13 posts tagged with "digital humanities"

Image: Woman punch card operators working on Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus. Back left: Rosetta Rossi Bertolli; bottom right: Livia Canestraro. CC-BY-NC. Thanks to Melissa Terras, “For Ada Lovelace Day,” 2015.

I am surprised and thrilled that someone thought it worth nominating me for the Roberto Busa Prize, and overwhelmed to have been placed by ADHO in such illustrious company, fully aware that there is so much superb work in our community deserving of this recognition.

All knowledge is relational. It is fabulous to have recognition of scholarship that emerges from an intersectional perspective and is embedded in process: from making things that try to leverage technology in new ways, trying and failing, and yet continuing to try to make a difference to how we work and to enable us to create and share knowledge together, in better ways, in a changing world. For such work, collaboration is essential, which is to say it’s all about people.

My absolutely stellar colleagues here at LINCS gelled into a phenomenal team, even though we came together remotely, many of us for the first time, at the height of the pandemic, to build an infrastructure for linking scholarly knowledge across disciplines. The core LINCS team is at the heart of a growing network of scholars, students, and professionals who are, thanks to the combined efforts of these brilliant people, able to engage in serious exploration of the capacity of linked data to enhance cultural research and cultural experiences. The CWRC virtual research environment has involved 200+ wonderful people (and counting, since our credits need updating before we launch this spring as an instance of the LEAF software framework). And my belief in the magic of producing knowledge collaboratively in new digital ways grew out of formative experience as a new scholar in the Orlando Project, whose sterling participants include as active contributors ~150 students.

The point isn’t the numbers but the sense of expanding networks: there are overlaps between projects and roles, so the counting isn’t exact, indeed cannot ever be exact, because there will inevitably be inadvertent omissions, and because the strands of influence just keep linking out. I’m so grateful for all the rich relationships that infuse this work, amazed at what we’ve created and learned together, proud of those who’ve put it to work in other contexts and fields.

And there are so many other relationships, other people to whom credit is due. Mentors who bolster my confidence. Models whose thinking and practices inform and inspire mine. Co-authors and co-presenters who help me see things differently as we struggle to express ourselves together. Students and colleagues in courses and workshops whose reactions and questions spark such insight. Colleagues who carry on and remain dedicated despite the deplorable precarity of the conditions in which they work. Collaborators on projects led by others, in which I have learned so much, including Collective Biographies of Women, INKE, Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada, NovelTM, Staging Better Futures/Mise en scène de meilleurs avenirs, The People and the Text, Voyant,The People and the Text and the Women Writers Project. The creators and activists whose work reflects, reimagines, and reshapes the world we live in.

So many other projects that have worked with CWRC and LINCS, and the incredible array of digital humanities initiatives from around the world, working collectively to figure out how to make and share knowledge differently in this age of incunabula. Those in university administration—at the universities of Guelph, Alberta, and many partner universities—as well as funding organizations—CFI, CANARIE, DRAC, Mellon, SSHRC—who get that this work doesn’t fit the old moulds, who strive to remove barriers, and who develop new models. Colleagues who keep scholarly organizations like CSDH, ACH, ADHO, ACCUTE, ACQL, MLA, BWWA, VSAWC, and NAVSA ticking along so we have collegial spaces in which to connect. Colleagues on panels and boards who help me grasp the bigger picture and alternative views. Partners in GLAM and the knowledge ecosystem, like CRKN, CHIN, and Library and Archives Canada, who share the vision of what is possible if we work together.

Everyone in this particular web who is motivated by a sense of how the complexity and value of human cultures and histories—especially of women, BIPOC, colonized, 2SLGBTQI+, impoverished, and otherwise marginalized people—could register in digital space in different, more vibrant, nuanced, contextualized, respectful, and equitable ways.

I’ve always found that context changes everything when learning something new, especially when it comes to understanding why that something matters. The first example I can think of is how, for all the general chemistry courses I’ve taken, the concepts never really clicked, nor did I see why I had to learn them. Four of these courses later, I wasn’t very excited to take biochemistry, but when I did, I couldn’t believe how much of a difference it made to have a real context: the human body, where chemical reactions happen for a reason. Suddenly, the abstract became pretty important—I could see how it all fit together, and in turn, my understanding of general chem probably increased threefold. Rest assured, this blog post is not going to be about chemistry. Rather, it’s about how the same phenomenon occurred this summer, when working on the Orlando Project changed the way I think about data...

As an English student, I was always told to keep my writing concise. Doing so was often easy because I could assume that the person reading my work would be an English scholar, so their expectations of my writing and the knowledge they brought to it would sit within a very specific range. In this way, I trained myself to default to an academic tone and level of complexity and to produce writing that was comparative and analytical.

This summer, however, as a member of the LINCS documentation team, I worked on an entirely different kind of writing: user guides and instruction manuals for the many software tools developed or employed by the project. To begin writing documentation, I first had to relearn how to write...

Over the past two years I’ve had chances to work on many aspects of the Orlando Project, but the work that I’ve consistently found the most engaging has been researching and writing author profiles. Orlando’s profiles are collaboratively authored scholarly histories, which are structured by a custom XML tagset, and which allow researchers to explore the intersections between women’s lives and their creative production. During my first summer as Digital Humanities (DH) Research Assistant, I began work on the profile on Lili Elbe; in the past year, I started writing a profile on Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. As I put the finishing touches on these profiles, I’ve noticed that both women’s life stories highlight the overlap between the personal and the political, and between individual identity and the limits imposed on creative work...

The Digital Humanities (DH) was not something I had a lot of experience with before starting as a LINCS undergraduate research assistant. My work with LINCS pertains to the Early Modern London project, working alongside the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) team. Part of my job is what LINCS refers to as reconciliation, or what MoEML refers to as disambiguation...

If each part of a ship were replaced over time, when, if ever, does it become a new ship?

Little did Heraclitus, Plato, and others know that the problems posed by the “Ship of Theseus” paradox would continue to vex digital humanists in the twenty-first century...

I joined the LINCS Project as an undergraduate research assistant, mainly to work on the Orlando Project. This position gave me my first real experience with Digital Humanities (DH). Before starting the job I could barely have come up with even a vague definition of DH (despite my best efforts and quite a bit of Googling). When I finally did start to get a sense of the nature of DH—a field that brings together humanities research and new technologies, birthing new possibilities and adding depth to research—there were elements of it that felt very familiar and in line with the sort of work I had experience with as an undergraduate student majoring in English...

When I began working with ontologies at the LINCS project this summer, my colleagues and I quickly found ourselves asking exasperating questions like “How do you explain the visual concepts present in an artwork to a database?” Even more broad (and maybe ultimately unanswerable) questions like “what is a thing?” also began to arise.

Soon I was assigned to music data...

History has always been something I’ve been passionate about, and as an undergraduate student approaching graduation, I’ve become more eager to find ways to preserve primary sources. From my experience, having access to primary sources makes the researching process a lot easier, and these sources would not exist if there weren’t proper measures to preserve them.

If you’ve ever taken a history class, you probably know about the distinction between primary and secondary sources, and how primary sources are integral to the reliability of any history paper or assignment. Among primary sources in history, one type that goes largely unnoticed and can actually be hard to define is oral history...

In the summer of 2020, I was hired as a research assistant with the University of Guelph’s Bachinski/Chu Print Study Collection. Initially, my job entailed the care and maintenance of the objects in the collection with a few other tasks as assigned. Of course, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic meant that I spent the entire summer not working with the objects themselves, but rather doing deep research from home, using whatever online sources I could find. This proved to be challenging because while the collection boasts objects from a variety of dates and creators, it is largely made up of the works of mid-to-late twentieth-century Canadian printmakers who have a limited online presence...