Workshop Details

The DH@Guelph team is thrilled to announce the 2026 Summer Workshops, which will take place in person, May 19 - 22, in the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph.

All workshops are four-days in length and each participant can only register for one workshop. Please explore the workshop options below, then register on our Eventbrite page. 

The DH@Guelph Summer Workshops are proudly partnered with the new Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities (CC:DH). Click here to find out more information.

The workshops available are:

1. Introduction to Database Design

Instructors: Harvey Quamen and Jon Bath

Description: This course will introduce the use of relational databases for the analysis of humanities data. We will begin by examining why a database might be an appropriate tool for your project and then move on to how to model, or structure, your data in a database. Finally we will learn how to query, or ask questions, of your data set. Throughout this process we will be using MySQL, a free, open-source relational database tool, and learning the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL). No previous experience with databases or programming is required, and you should feel free to bring your own data in whatever form it currently is. 

Intended Audience: Anyone interested in data.

2. UX for Digital Humanities: Designing Inclusive and Engaging User Experiences

Instructors: Ahlam Bavi

Description: This four-day workshop introduces participants to User Experience (UX) design as a critical method in Digital Humanities (DH), with a focus on inclusive, community-centered, and culturally sensitive design. Participants will learn how to plan, prototype, and evaluate digital projects—such as digital archives, interactive maps, web-based storytelling platforms, and digital heritage installations—using UX principles tailored specifically to DH contexts.

The workshop combines hands-on design practice with critical reflection on accessibility, ethics, and equity in digital public scholarship. Using real DH examples, participants will learn UX research methods, user journey mapping, information architecture, prototyping, usability testing, and evaluation frameworks. Special attention will be given to designing for diverse and marginalized communities, including Indigenous cultural heritage contexts, multilingual audiences, and non-technical users.

By the end of the workshop, participants will develop a complete UX prototype for a DH project of their choice, grounded in accessible design, ethical engagement practices, and user-centered thinking. The course requires no prior UX or design experience and is suitable for DH scholars, librarians, archivists, graduate students, and cultural heritage practitioners.

Intended Audience: DH scholars and graduate students. Librarians, archivists, museum professionals. Faculty and students working in web design, UX, digital heritage, or digital archives. Beginners with no UX background are welcome.

3. TEI and Digital Edition Production with LEAF Commons

Instructor: Diane Jakacki

Description: In this hands-on course participants will learn how to develop and produce a data-rich textual edition using the open-source web-based Linked Editing Academic Framework (LEAF) Commons suite of tools: LEAF-Writer, NERVE, and the Dynamic Table of Contexts. Sessions will involve digital editorial principles and processes. We will concentrate on the editorial workflow (transformation of existing digital images or documents, semantic encoding, linked data annotation generation, publication) and develop mechanisms for effective collaboration and documentation. Learning experiences will be as responsive as possible to participants’ ongoing work – editors with projects anywhere along the production continuum are welcome. By the end of the course participants should have developed skills to make their digital edition processes more efficient, and where tools can (and cannot) aid them in undertaking their own projects.

Intended Audience: This workshop is open to humanities scholars, educators, librarians, and students interested in integrating data visualization into their work. No prior experience with data visualization is required. 

4. Rest as Resistance: Embodied Digital Humanities for Collective Liberation

Instructor:  TIKA

Description: An immersive workshop exploring how rest, regulation, and embodied knowledge function as technologies of survival, creativity, and community transformation. Rooted in Black feminist scholarship, somatic intelligence, and digital humanities practice, this course invites participants to examine how digital culture, historical trauma, identity formation, and creative expression intersect within the nervous system and across communities.

Participants will engage with multimodal tools—including digital storytelling, text analysis, narrative ethnography, somatic mapping, sound design, and collaborative storywork—to understand how rest is not only a personal practice but a political, digital, and cultural intervention. Through guided learning, hands-on activities, and reflective praxis, the course explores rest as a methodology that counteracts extraction, overwork, burnout, and the violences embedded into academic, technological, and institutional systems.

Across four days, learners will build a personal and communal digital artifact—such as a sonic rest archive, collective body map, digital memory quilt, reflective micro-essay, or multimedia narrative—designed to center liberation, care, and creativity. The workshop is open to scholars, artists, educators, technologists, archivists, activists, and community members seeking new ways to integrate embodied methodologies into digital humanities scholarship and teaching.

Intended Audience: Digital humanities scholars, educators, researchers, artists, composers, and storytellers. Community organizers & cultural workers. Librarians & archivists. Graduate students & emerging practitioners. Technologists, designers, creative developers and anyone seeking embodied, justice-focused methodologies.

5. Dead Media, Living Data: Hacking the Archive

Instructors: Arun Jacob and Dr. Paula Nunez de Villavicencio

Description: This four-day workshop brings together the fields of digital humanities, hacker culture, and media archaeology to transform technical maintenance into a form of radical historical inquiry. We pose the question: what happens when we pry open “dead” media devices and defunct media formats instead of discarding them. Working hands-on with obsolete and vulnerable media technologies, participants learn to treat technical maintenance as a form of cultural and historical inquiry while understanding it as care praxis.

The course begins with the hard skills needed to identify, access, operate, and stabilize disappearing digital media systems, such as gaming consoles, MP3 players, and cellular phones. At the same time, the workshop foregrounds the interpretive and critical practices of media archaeology. Participants read and apply key media-archaeological concepts to their own technical work, learning to see every cable, codec, and file system as part of a longer, nonlinear media history

Throughout the workshop, we position media archaeology as a methodology for DH scholarship, while espousing hacker-culture sensibilities, namely, curiosity, tinkering, resistance to black-boxed systems, and a commitment to tools and knowledges. Workshop participants will come away with small, research-driven interventions, such as mini-exhibits, methodological how-to guides, and/or critical narratives that tether device-level analysis to questions of surveillance, power, and infrastructural injustices.  

Intended Audience: This course is intended for a wide audience interested in learning about caring for and hacking obsolete and black-boxed technology, and media archeology as a digital humanities method for approaching questions of knowledge and power. We welcome undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to explore techniques of analysis that integrate digital humanities tools with historical research.

6. Humanities Pedagogy in the Age of AI: Critical Frameworks & Practical Strategies

Instructor:  Lisa Baer-Tsarfati

Description: Generative AI has entered higher education at breakneck speed, raising complex questions about equity, ethics, environmental impact, academic integrity, and student learning. Institutional responses have often fallen into two extremes: uncritical enthusiasm or punitive bans enforced through unreliable AI detection software. Neither approach supports meaningful, justice-oriented pedagogy. This workshop offers a third path: teach students how to think critically about AI, how to use it responsibly, and how to advocate for greener, more equitable technological futures. 

Over four days, participants will explore the cultural, historical, and computational assumptions embedded in AI systems; analyze the environmental and social costs of generative models; and design assignments that foreground process, authenticity, and genuine learning. Through hands-on redesign sessions, reflective discussions, and micro-teaching activities, instructors will build a sustainable framework for integrating AI into the humanities classroom with clarity, nuance, and care. Participants will leave with a course-ready AI policy, redesigned assignments, accessible classroom activities, and a critically informed stance they can articulate to colleagues, students, and institutional interest holders / decision makers.

Intended Audience: This workshop is intended for humanities instructors, librarians, graduate students, and educational developers who are navigating the impact of generative AI on teaching, learning, and assessment. It is especially suited to those teaching writing-intensive or research-focused courses who are seeking alternatives to blanket AI bans or surveillance-based approaches.

7. Making: A Feminist Praxis (Theme: Refusal and Complaint)

Instructors: Kim Martin and Kiera Obbard

Description: For the second iteration of this workshop, we will focus on the theme of Refusal and Complaint as feminist praxis, drawing on Ahmed’s new book No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining. 

This course will introduce participants to feminist (digital) making through a combination of theory and praxis. Over four days, participants will read and discuss a variety of texts related to feminist making, across topic areas including weaving, poetry film, and zine making, and then apply these learnings with hands-on maker activities. Participants will be supplied with several datasets about our theme, and are also encouraged to bring their own. In each activity, the digital will be represented in either the mode of creation (i.e., via a digital platform), or through visualization/physicalization. Through this approach, participants will learn to apply creative analytic practices to their engagement with feminism, data, and the digital. This course will also discuss how these approaches can be implemented into pedagogy. 
 

Intended Audience: The intended audience are creative practitioners, faculty, students, or anyone wanting to learn to implement their creative practice into research and pedagogy. Participants of any skill level can attend the workshop. 

8. Building Multimodal Generative AI Agents for Humanities

Instructors: Yadira Lizama Mué

Description: This hands-on course is designed for scholars, educators, and practitioners in the humanities who want to actively work with generative AI, not just learn about it. Participants will design, customize, and interact with AI agents that can interpret and generate text, structured data, images, and sound, using a range of contemporary models, including Large Language Models, Large Vision Models,  Large Audio-Language Models, and Multimodal AI.  The course emphasizes experimentation, critical reflection, and creative use. Participants will explore how these tools can support new ways of making meaning, structuring knowledge, and telling stories across different data formats, while also engaging with the ethical and cultural questions they raise. Curated datasets and tools will be provided, but participants are encouraged to bring their own research data and use the course as a space to experiment with questions that matter to their own work. The course culminates in a collaborative Project Studio, where participants will share the prototypes they have developed, learning from one another’s approaches and perspectives.

Intended Audience: This course is intended for scholars, educators, and practitioners, including graduate students, faculty, instructors, DH researchers, librarians and archivists, with little technical background, who are curious about multimodal generative AI and Agentic AI systems.

9. Intro to Soundscapes: Listening, Scoring, Field Recording, and Remixing

Instructors: Danica Evering, Subhanya Sivajothy, Chelsea Miya, Kim McLeod

Description: What does data about safety look like? What does it mean to embody, sound, and feel these experiences while mobilizing within a larger community? In this DH@Guelph workshop, we invite participants to explore intentional listening, remixing, field recording, and soundwalking. Following a grounding in sound theory and anticolonial listening, we will embark on a series of activities: Composing and performing mini sound scores, remixing field recordings and sound archives into sound collages, and An outdoor soundwalk; a guided listening activity along a planned route.

Through these exercises, participants will consider elements of sound–from its affective qualities to the dominant power structures uncovered in the soundscape of each place. If you're interested in embodied performance, remixing, sound art, or acoustic ecology, this workshop is for you!

The soundwalk portion of this workshop will take place outside. Please come dressed for the weather! Personal audio pieces, soundwalks and scores will be woven together into a collaborative multi-part programme on Friday

Intended Audience: The workshop will appeal to students, researchers, and staff interested in the digital humanities, and especially in situating audio and sound in relation to live performance, archives, mapping, and data modelling with sonification. The workshop is designed for beginners and welcomes those new to digital humanities and sound studies

Made your decision? Head over to our Eventbrite page to register!