DH @ Guelph Fall 2014/Winter 2015/Summer Workshops 2015
Fall 2014
DigiWorks
Wednesday, October 22
The Scottish Chapbook Project
Please join us for the inaugural DigiWorks session!
DigiWorks is a new series of presentations featuring DH-focused works-in-progress by members of the U of G community. The atmosphere is informal and non-technies are extremely welcome (we promise them a good time)! These sessions are an ideal way to learn more about colleagues' work -- in particular, the innovative ways they're integrating digital methods into their humanities research. If you're working on a digital project of your own, or simply considering one, you'll be able to benefit from the experience of your peers. But come even if you're not presently considering a digital project -- you might leave a DigiWorks session with one in mind!
The first session, led by Melissa McAfee, Andrew Ross, and Sierra Dye, focuses on the Scottish Chapbooks Project, an effort to digitize the Library's collection of approximately 600 18th and 19th century chapbooks. Chapbooks (literally, "cheap books") are an important form of early popular literature, which, because they were not always treated as "serious," have not been widely preserved. For this reason, Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton has identified chapbooks as one of the genres most pressingly in need of digitization (link). The Scottish Chapbooks Project rises to this challenge, aiming to preserve and disseminate these fascinating materials. To date, the project has scanned 570 chapbooks, designed a website, and is currently seeking partners and resources to make their website publicly accessible. Anyone interested in building a digitized archive or exhibition -- particularly on the Omeka platform -- will benefit from the session. No technical expertise is expected of participants, though the technically adept are welcome to contribute their insights!
Wednesday, November 12
Digi Daydreams: Starting Up the Rural Diary Website (Catharine A. Wilson, History)
Please join us for the second DigiWorks session. DigiWorks is a new series of presentations on DH-focused works-in-progress by members of the U of G community. The atmosphere is informal and non-technies are extremely welcome (we promise them a good time)! These sessions are an ideal way to learn more about colleagues' work -- in particular, the innovative ways they're integrating digital methods into their humanities research. If you're working on a digital project of your own, or simply considering one, you'll be able to benefit from the experience of your peers. But come even if you're not presently considering a digital project -- you might leave a DigiWorks session with one in mind!
This session, led by Catharine A. Wilson from the Department of History, is entitled “Digi Daydreams: Starting up the Rural Diary Website.” The website will present scanned copies of rural diaries alongside contextual material on their history and significance. In an effort to make these diaries searchable (since they are mostly handwritten, they are not candidates for automatic Optical Character Recognition), the website will also serve as a platform for “crowdsourcing” their transcription, deploying tools developed for the DIY History website at the University of Iowa.
This is a particularly exciting presentation, not only because of inherent interest of the materials, but also because the project is in its beginning stages. The creators of the Rural Diary Website will thus welcome any insight and guidance you might offer -- and for those considering taking the leap into developing a digital project of their own, the session will provide a glance into what is needed to take the first steps.
Winter 2015
DigiDo
Tuesday, February 10
Photoshop Playshop (Paul Forrest, CoA)
Make everything you touch look better! Come and play on the world's most powerful image-editing application -- Photoshop! Tuesday, February 10 from noon - 1:30 p.m. in Library Rm 034.
College of Arts Media Designer Paul Forrest will guide you through the basics of photo editing to enhance your web pages and presentations using this versatile program. If you have a specific project in mind, come with your questions.
DigiCafé
Wednesday, March 3
Artistic Expression in the Digital Age: A Roundtable Discussion on the Digital Arts
All artists today are digital artists. In music, in the visual arts, in film, and in literature, digital methods have become a vital part of the process of creation. In cases where the output remains analogue — printed books, painted canvases, celluloid film reels, 12” vinyl — the work of art usually reaches this final analogue output stage only after first having undergone several conversions into and out of digital form. The works of the most committed analogue artists will be discussed, debated, and disseminated online. Even the rejection of the digital entails an implicitly acknowledgement of its importance and ubiquity — and even those artists who avoid the digital in their process may take the digital world on as a topic or a theme.
This panel, beginning from an acknowledgment of the powerful and multiform impact of the digital on contemporary art, asks a series of follow-up questions. How have digital methods changed your own process? How have they impacted the sort of works you create? Have they changed the way you relate to your audience and your peers? Where are the digital arts taking us? Where should we take them?
Panelists:
Catherine Bush, Assistant Professor, Creative Writing MFA, Guelph-Humber
Christian Giroux, Associate Professor, School of Fine Art and Music
James Harley, Associate Professor, School of Fine Art and Music
John Phillips, Design Engineer, Digital Haptic Lab
Moderator: Adam Hammond, Michael Ridley Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities
Friday, March 13
Digital Archives and The Angel of History
Darren Wershler (Concordia University)
This talk developed as a postmortem of over a decade’s worth of work on the production of large, formal digital repositories (that we casually and problematically refer to as "archives") both inside and outside the academy. It attempts to answer two related questions:
1. What sorts of power relations do we perpetuate when when we talk about "digital archives,"
and
2. Who is the "we" in the previous sentence, and how do we understand our role in the production, circulation and consumption of these things we've been referring to as digital archives?
Ultimately the talk argues for both a change in humanities research methods and a growing need for a much greater degree of involvement of Canadian digital media scholars in the formation and critique of cultural policy. Our work as scholars is always shaped by the sorts of grants we apply for, and the ways we are allowed to disburse those funds, yet we have very little say in the production and maintenance of such grants. For those working with digital media, the problem is especially acute because the funding models are untested and the objects of research are unfamiliar. Only a greater degree of involvement with the social protocols that govern emerging technologies will allow academics to see anything other than the wreckage of our activities in retrospect.
Darren Wershler is the Concordia University Research Chair in Media and Contemporary Literature (Tier 2) and a co-editor of Amodern. He conducts most of his research with the Technoculture, Art and Games group (TAG), an interdisciplinary centre that focuses on game studies, design, digital culture and interactive art. Darren is the author or co-author of 12 books, most recently, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (U of Toronto Press), and Update (Snare), with Bill Kennedy.
Website: alienated.net
Twitter: @alienated
Summer Workshops
The University of Guelph offered DH@Guelph Summer Workshops from May 19-22, 2015, enrolling 29 students in this inaugural offering.
We had librarians, alt acs, profs, undergrad and grad students, and postdocs from a wide. range of disciplines and departments from University of Guelph, Western University (lots of them), University of Oregon, Cornell, Waterloo, University of Toronto, University of Pennsylvania, York University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Trent University, McMaster, and Ryerson. People came to work on: 19thc British lit, 19thc American history, 18thc lit, law and copyright, 19thc architectural photos, representations of the prison, comparative lit and literary, identity struggle, multi-culturalism and minorities including Jewish-Islamic struggle in Europe, historic house museums, 18thc rare books, development of anthropology, Early modern drama, gender and early modern studies, post-WWI Canada, narratives and photographs of Richard Wright, Jane Austen's creation of external space through her prose, feminism in early modernism, the letters of and digitized texts related to Eliza Fenwick, corpus linguist interested in what words mean exploring topic modeling, spatial humanities expert exploring digital scholarship tools, children's literature archive of toys, books, comic books and periodicals.
Students in the "Topic Modeling for Humanities Research” course offered by Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke got a good leg up with both Mallett and RStudio and engaged with a wide range of materials. To mention just a few of the projects, work on Spenser’s Faerie Queene offered insights into the impact of rhyming words on topic formation; we saw the contrasting ways affect registers around the notion of “memorial” in a 9/11 newspaper archive; Hansard records from around WWI supports topic modeling of what different MPs or parties or regions talk about particular subjects; using RStudio to topic model Pepys Diary broken up by years and months and 100 topics allows the visualization of the frequency of topics over time.
Students in the “Developing a Digital Exhibit in Omeka” course offered by Adam Doan, Melissa McAfee, Andrew Ross, and Catharine Wilson developed a wide range of exhibits, including on the English writer Eliza Fenwick, who lived in the Niagara region; on neo-orientalism and occidentalism in the case of Jewish-Egyptian singer Layla Murad; and on historic house museums featuring different categories of houses and a map representing their location. An adventurous participant successfully experimented with slurping up materials from the Cornell University Artsstor Shared Shelf collections to create exhibits for teaching and commentary.
We also had several public events: Susan Brown (Guelph) gave an opening talk on "Emergent Modes of Digital Scholarship”, Jennifer Roberts-Smith gave a very engaging keynote called "Your Mother is Not a Computer: Phenomenologies of the Human for Digital Humanities”, and we had a lively panel with Adam Hammond (Guelph, soon UCSC), Aimée Morrison (Waterloo) and Andrew Ross (Guelph, soon LAC/BAC) on "DH, Early Career Scholars, and Alt-Ac".
Everyone participated with gusto and there was a great atmosphere. Thanks to all who came and made it a success!
The workshops were offered as part of the DHSI network, meaning that student who enrolled in the course, some of whom are heading off to Victoria for courses in June, will be able to count their work at the DH@Guelph workshops towards the new University of Victoria Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities. We are considering offering workshops again next year, and have already had inquiries from people nearby interested in contributing a course. If you are interested, please contact digital.humanities@uoguelph.ca.