First-generation international graduate students (FGIGS) occupy a structurally marginal yet analytically underexamined position within U.S. higher education. Defined by the intersection of two identities, being international students studying outside their country of citizenship and being first-generation students whose parents did not earn a four-year college degree, FGIGS are frequently rendered invisible within institutional research and support structures that treat these categories as discrete. While existing scholarship has examined international graduate students and first-generation students independently (Seay et al., 2008; Spiegler & Bednarek, 2013; Glass et al., 2017; Standlee, 2018), far less attention has been paid to how these identities intersect at the graduate level, where informal knowledge, professional networks, and institutional navigation play an outsized role in shaping academic success, persistence, and well-being. This project addresses this gap by examining FGIGS’ educational experiences within U.S. graduate programs and by developing a multimodal digital repository that documents these experiences while offering a resource-oriented intervention.

This study is guided by two interrelated research questions: (1) What academic, social, and cultural challenges do FGIGS encounter in U.S. graduate programs (2) How can digital humanities (DH) tools be used not only to analyze FGIGS narratives, but also to surface the relational infrastructures through which inequality and resilience are produced? Together, these questions position FGIGS’ experiences not as individual deficits, but as outcomes of unequal access to the social and institutional capital that structures opportunity in higher education.

Conceptually, this study integrates social capital theory (Bourdieu, 1986) to explain how inequality is reproduced within graduate education. Intersectionality provides a framework for understanding how overlapping identities shape vulnerability and resilience, while social capital theory clarifies how those identities translate into differential access to networks, trust-based relationships, and institutional know-how. Building on foundational understandings of social capital as resources embedded in social relations, this project conceptualizes FGIGS as disproportionately excluded from informal mentoring pipelines, peer networks, and professional socialization processes that constitute the “hidden curriculum” of graduate education. Importantly, this exclusion does not signal a lack of ability or aspiration; rather, it reflects structural barriers that limit FGIGS’s capacity to translate effort into recognition, support, and advancement within U.S. academic institutions. By foregrounding social capital, the project shifts analytical attention away from individual adaptation and toward the relational and infrastructural conditions of academic life.

Methodologically, the project adopts a qualitative digital humanities approach that blends interpretive inquiry with computational analysis and digital publishing (Terras, Nyhan, & Vanhoutte, 2013). Digital humanities is understood here not merely as the application of digital tools, but as a critical mode of knowledge production that enables new ways to analyze, visualize, and disseminate marginalized narratives. As a case-based study, the study recruited FGIGS enrolled in either a master’s, doctoral, or professional program at the University of Florida to participate in focus-group discussions. Data generated through these sessions were transcribed, anonymized, and assembled into a qualitative corpus designed to preserve narrative depth while enabling cross-case comparison. Participants were also invited to submit reflective writing, images, or creative artifacts, allowing for multimodal expression of lived experience.

The analytical workflow experiments with multiple DH tools to operationalize social capital and render relational inequality visible. NVivo is used for qualitative coding to identify themes related to mentoring, peer support, faculty access, institutional navigation, and resource awareness, enabling systematic analysis of how social capital is built, constrained, or denied. Voyant Tools supports exploratory text analysis by revealing recurring linguistic patterns and affective registers associated with isolation, belonging, resilience, and institutional opacity. Tableau is used to create interactive visualizations that map disparities in access to funding, advising relationships, and professional development opportunities across demographic variables. Together, these tools allow the project to move between close reading and distant reading, narrative depth and structural patterning.

Rather than housing findings in a static archive, this study curates its materials within Scalar, an open-source digital publishing platform that supports nonlinear, multimodal scholarship. Scalar enables the integration of narratives, visualizations, and interpretive commentary while foregrounding pathways that mirror the fragmented and uneven trajectories of FGIGS’ academic journeys. This design choice reflects a core DH commitment: form is itself an argument. By resisting extractive data practices and prioritizing participants’ voices, contexts, and accessibility, the project positions the digital repository as both a scholarly output and a practical resource. The platform is intended to serve FGIGS, faculty, advisors, and educational policymakers by making the relational dimensions of graduate education more visible, often obscured by institutional metrics.

As a work-in-progress DH short paper, this study contributes to broader conversations about equity, care, and public scholarship in digital humanities. It raises critical questions about how social capital is unevenly distributed within academic institutions, how qualitative narratives can be ethically visualized without erasure, and how DH projects can move beyond representation toward infrastructural intervention. At a moment when diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are being rolled back and depoliticized, and when international students are subject to heightened scrutiny in the United States, FGIGS occupy a paradoxical space: frequently celebrated as symbols of global diversity yet excluded from meaningful institutional support. This project argues that digital humanities offers a uniquely powerful framework for documenting such contradictions while building alternative modes of visibility, connection, and institutional learning.