As generative artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes classrooms, workplaces and creative industries, UCF researchers are asking a timely question: How should the humanities respond?
UCF’s texts and technology program has a 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, UCF 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 Mel Stanfill and Professor Anastasia Salter 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 UCF’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” 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 article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
