Community
June 18, 2014
A Breath of Fresh Air
Posted on behalf of Nathalie Cooke:
Let me be candid: DHSI 2014 was a breath of fresh air.
Weather was great, U Vic hosted us with a welcome of trees, breathtaking scenery and wildlife, not to mention hugely friendly staff. My classroom was beside First Peoples’ House, where there was a terrific totem being carved out of cedar. And evenings gave me a chance to visit some of Victoria’s beautiful beaches and glimpse the sea life. Many thanks!
I confess I learned tons of new things at my first DHSI, from teachers, but also from other students since they brought such a range of expertise and interests to this intellectual summer camp for grown ups in a beautiful part of the world. Let me preface my list of things learned by saying that this was my first DHSI, so some of the insights that were huge for me might seem like starlight twinkles from the past for others.
I discovered:
– CWRCwriter (thanks Susan Brown, Michael Brundin, Mihaela Ilovan),
– CWRC mapping tool (thanks Michael Brundin and Susan Brown)
– Voyant tools (on everyone’s list of favourite visualization tools: thanks for the refresher Susan, and huge thanks McGill colleague Stefan and co-investigator Geoffrey Rockwell for imagining and creating this significant application. I’m as impressed now as I was upon first seeing it)
– tweetdeck (thanks André de Avillez)
– storify (thanks André de Avillez)
I was very grateful for luxury of a full workweek in which I could find time to renew collegial links and to establish new ones:
– as well as to explore collaborative work environments (thanks to the CWRCshop itself, and talented & collegial classmates sitting in “my corner” of the classroom, Shakespearean Cameron Butt, fiction author and modernist scholar Claire Battershill, software developer and digital preservation hobbyist Justin Kerk, and Orlando affiliate Kathryn Holand),
– to learn more (thanks Bret and Emily of the Spanish Civil War Project)
– to reconnect with colleagues now living in other parts of the country, including Karis Shearer, Erin Wunker and Dean Irvine
– and even to find a space to catch up with colleagues from Montreal, including Jeff Weingarten, since the usual buzz of academic work leaves few pockets of time for real conversation.
Thanks DEMiC for giving me these opportunities!
