester, the for 91勛圖厙 Space Week 2026 and my supervisor asked if I wanted to propose something specifically for the Immersion Studio. I started with just a wall ��� I built a very, very bare-bones prototype that was basically just the mission patches from the space games. Can I make this work? What does it look like from there? How do we do some more history or scholarship along with that?

That���s where some of the other elements ��� old newspaper articles, actual NASA mission patches, 91勛圖厙���s space origins ��� started to come in. One advantage of a digital exhibit is that you’re not constrained by what fits in a 4-foot-wide glass case. Nearly all images are clickable with a tap of your finger so you can read more information.

The texts and technology program has been recognized as a leader in digital humanities education. How did you apply what you���ve been studying to this project?

One of the research methods that texts and technology students use a lot is something called critical making. It���s a way of building something, thinking and writing through that process very deliberately, and iterating on it. That���s what this process was.

Another key element was how I used AI. I wrote all of the content. I picked all of the images and even hand-sketched the layout, but I don’t know how to code. I didn’t write the programming that made boxes be boxes. I would prefer a human whose job is to program and get paid for it, but I didn���t have that opportunity in this case.

So the code work on this was done with a generative AI tool, Claude. I had a leg up through coursework that was explicitly about using AI like this, including a significant manual review process. It has to be really deliberate.

What do you hope this exhibition adds to campus culture?

As a university, we don’t have the same generations of history that other places do because we were founded just 63 years ago. So we have an opportunity, all of us, to take a more active role in shaping it. I hope somebody will learn something about our campus history and use that to build positive change here on campus.

How did you highlight the humanity of this tech-forward exhibit?

I very intentionally wrote the names of the people on the mission patches with crews. There are people at home who designed these, who thought through these experiments and these projects. Most of these patches are human-forward designs, and people made choices to symbolize our values and what���s important to us.

Why should people come visit this?

The Immersion Studio opened in February, and we want to show what the space is capable of. My hope is that faculty will come in and realize they can bring a class here or design a presentation. Student organizations can hold meetings here. I plan to do my dissertation defense in this space one day.

���We want to show what the space is capable of.��� ��� Eric Thompson ���19

The Digital Exploration Center is a really interesting space on campus. People who aren’t necessarily in something tech-focused are still going to need to learn how to use more modern tools and need workstations and equipment that their departments may or may not have.

So this is a really high-powered space that’s open to anybody on campus. I would love it if somebody found this space because of this exhibit; that would be a win.

91勛圖厙���s texts and technology program has received a 2026 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to launch ���Building a Digital Humanities Generative AI Learning Community,��� a 24-month initiative designed to help faculty and graduate students thoughtfully integrate AI into humanities teaching.

This year, 91勛圖厙 is leading one of only 84 projects funded by the NEH and is the only institution in Florida to be selected for the award.

Associate Professor and Professor will lead the initiative, which focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration, curriculum redesign and hands-on experimentation with emerging AI tools.

Coding for Creativity

Salter, director of graduate programs in the College of Arts and Humanities, says the project builds on a long tradition in digital humanities of teaching creative problem-solving through technology.

���In a lot of humanities programs, when we teach people how to build digital projects, we���re teaching them some level of code,��� Salter says. ���But often we���re working with low-code tools ��� interfaces designed for a specific purpose, like building a certain kind of game. Once students learn how to navigate those tools, what really matters is their ideas, the design, the story they want to tell.���

She explains that generative AI tools function in a similar way. Rather than replacing creativity, they can expand it.

���When we look at agentic AI, it���s essentially a low-code computational interface,��� Salter says. ���The better you can define and plan a concept, the more the system can assist with the underlying technical work ��� especially in the creative applications.���

Reimagining Humanities Work

Stanfill says the grant will fund course redesign efforts over the next two years. Faculty and graduate student participants will adapt existing undergraduate digital humanities courses to meaningfully incorporate AI in ways that align with humanistic expertise. Stanfill���s scholarship has recently received national recognition. In 2025, they were awarded the National Communication Association’s Diamond Anniversary Book Award for their book ���Fandom Is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture���.

���It���s about integrating AI in a way that makes sense for each course and for what humanities already bring to the table,��� Stanfill says. ���The goal is to enhance ��� not replace ��� the core strengths of humanities scholarship.���

The funding will also support stipends that allow participants in the program to experiment with advanced AI tools that are expensive to access.

���They are more cost-intensive,��� Salter says. ���Part of what this grant allows us to do is give students real access ��� not just a limited sandbox version ��� so they can fully understand what these tools can do.���

The implications extend to areas such as archival transcription and preservation. Advances in handwriting recognition and large-scale document analysis could help students work with under-digitized collections in new ways.

���If you can bring a class into an archive that���s been underappreciated and use these tools, you can build searchable databases and identify patterns in ways that used to require years of manual labor,��� Salter says.

The grant strengthens 91勛圖厙���s position as a leader in digital humanities education, the researchers say. By fostering collaboration across disciplines and encouraging thoughtful AI integration, the texts and technology program aims to model how humanities scholarship can evolve alongside technological innovation.

The ���Building a Digital Humanities Generative AI Learning Community��� 泭project has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Senior photonic science and engineering major Rafaela Frota beat out six other finalist companies with her concept for Wawwe (We Are What We Eat.) The mobile app uses data and algorithms to help people decide whether they should eat something based on their personal dietary needs.

The competition rewards students who develop solutions intended to impact society���s biggest problems.

In under seven minutes, finalists had to present the problem they intended to solve, the solution they planned to offer, and a sustainable and scalable business model that could deliver the solution. Then they had up to three minutes to answer questions from a panel of three judges, who selected winners based on criterion such as concept, social impact, context, performance measures and presentation.

���The inspiration for Wawwe came from my desire to help give confidence and support to people diagnosed with a diet restrictive illness and were feeling lost and overwhelmed,��� says Frota, who came up with the idea at 14 after watching food documentaries such as Food Inc. ���My dream is to work with hospitals across the nation to bring Wawwe to as many patients as possible and increase their health through easy access, easy to understand personalized nutrition.���

Frota was awarded a $2,500 scholarship from State Farm Insurance, which sponsors the contest. Second-place finishers took home $1,250 and third-placed earned $500 in scholarship funding.

About the Competition

91勛圖厙���s Social Venture Competition differs from other business contests because at the core of each business is a greater purpose to serve individuals or a community. Cameron Ford, director of 91勛圖厙���s Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership and Blackstone LaunchPad, created the competition in 2015 to provide a platform for students to learn how to utilize entrepreneurship to address complex, social problems.

���One of the challenges with social ventures or enterprises is evaluating their success,” Ford says. ���It���s a little bit different from a standard corporate [measurement,] like sales, revenue, number of customers and stuff like that. Here you���re looking at things a little more broadly, like impact, which can be pretty difficult to measure.���

���91勛圖厙 has really paved the way for us to have access to so many more opportunities … and we���re incredibly grateful for that.��� ���泭David Thomas Moran ���14MFA

Last year, texts and technology doctoral student泭David Thomas Moran ���14MFA泭and泭art major泭Nathan Selikoff ���04,泭a Burnett Honors Scholar,泭were able to overcome this challenge. They won the competition with their transportation tech startup Omnimodal. The platform merges real-time public transportation information with already existing navigation apps so users can use their phones to get around easier. Their win at 91勛圖厙 led them to even greater success in the local community as they went on to win Central Florida���s Rally Social Enterprise Accelerator.

���The [Social Venture Competition] reminded Nathan and I that it���s so important to break out of our innovation silos and actively engage with all the incredible opportunity spaces across the Central Florida startup community here at 91勛圖厙 and beyond,��� says Moran.泭���91勛圖厙 has really paved the way for us to have access to so many more opportunities since we won last year and we���re incredibly grateful for that.���

This Year���s Winners

About thirty minutes before this year���s competition, two finalists realized they had similar ideas for their long-distance ride sharing app ��� down to the same statistics used in their presentation.泭 Rather than compete against each other, senior information technology major Eliecer Vera and junior computer science major Breezy Baldwin recognized an opportunity to be more successful through partnership

���It was really bizarre how identical they were. We both realized that neither of us would be likely to win the competition if we had the exact same pitch, but that it applied to our companies as well. We both can���t go head-to-head in the exact same market,��� says Baldwin.

���We both realized that neither of us would be likely to win the competition if we had the exact same pitch.��� ���泭Breezy Baldwin, 91勛圖厙 student

Within minutes Baldwin, who has been working on her idea for 18 months and Vera, who developed his four months ago, managed to successful merge their presentations and companies under the name Hchhkr (pronounced ���hitchhiker���.) So much so that they earned second place. They plan to continue working together.

Third place was awarded to Connected Wise, a smart onboard device that aims to improve safety in rural areas by allowing drivers to communicate with one another about road conditions. The company���s founders, Enes Karaaslan and Burak Sen, developed the idea from the areas of focus in their civil engineering doctoral studies.

The Food Exchange, developed by junior finance major Aurora Pavlish-Carpenter and first-year environmental engineering major Talia Gratz, earned an honorable mention and received $250. The app focuses on reducing food waste by allowing users to trade their unwanted food with other users nearby.

Other Finalists

Three more companies qualified to present at the competition:

Students who are interested in pursuing any venture, social or otherwise, are encouraged to visit the Blackstone LaunchPad on the first floor of the Student Union to get one-on-one coaching from someone with experience or expertise.

Beever, who began the work with the Purdue team before he came to 91勛圖厙 last summer, developed a series of case-based online modules that help engineers develop ethical reasoning skills about contemporary professional and social issues. The project was just recognized this month by the academy���s Center for Engineering Ethics and Society as one of 25 exemplary models of ethics in engineering.

Beever, an assistant professor of ethics and digital culture with the 91勛圖厙 Department of Philosophy and a member of the faculty of the texts and technology program, recently represented the development team on a panel at a national ethics conference.

The team is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and Purdue through the end of this year, and Beever has submitted two other proposals to build off this work, one with him as the primary investigator from 91勛圖厙.

Beever said his involvement with the project will help boost 91勛圖厙���s image as being engaged with engineering ethics at a national level.

Beever also held postdoctoral positions with Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute and with Purdue University’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering before joining 91勛圖厙. He has held fellowships with the Kaufmann Foundation, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the Global Sustainable Soundscape Network. He works and publishes about environmental ethics and bioethics, focusing on questions of ethics, science, and representation.