In collaboration with the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, the Caribbean Digital celebrated its twelfth annual conference at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, on December 4 and 5, 2025. Since its inauguration in 2014, the TCD has held its annual international conferences in the United States and the Caribbean. Over the past eleven years, the TCD has created a dedicated space of exchange for Caribbeanist-focused digital scholars. The two-day conference included panels, roundtable conversations, artist presentations, and project show-and-tells by community practitioners and scholars working across the humanities.

Day one opened with a curated video showcase of 2025 CDSC micro-grant awardee projects, whose work ranged from digital repositories and curated digital exhibitions to complex mapping projects centered on the Caribbean. You can learn more about their projects here.

The micro-grantees showcase was followed by panels that addressed larger themes of storytelling and pedagogy. The digital slam presentations panel, moderated by Professor Tzarina Prater (Bentley University), featured presentations on audio computational approaches to cultural preservation and digital storytelling through art and online exhibitions. The following panel, moderated by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University) and Alex Gil (Yale University), turned to the question of deploying computational methods in the classroom and, more broadly, in Caribbean-centered education. Presentations ranged from cutting-edge digital classroom pedagogies to Caribbean-focused online wiki projects to Caribbean-based education LLM projects. The night ended with a Keynote dialogue between Saint Lucian historian and artist Fiona Compton and professor Leighan Renaud (University of Bristol), moderated by professor Nicole Aljoe (Northeastern University), on their cutting-edge digital projects.

Friday turned to the technical side of Caribbean DH studies with panels on data curation, visual reresentations and mapping projects. The opening panel, Re-Imagining Archives, moderated by Reba Dickson, brought together academic and independent scholars to explore new forms of digital archives for preserving cultural fashion exhibits, textiles, educational resources, audiovisual materials, and declassified political documents. Friday’s second section on re-imaginging data, moderated by Savita Maharaj (Brandeis University), introduced the audience to new ways of visualizing, theorizing, and representing data in Caribbean DH scholarship. The following panel, “Poetics, Visual Aesthetics, and Technology,” moderated by Professor Sonya Donaldson (Colby College), introduced the audience to the development of Dutch Caribbean literary archives, diaspora digital discourse analysis, and the digital archiving of oral history. The final panel of the day, “Caribbean Cartographies and the Digital,” moderated by Professor Faith Smith (Brandeis University), explored various digital approaches to mapping the spatial histories of legal activism and marronage, Caribbean migrations, and visual art making.

TCD came to a close on Friday with presentations by alumni and the TCD artist-in-residence. The alumni showcase featured scholars whose projects had been supported by the CDSC at some point in its development via the microgrants program, the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute, and other partner programs. These projects ranged from digital repositories to digital cartographies to 3D animation exhibits. The alumni showcase was followed by a closing reception by the 2025 TCD Artist in Residence, Geraldine Rivera.

The Caribbean Digital creates a vital space for global conversations about the present and future of digital humanist inquiry by providing a platform for researchers, librarians, and educators doing important work in and about the Caribbean. We thank all the participants and collaborators who made this conference possible!

TCD is the official organizer of the archipelagos journal, whose published peer-reviewed scholarship has inspired and contributed to many digital projects in Caribbean Studies.

A recording of the panels will be made available on The Caribbean Digital XII website soon.