Our Students
Alison Biffi
Major: Art History
Minor: Culture & Technology Studies
I am a second-year student at the University of Guelph pursuing a Bachelor of Arts, with a major in Art History and minoring in Culture and Technology Studies. I was drawn to the Culture and Technology minor by my interest in reimagining educational communications and democratizing information. I appreciate how the emergence of digital humanities modernizes stories from the past and creates opportunities to tell new stories from our histories. My area of personal interest is in creating fun, engaging and reliable resources to share the wonders of art history with younger digital-centric generations. With the help of the Culture and Technology program, I have created my first digital project, The [In]Visible podcast, which explores how female artists of the Early Modern period in England have been largely ignored in art history. Culture and Technology studies has encouraged my critical thinking on data and how to effectively communicate scholarly ideas to our audiences. After learning more about the program from Dr. Kim Martin during a first-year class, I thought it was very innovative and am excited to explore how history, specifically art history, can be told in new and exciting ways.
Some of my work:
The [In]visible Podcast
Jasmine Drudge-Willson
Undergrad: French Studies
MA: French Studies
Current Position: Customer Success Manager at Schema App
I first encountered the Digital Humanities in the last year of my B.A. in French Studies at the University of Guelph. What started as an interest in tools for textual analysis quickly grew into a fascination with the way data is classified and interpreted by machines. Eager to learn more, I began working as a Research Assistant with the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) to develop semantic web vocabularies for various humanities datasets. This inspired me to continue on to graduate studies at the University of Guelph.
Though my M.A. coursework focused on language, literature, and culture in Francophone communities, I was inspired by what I was learning in my DH-focused research positions, and so chose to write my major research paper on cyberinfrastructure projects in Canada and France. I assessed the ontologies developed by CWRC (CA) and Huma-Num (FR), and discussed their strengths and weaknesses in terms of their critical methodologies and general usability. My work interpreted ontologies as a form of translation, understanding the diffusion of information as fraught with ethical implications related to the affirmation (or denial) of specific representations of reality.
I now work as a Customer Success Manager at Schema App—a semantic technology company in Guelph—where my experience with Digital Humanities has come in very handy! Thanks to DH, I'm able to assess and interpret technical information, and communicate complex ideas in a way that's accessible to my clients and colleagues. The Culture and Technology Studies program was exactly what I tried to morph my French M.A. into, and I'm so excited students will get to learn technical skills alongside the cultural context to engage with them more critically.
Some of my work:
The CWRC Ontology Specification 0.99.80 (Dataset, 2019)
The Evolution of Feminist Discourse: Using Digital Tools to Analyze Language & Experiment with Structure (Scalar, 2017)
Kelly Hughes
Majors: Culture & Technology Studies and History
Area of Emphasis: Storytelling & Public Humanities
Research Interests: Using digital methods for food culture research and preservation
I enrolled in Culture & Technology Studies: Keywords as an elective in my first year, a truly eye-opening experience that led me to discover how digital approaches to studying culture could further my research interests. After that first semester, I decided to do a dual major in CTS and History.
As a mature student with a background in culinary arts, this program has enabled me to bring together my interests in food culture, history, research, writing, and technology. With he skills I am learning in CTS I can approach projects in ways I didn’t think were possible, such as using algorithms or Python code to analyse thousands of digitized Medieval recipe texts, or creating a searchable database of my own cookbook library!
CTS has opened up an entire new set of possibilities for my future work in the culinary field, and beyond. One such opportunity has been my current position on the Orlando Project team, where we work to ensure database integrity, bibliographic accuracy, and create new tagged, linked, and searchable profiles of centuries of women writers.
Some of my work:
A podcast about the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) project
This piece describing the many ways food culture is mediated by technology
An infographic showing the complexity of the word “value” as applied to the intersection between culture and technology
Arshia Sandhu
Major: Computer Science
Minor: Project Management
Research interests: Technology, history, music
I am currently in my 2nd year of BSc in Computer science at University of Guelph with a minor in Project management. I am also working on my startup, Lynshia, which is a virtual personal menstrual assistant that helps break taboos and provides crucial assistance and support to women across the globe during their menstruation.
For me, Culture & Technology studies helped me see the bigger picture from a very different perspective. One of the most important realizations that I came across while working on my blog in the CTS1000 Culture & Technology Keywords course, was that it is not the lexicographer who gives meaning to words, but the whole society who collectively sets and updates the language we use. Just like words and their interpretations, the culture of a society is also susceptible to changes with time and a single entity cannot control it. Society as a whole society collectively gives birth to its culture and changes it.
Some of my work:
An infographic showing the complexity of the word “code” as applied to the intersection between culture and technology
A process flow for identifying fake news
A keyword analysis of the word “code”
Thomas Smith
Major: Theatre Studies
Current Study: MA History
Career Goals: I hope to one day work for a large archive or museum or continue my education and teach at the university level.
I find studying digital humanities immensely valuable as it can enrich the amount of information available in a source. Secrets that are buried in literature can be uncovered when you semantically search it for patterns, or historical events and objects can come to life in virtual reality. Digital humanities foster an interdisciplinary learning style that is unavailable with other streams of education.
My major was in Theatre Studies, and I am currently enrolled in an MA in History at the University of Guelph examining the uses of virtual reality with historical experiences. I am researching Lord’s Mayor Day pageants that occurred in early modern London.
I am also working for LINCS, the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship under Dr. Susan Brown and Dr. Kim Martin, investigating geospatial ontologies, updating the THINC Lab’s website, and video editing for the project.
Some of my work:
For Kim Martin’s HIST4170, I created a Twine game based on the internment of Ukrainian Canadians. Click the link to try it out!