It is with great pleasure that we announce the results of the 2012-14 Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2012-13 MA and PhD stipend competitions. We received an impressive batch of outstanding applications at all levels. Many thanks to members of the postdoc and graduate awards committee (Paul Hjartarson [Chair], Neil Besner, and Alan Filewod) for their expert adjudication of these appplications.
EMiC has awarded one new postdoc fellowship to Emily Robins Sharpe (University of Guelph) and five graduate stipends to candidates working on EMiC-affiliated editorial projects (Melissa Dalgleish [York University], Christopher Doody [Carleton University], Alana Fletcher [Queen’s University], Freeda Wilson [University of British Columbia (Okanagan)], and Katherine Wooler [Dalhousie University]).
We hope that you’ll be able to watch these projects develop through posts on our community blog, but in the meantime here’s a foretaste of their proposed research:
Emily Robins Sharpe
University of Guelph
Postdoctoral Fellowship 2012-14
Supervisors: Alan Filewod and Susan Brown
Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment
My postdoctoral work contributes to a collaborative project, “Canada and the Spanish Civil War: A Digital Research Environment,” which I am co-directing with Dr. Bart Vautour, an EMiC co-applicant. The Digital Research Environment (DRE) is a long-term, multi-phase project that will provide integrated public access to the large amount of diverse Canadian cultural materials concerning the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). The conflict animated Canadian public discourse, and inspired nearly seventeen hundred Canadians to travel to Spain where many joined the International Brigades as armed volunteers in the anti-fascist cause. The artistic community in Canada also adopted Spain as one of the most rigorously represented subjects of the time. Yet, while American and British scholarship on the conflict has persisted, Canadian cultural texts remain dispersed, difficult to access, and in some case completely undocumented. Our project begins to remedy this unfortunate critical disparity by seeking to develop a long-term research agenda for the recovery and remediation of Canadian responses to the conflict. Dr. Vautour and I envision “Canada and the Spanish Civil War” as a three-phase project that aims to alleviate this critical gap, representing the first scholarly effort to collate this Canadian material for public consumption in a systematic way. The first phase requires conducting archival research and gaining digital skills, as well as scholarly consultation and project development. The second phase of the project builds upon the first to see the preparation and publication of a clean-text print anthology, Selected Canadian Writing on the Spanish Civil War, with a scholarly apparatus housed in the DRE. The third phase of the project—perhaps the most logistically challenging—will see a massive collation and digitization in order to create a digital collection within the DRE. I am excited to take up my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph, where I will work under the supervision of Dr. Susan Brown and Dr. Alan Filewod.
Melissa Dalgleish
York University
PhD Stipend 2012-13
Supervisor: Stephen Cain
Anne Wilkinson’s Counterpoint to Sleep: A Digital Edition
I am currently at work on a digital social-text edition of Anne Wilkinson’s first collection, Counterpoint to Sleep (1951), which I’ve planned as the first of five modular editions that together will comprise the digital Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson project. Rather than attempting to replace existing editions of Wilkinson’s work, my project seeks to reproduce them in digital form in order to illuminate the ever-evolving composition, transmission, and reception history of her poetry. The digital Counterpoint is image-based in order to foreground the reading experience in the edition as it was originally published and read; readers will also be able to view all of the variant versions of the poems in the collection, read embedded notes that highlight textual variance and provide bibliographic and explanatory information, and challenge or support my editorial decisions.
Christopher Doody
Carleton University
PhD Stipend 2012-13
Supervisor: Zailig Pollock
Digital Edition of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal
My project is to start creating a digital edition of P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal, as part of the larger Digital Page Project. It will be a database, containing a reading version of the text, alongside all its variant versions—there are nine manuscript versions, and three variant print versions of the text. For each variant version, the database will contain both a high-quality image and a transcription of each page. This will allow users to quickly compare changes between the different versions of the text. It will also allow users to follow Page’s creative process as the text was transformed from a personal written diary in Brazil in the late 1950s to a published public text in the late 1980s.
Alana Fletcher
Queen’s University
PhD Stipend 2012-13
George Whalley: A Digital Edition of Selected Poetry Materials
The project I am currently undertaking with the assistance of an EMiC PhD stipend will produce an open-access, online database of the primary materials of George Whalley. One of the aims of this project is to make Whalley’s poetry manuscripts and typescripts and documents related to their production (such as related letters, personal papers, and photographs) available to a wider scholarly audience. The database is also foundational to subsequent digital and print editions of Whalley’s works Michael DiSanto (Algoma University) and I will produce, the first of which is a digital edition of selected materials that will provide rich insights into Whalley’s creative process as a poet. This digital collection will serve as the counterpart to a scholarly print edition of Whalley’s collected poems that Professor DiSanto is editing for McGill-Queen’s University Press, with an expected publication date of 2015.
Freeda Wilson
University of British Columbia (Okanagan)
PhD Stipend 2012-13
Supervisor: Karis Shearer
Digital Visualization of the Evolution of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion
The focal point of this project will be to present a digital visualization of the evolution of a given chapter of Gabrielle Roy’s Bonheur d’occasion. Under the supervision of Dr. Karis Shearer, I will focus on the major editions between 1945 and 1977, as well as the two English translations (The Tin Flute), and identify the differences (additions, changes, omissions) which occur between each of the editions and the original, and then proceed to determine the source (author, editor, translator) and reason (language, text length, etc.) for each change. The resulting data will be organized and structured in a digitized, 3D format in which the data can be manipulated, allowing for further research. Other scholars will be able to build on this work, expanding the research to cover an entire text, to include several or all of Roy’s texts [or other authors’ works] and to incorporate this research in larger projects.
Katherine Wooler
Dalhousie University
MA Stipend 2012-13
Supervisor: Dean Irvine
Editing Evolution: Assembling and Analyzing bpNichol in a Digital Edition
I will be creating a digital critical edition of bpNichol’s works that highlights Dada aesthetics within his writing. Using genetic criticism to emphasize the evolutionary nature of his multi-versioned works, the edition will highlight Nichol’s use of intermedia, word processors, and unconventional forms. A digital medium will expand the functionality of genetic criticism to encompass Nichol’s attention to bibliographic codes. Nichol’s poetry, prose, and drawings deserve a non-traditional textual apparatus, a redefinition of the standard systems of criticism, and the adoption of new bibliographic codes to better reflect the text and the purposes of the paratext. By implementing these changes, my critical edition will become a direct extension of the creative work, as opposed to a format in which the text and the textual apparatus are completely different species.
[…] Robins Sharpe has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Editing Modernism in Canada project to begin developing, with Bart Vautour of Mount Allison, a Digital Research Environment on […]