I spent one year as the EMiC postdoctoral fellow which I mostly spent working in the McMaster University Archives reading and writing about Austin Clarke and learning about the digital humanities. I was somewhat surprised when EMiC decided to fund my Clarke project but as I learned more about the organization I realized that there really is no strict mandate for EMiC work. Their working definitions of modernism and Canadian writing are wide and flexible and indeed part of their project is to push at the boundaries of these definitions; I think this is one of EMiC’s real strengths.
During my year as the EMiC postdoc I completed the edits on my book, published a few articles, worked on my own topic modeling software and did lots of cool and fun exploratory stuff that won’t necessarily show up on my CV but that was important nonetheless. This was all thanks to EMiC. EMiC also gave me the time, resources, and community support that I needed to get started on what has become a large project on Clarke’s writing and letters. My work with EMiC has undoubtedly provided the basis for what I hope will become my second book project. The boxes of material in Clarke’s archives span more than 23m if you laid them out on the floor so the sheer volume of material took a long time to grapple with. To begin to categorize these papers, to learn about the tools I could use to interpret them, and to develop some on my own. All of this took time as well. It’s thanks to EMiC that I had the necessary time and resources to work through all of this.
I also attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute which was by far the coolest week of my year. DHSI is summer camp for DH’ers (new and experienced) and is everything a traditional conference should be. You meet cool people, learn about their cool work, and have all kinds of cool conversations over cool drinks. I think one of EMiC’s greatest achievements is helping to build the community that grew out of the DHSI experience. It is because of EMiC that so many scholars were able to attend DHSI, meet one another, and share their ideas and experiences. We talk a lot about building community as a component of our DH work but really this has to go beyond retweets and blog links. EMiC provided a model for community building that is particularly suited to Canadianists and DH’ers. This kind of work is especially important for DH’ers who may be out of place in traditional departments and is especially urgent given everyone’s pessimism for the future of the humanities.
Lauren Klein has recently insisted on the need to practice both carework and codework in the digital humanities, arguing that DH, at its best, “can perform a double function: facilitating new digital approaches to scholarly research, and just as powerfully, calling attention to what knowledge, even with these new approaches, still remains out of reach.” Dean Irvine and the entire EMiC crew provided a model for this kind of DH work that encourages a wide range of projects alongside critical interrogations of the methods of DH itself. During my time with EMiC I repeatedly saw work that exemplified both carework and codework and serve as an example for all of our future scholarship. It will be little surprise to me if young scholars 20 or 30 years from now are studying the important role of EMiC in shaping Canadian literary scholarship.
Paul Barrett
Call for Nominations
CSDH/SCHN Outstanding Achievement Award for Computing in the Arts and Humanities
The CSDH/SDCH Outstanding Achievement Award for Computing in the Arts and Humanities acknowledges a Canadian researcher or a researcher at a Canadian institution who has made a significant contribution, over an extended career, to computing in the arts and humanities, whether theoretical, applied, or in the area of community building. The recipient will be invited to accept the award and to address the society in a plenary session of the annual conference at Congress, which will be held in Ottawa in the spring of 2015.
This award is generally given to someone who has made a substantial and prolonged contribution to the community, typically a senior researcher. We have awarded it to teams. We have awarded it posthumously in recognition of a lifetime contribution. We also recognize people who have served the community in a service capacity and therefore may not have a faculty position. For a list of previous recipients, see http://csdh-schn.org/activities-activites/outstanding-awards-prix/
Nominations of up to 500 words must be submitted by October 31, 2014. Only current current members of CSDH/SCHN are eligible to submit nominations. Nominations must be sent by email to the chair of the CSDH/SCHN Awards Committee (dean.irvine@dal.ca).
The Awards committee will compile a short list, confirm with nominees whether they are willing to be considered, and request the submission of supporting material (CV, letters of support, access to contributions or projects if not readily accessible) by December 15, 2014. Adjudication of the award will be conducted by the CSDH/SDCH Awards Committee (Dean Irvine, Susan Brown, Juan Luis Suarez, Kevin Kee, and Janelle Jenstad), who may consult the CSDH/SCHN Executive or external members of the community for assistance in evaluating applications. Selection will be made by the end of December 2014. An announcement will be made in spring 2014, along with the release of the CSDH/SCHN conference program for Congress 2015.
We are pleased to announce that Editing Modernism in Canada will once again be partnering with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in order to offer opportunities for project members to participate in DH courses offered over three weeks at the University of Victoria: June 1st-5th 2015, June 8th-12th 2015, and June 15th-19th 2015.
Registration for DHSI is now open. This year will see an expansion from the regular 1 week institute to 3 weeks of courses, in part to support those enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities at U Victoria. Participants may choose to attend 1, 2, or all 3 week-long sessions. In 2015, 40 courses ranging from old favourites to exciting first-time ventures will be on offer. Each week of DHSI will include a week-long training workshop, and the core week (June 8th-12th) will also include morning colloquia, lunchtime unconferences, and Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. Throughout the institute, keynotes will be delivered by Malte Rehbein (U Passau), David Hoover (NYU), Claire Warwick (UC London), and Constance Crompton (UBC Okanagan). Tuition scholarships are available for students, and other EMiC participants (co-applicants, collaborators, postdocs, partners) can register at a discounted cost of $300.00 for students and $650.00 for non-students (for registration before April 1st 2015).
EMiC Director Dean Irvine will be teaching “Digital Indigeneity” at DHSI 2015 during the core week. For a full list of courses, to register, to apply for a tuition scholarship, or for more information, please go to dhsi.org. Make sure to register with an EMiC discount code (EMiC-Student or EMiC-Non-Student).
Please note that although we can offer discounted registrations for DHSI 2015, we cannot offer subventions for travel or accommodations. There is no application process this year. You should register directly through the dhsi.org website and arrange for your own transportation and accommodations. Students are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the generous DHSI tuition scholarship program.
In the meantime, keep posting your DH stories on the EMiC blog. And watch out for the public launch of the Modernist Commons later this fall. We’re in the process of trying to arrange on-site workshops for early adopters of the Modernist Commons; if your institution may be interested in hosting a workshop, contact us at emic@dal.ca.
For anyone who would like to register for the Digital Editions workshop on Friday, May 30th, please see the registration details below. This afternoon workshop will feature the latest iteration of the Modernist Commons. If you can’t make it to DHSI in Victoria, come to Congress at Brock for a preview of EMiC’s digital repository and editorial workbench. Those of you who have seen earlier versions of the Modernist Commons will be interested to see the strides we’ve taken from prototype to production platform over the past few years, and those who are new to EMiC and its infrastructure development can learn how to take advantage of the freely available content-management, optical character recognition, TEI and RDF markup, versioning, collation, and visualization features that the new platform has to offer. If you can make it to DHSI, the Modernist Commons will be demoed for anyone who wants to drop in on Susan Brown’s CWRCshop course.
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DHSI@Congress 2014 (28-30 May 2014)
The DHSI@Congress is a series of 2.5 hour workshops for scholars, staff, and students interested in a hands-on introduction to the ways that traditional and digital methods of teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation intersect and enhance one another. The workshops are built on the community model of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, which connects Arts, Humanities, Library, and Archives practices and knowledge in a digital context. The workshops are modular and may be taken individually or as a self-directed course of investigation. We invite you to register through the Congress2014 website for any and all workshops that engage your interest.
DHSI@Congress is brought to you by the DHSI in partnership with CSDH/SCHN and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. DHSI@Congress participants must be registered for Congress in order to take part in the workshops. The plenary is free and open to those not registered for Congress.
For more information, feel free to contact the DHSI@Congress organizer, Constance Crompton, at constance.crompton@ubc.ca or follow us @DHInsitute on Twitter.
To register, please visit the Congress registration page (https://www.regonline.ca/Register/Checkin.aspx?EventID=1526736).
A ground-breaking addition to modernist studies, Modernism: Keywords is a collaborative work drawing on the research of twelve faculty and (former) graduate students, all initially located at the University of Toronto. Keywords—an approach pioneered by Raymond Williams—charts words with divergent, conflicted, and changing meanings, not to fix definitions but to use unsettled definition as a key for understanding cultural controversies and debates. Entries in this book range from possibly unexpected words like Einstein, Hamlet, and rhythm to distinctively modernist words like advertising, propaganda, and shock. Of particular interest to members of EMiC, the mix of modernist voices includes Canadians Francis Marion Beynon, E. K. Brown, Richard Bucke, Morley Callaghan, Annie Charlotte Dalton, Pelham Edgar, John S. Ewart, Northrop Frye, W. Eric Harris, Stephan Leacock, Wyndham Lewis, Dorothy Livesay, Hugh MacLennan, Marshall McLuhan, Lucy Montgomery, Emily Murphy, Charles G. D. Roberts and A. J. M. Smith, with quotations as well from the Balfour Declaration, the Charlottetown Guardian, and the Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature. With the inclusion as well of writers from Australia, the Caribbean, India, New Zealand, and South Africa, Modernism: Keywords advances a paradigm of modernism as a cross-nation web. The accessible entries should appeal to a wide range of readers, from non-academics to research specialists. You can read more about this work, including an excerpt, on the Wiley Blackwell page. A 20% discount is currently available, for either hardcover or ebook from the Wiley site: go to www.wiley.com and enter the code LTR14 at checkout. The Amazon site offers discounts as well, for hardcover and Kindle formats. The book is also available from Kobo, and from iTunes for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac.
Posted by Melba Cuddy-Keane
Please find below a snippet of a call for nominations from the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanitiés numériques. Full details available online at the links below. Deadline for nominations is 15 March 2014.
Dean Irvine
Vice-President, CSDH/SCHN
Chair, CSDH/SCHN Outstanding Contribution Award Committee
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[version française suit]
Call for submissions for the 2014 CSDH/SCHN Outstanding Contribution Award
This award is given for an exemplary project or publication by a Canadian researcher, or a researcher at a Canadian institution, or a team based at Canadian institution. It recognizes a major contribution to the field of digital humanities, broadly conceived, by a Canadian researcher or team of researchers, or a researcher or team based at a Canadian institution, in the form of a recent scholarly publication or published software or tool contribution.
For more information, please visit our site: http://csdh-schn.org/2014/02/11/contribution-nominations/
Appel à candidatures pour le Prix de contribution exceptionnelle CSDH/SCHN 2014
Description :
Ce prix est remis pour un projet ou une publication exemplaire par un(e) chercheur(e) canadien(ne), ou un(e) chercheur(e) dans une institution canadienne, ou une équipe basée dans une institution canadienne. Ce prix est une reconnaissance pour une contribution significative dans le domaine des humanités numériques, conçue en grande partie par un(e) chercheur(e) canadien(ne), ou un(e) chercheur(e) dans une institution canadienne, ou une équipe basée dans une institution canadienne sous la forme d’une publication savante, d’un logiciel publié, ou d’une contribution sous forme d’outil récent.
Pour plus d’information, veuillez consulter notre à http://csdh-schn.org/2014/02/11/contribution-nominations/
The 28th Annual Two Days of Canada Conference
in partnership with EMiC
followed by a special one-day symposium on bpNichol’s life and works
5-7 November 2014
Since the 1920s, when Canadian avant-gardist Bertram Brooker announced art’s imminent triumph over business, the discourse of avant-gardism in Canada has frequently combined revolution, aesthetics, and ecstatic projections of the future. The 28th annual “Two Days of Canada” conference at Brock University, the oldest Canadian Studies conference of its kind in Canada, invites scholars and graduate students in all disciplines who research any aspect of the humanities or social sciences in the Canadian context to a conference centred broadly on the idea of what lies ahead for Canada and the arts in Canada.
This conference represents an opportunity to reflect on the state of the future in Canada as well as the role that forward thinking artists, philosophers, and revolutionaries have played and might yet play in shaping what lies ahead. Many possible topics comprise the broad theme of this conference, such as:
• dissent, disruption, and revolution: from early rights-based activisms to contemporary movements like Idle No More and Occupy
• future gardes in Canada and the future of the modernist avant-garde
• editing, publishing, and archiving the avant-garde
• teaching, mentoring, and inventing the avant-garde
• politics, political agency (especially including decolonization), and the arts
• equity, inclusiveness, and ideas/models of community
• movements, networks, nodes, and manifestations
• the impact of digital methodologies
• race, gender, and class in avant-garde production, dissemination, and recognition
• border crossing, transnationalism, and globalization
• futurist representations and the mediated future
• the theory of avant-gardism and modernism in Canada vis-à-vis international models
• the history, historiography, and boundaries of Canadian avant-gardism
Proposals for individual papers, presentations, or panels from all disciplines, covering any aspect of Canada’s future or the role of the avant-garde in Canada, are welcomed. Papers intended for the bpNichol symposium should be marked as such (see below). Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and may be sent to Gregory Betts, Department of English Language & Literature (gbetts@brocku.ca) before 3 March 2014. Please attach a 50 word biography to your submission. Hardcopy proposals should be sent to: Professor Gregory Betts, c/o The Department of English Language & Literature, Brock University, 573 Glenridge Ave. St. Catharines, ON., L2S 3A1
Friday 7 November 2014
9am–9pm
This collaborative symposium of scholars, writers, visual artists, musicians, and those interested and invested represents a cogent network of energies focused on the award-winning work of Canadian poet bpNichol (1944-1988). Nichol was a singular literary figure, with substantial influence on small press and experimental writing communities in Canada, the United States, and beyond. He has been the subject of countless books and essays by writers in both countries, and is the subject of a current outpouring of academic interest that has given rise to the republication of many of his books.
This one-day symposium on Nichol’s life and works will be held at the Niagara Artists Centre in downtown St. Catharines, in collaboration with Brock University’s Centre for Canadian Studies and the Editing Modernism in Canada Project. It will include plenary speakers, roundtable discussions, special topics panels, workshops on avant-garde pedagogies and production, a poetry reading, and a Fraggle Rock-themed dance party. Papers exploring any aspect of Nichol’s production or the scholarship on Nichol are welcome.
Proposals for individual papers, presentations, or panels are encouraged. Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words and may be sent to Gregory Betts, Department of English Language & Literature (gbetts@brocku.ca) before 3 March 2014. Please attach a 50-word biography to your submission. Hardcopy proposals should be sent to: Professor Gregory Betts, c/o The Department of English Language & Literature, Brock University, 573 Glenridge Ave. St. Catharines, ON., L2S3A1
[Cross-posted from http://www.mith.umd.edu/dhwi/]
The Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC) project and the Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI) are delighted to announce the 8th course for the upcoming 2013 institute. Digital Editions, led by EMiC director Dean Irvine, is designed for individuals and groups who are interested in creating scholarly digital editions. Topics covered will include an overview of planning and project management, workflow and labour issues, and tools available for edition production. Participants will be working with the Modernist Commons, a collaborative digital editing environment and repository designed by EMiC in collaboration with Islandora and its software-services company DiscoveryGarden.This course was made possible through the generous sponsorship of EMiC. We invite you to visit DHWI and EMiC to learn more about this training opportunity and this exciting international project.
EMiC participants (faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate fellows) and other students affiliated with EMiC co-applicants and collaborators may apply to attend DHWI online at http://editingmodernism.ca/training/summer-institutes/demic/.
Read the new DEMiC, DEMiC Travel, and DEMiC Accommodations pages and Application Form carefully. There are new deadlines and new mechanisms of oversight for booking travel and accommodations for both DHSI at Victoria and DHWI at Maryland.
Looks like we’re going to have to update that summery URL. Welcome to winter training. Now there’s no off season for DH enthusiasts.
The editors of Book 2.0 invite articles on the rapidly growing application of digital tools to research and publishing strategies in the humanities and social sciences for a special issue scheduled for 2013.
Contributions may relate to curating online collections and archives, the design and implementation of new applications that support or enrich research, and emerging forms of cross-disciplinary scholarship that are supported by technology. In particular, we welcome submissions on innovative publishing and dissemination models that increase access to digitised and born-digital materials. Abstracts of no more than 200 words should be submitted to Dr Mark Turin <mark.turin@yale.edu> and Dr Mick Gowar by 4 August 2012.
Book 2.0 is a new, interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal focusing on developments in book creation and design—including the latest in technology and software affecting illustration and production. Book 2.0 also explores innovations in distribution, marketing and sales, and book consumption, and in the research, analysis and conservation of book-related professional practices. Through research articles and reviews, Book 2.0 provides a forum for promoting the progressive practice in the teaching of writing, illustration, book design and publishing across all sectors.
To read Issue 1, Volume 1 of Book 2.0 for free, please visit http://bit.ly/Book201 Or read our blog at http://booktwopointzero.blogspot.co.uk
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.