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May 15, 2012
Digital Humanities Winter Institute
MITH will host the first annual Digital Humanities Winter Institute (DHWI), from Monday, January 7, 2013, to Friday, January 11, 2013, at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland. We’re delighted to be expanding the model pioneered by the highly-successful Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria to the United States.
DHWI will provide an opportunity for scholars to learn new skills relevant to different kinds of digital scholarship while mingling with like-minded colleagues in coursework, social events, and lectures during an intensive, week-long event located amid the many attractions of the Washington, D.C. region.
Courses are open to all skill levels and will cater to many different interests. For the 2013 Institute we’ve assembled an amazing group of instructors who will teach everything from introductory courses on project development and programming, to intermediate level courses on image analysis, teaching with multimedia, and data curation. DHWI will also feature more technically-advanced courses on text analysis and linked open data. We hope that the curricula we’ve assembled will appeal to graduate students, faculty, librarians, and museum professionals as well as participants from government and non-governmental organizations.
An exciting program of extracurricular events will accompany the formal DHWI courses to capitalize on the Institute’s proximity to the many cultural heritage organizations in the region. This stream of activities, which we’re calling “DHWI Public Digital Humanities,” will include an API workshop, a hack-a-thon, and opportunities to contribute videos and other materials to the 4Humanities campaign to document the importance of the humanities for contemporary society.
Both the outward-looking DHWI Public Digital Humanities program and the week of high-caliber, in-depth digital humanities coursework will be kicked off by the Institute Lecture. This year’s speaker will be Seb Chan, currently the Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City.
We hope that many of you will join us this winter in Maryland for what promises to be a terrific event. Registration is now available at this site.
Like DHSI, we will be offering a limited number of sponsored student scholarships to help cover the cost of attending the Institute. The scholarships are made possible through the generosity of this year’s DHWI Instructors and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities
To keep up with news and events related to DHWI, follow @dhwi_mith. For all other enquiries, please contact Jennifer Guiliano, dhinstitute@umd.edu
March 30, 2012
Facebook Metamorphoses
A day in the life of EMiC on social media
December 7, 2011
Spectres of Modernism
[Excerpt of editorial cross-posted from Canadian Literature.]
Canadian Literature’s winter 1995 Marx and Other Dialectics
issue watched over the changing of disciplinary and literary old guards—or, if you will, an old left guard. This was the same number that announced the establishment of the journal’s home page (canlit.ca) and the creation of the Canadian Literature Discussion Group listserv (CANLIT-L) hosted by the National Library. It was “an hour / Of new beginnings,” as F.R. Scott said in his 1934 poem “Overture.” That same year observed the deaths of Earle Birney and George Woodcock. Dorothy Livesay passed away the year following. These deaths signaled the passing of a generation that put into practice the dialectics of modernism and political radicalism. With the appearance of an issue devoted to Marxism and Canadian literature, it may have seemed at the hour of their death that their generation’s literary and political legacies had for the moment been granted reprieves and survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of European communism.
[Click here to read the rest of the editorial at canlit.ca]
December 5, 2011
Space Hardware
[This is the first in a series of posts on my current research on modernist laboratories—avant garde, corporate, and scientific—and their relationship to the emergence of digital humanities labs. My thanks to the participants in my Modernist Remediations graduate seminar at Yale for letting me test these experiments with them and for their feedback on my various hypotheses.]
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
—Billy Bragg, A New England
My first drawing of a laboratory pictured a meteoric machine reentering the earth’s atmosphere, molten metal raining down upon an imagined metropolis. During the summer of 1979 I was transfixed by reports of where the wreckage of NASA’s Skylab was projected crash down to earth. I spent several days in early July feverishly touring around my neighbourhood on a pedal-powered motocross in search of space debris. It was an international media event—broadcast daily and nightly on radio and television, headlined in newspapers and covered in magazines dropped on my doorstep—far more important to me than stories my teachers told about men on the moon and their giant leap for mankind. Strangely, I distinctly remember being deflated at the discovery that Skylab didn’t take out my school, that I lived in the wrong hemisphere, that it fell to earth over the Indian Ocean and scattered across Western Australia. I wasn’t the lucky kid who cashed in on the San Francisco Examiner’s contest that offered ten grand to the first person who could deliver a piece of Skylab to its newsroom. That kid lived in Esperance, Australia. Of course he did: he lived in a place of named for eternal hope and expectation—Esperance, which seemed to me at the time an exotic territory of dream and fantasy. I lived in Victoria, British Columbia: more British than the British, as the local tourist industry advertised itself to the world, a proudly late Victorian town, a former Hudson Bay Company outpost living out its colonial half-life—or, as I later discovered, a remnant of empire that somehow produced modernists without ever being modern. For that week in July I was seduced by technologies of modernity. I was, after all, a Cold War kid. And that Australian kid was, if only for his 15 minutes of fame, the irrational object of my Western media-fueled envy. I felt myself freewheeling backwards into the Victorian past; he, my commonwealth counterpart, was rocketing into a globalized modernity. Yes, the sky was falling, and I wanted to catch a fiery piece of the southern sky.
At the time I had no conception of the magnitude of the five IBM mainframe computers at the Johnson Space Centre required to navigate Skylab. I probably still don’t. My only encounter with a computer was the Apple ][ that one of the teachers at my grade school kept in what had once been a chemistry lab. It was the only classroom with microscopes and glassware and dissection instruments, which were kept under lock and key in cabinets at the back. On an early morning prowl I discovered that the classroom itself wasn’t locked, which seems strange in retrospect, given that someone at the school board must have signed off on the delivery of a computer that—depending on the amount of RAM—cost somewhere in the range of $1300 to $2700 US. Presumably it made the most sense to keep the school’s one computer in its old lab. I’m assuming that it never crossed anyone’s mind to put it in the music room. Or the library. It’s a computer, and computers belong in labs. What would humanists ever want to do with a computer? The short answer is sneak into the classroom-lab before school to play videogames—my obsession, which happened to be Steve Wozniak’s proof of concept for the Apple ][, was a game called Breakout—and the long answer is to start peddling myself down the long road to becoming a digital humanist.
August 17, 2011
Cultural Histories: Emergent Theories, Methods, and the Digital Turn
Organized by TransCanada Institute & Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory
University of Guelph
March 2-4, 2012
Keynotes: Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara) – Steven High (Concordia)
In both history and literary studies, critical theory and the cultural turn have called into question the role of narratives and metanarratives of teleology and causation, and of monological or hegemonic voices in scholarly constructions of the past. Be it a reading of the problems of the past with an eye to possibilities in the future, a genealogical analysis of the remains of the past,
cultural ethnography channeled through archives, or a critical rendering of a discipline’s formation, historical projects help us understand ourselves and the sites we inhabit at the same time that they can cause ruptures and discontinuities that unmoor familiar regimes of truth and the instrumental and rational models that produce them. Writing cultural history has been
progressively challenged by a range of intellectual developments since the latter part of the twentieth-century. Critical theory and the cultural turn have called into question the roles of narratives and metanarratives, of teleology and causation, and of monological or hegemonic voices in scholarly constructions of the past. The contemporary accelerated pace of change, the ephemerality of eventful experience, and the relentless remediation of representations of events
in the age of digital information networks present new kinds of challenges in relating the present to events of the recent past. The shift towards digital scholarship further complicates historical projects by offering a much larger potential “archive” of sources and new tools for scholarly engagement. The current fascination with the archive and its application to uncommensurable
referents itself points to a sea change in how we engage with, attempt to access, and inscribe the past. Digital tools offer the chance to engage with the past using evidence on a much larger scale, as well as different modes of representation than those possible with print media. Yet engaging with the potential and perils of digital media requires dialogue with “analog” debates over how to engage in cultural history. This conference aims to bring together literary scholars and historians to discuss the impact of recent theoretical and methodological developments in our fields and think of new directions.
This interdisciplinary conference is jointly sponsored by the TransCanada Institute (www.transcanada.ca) and the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory /Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (www.cwrc.ca) to foster debate on new modes and methods of history and historiography, especially those employed or theorized by cultural historians, literary historians, and critics.
Examples of topics or questions to be considered:
• Historiography, historicism, and epistemic shifts
• Cultural histories in the context of post/colonialism, diasporas, minoritized communities, and globalization
• Writing about mega events (e.g., Olympics, G20 protests)
• The writing of histories of literature, text technologies, and modes of cultural production
• Digital interfaces for historical argument
• Historicizing critical concepts, or institutional and/or disciplinary formations
• Genres of cultural histories (e.g., literary history, chronicle, biography)
• The histories of cities, of space, or place
• Non-positivist histories, or speculative histories
• Cultural histories of crisis and/or trauma, truth or reconciliation commissions
• Activist historiography
• Archives as sources, as textual constructs, as problems
• Digital archive structures and their implications for cultural history
• Histories of the ephemeral, the popular, or the representative
We invite proposals of no more than 300 words for twenty-minute papers or panel proposals of three or more papers (nontraditional formats such as 10-minute position papers or project demonstrations are welcome).
Organizing Committee: Susan Brown and Smaro Kamboureli (University of Guelph), co-chairs; Catherine Carstairs (University of Guelph); Paul Hjartarson (University of Alberta); Katherine McLeod (Postdoctoral fellow, TransCanada Institute).
Deadline for abstracts: September 30, 2011
Notification of acceptance: October 30, 2011
Submission address: transcan@uoguelph.ca, or
Cultural Histories Conference, TransCanada Institute, 9 University Avenue East, University of Guelph, ON, Canada, N1G 1M8
July 21, 2011
L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory
Call for Proposals
L.M. Montgomery and Cultural Memory
University of Prince Edward Island, 21–24 June 2012
“Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.” — The Golden Road (1913)
“and even if you are not Abegweit-born you will say, ‘Why … I have come home!’” — “Prince Edward Island” (1939)
For the tenth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, we invite scholars, writers, readers, and cultural producers of all kinds to consider the topic of L.M. Montgomery and cultural memory. A term that originated in the field of archaeology and that now resonates in a wide range of disciplines, cultural memory refers to the politics of remembering and forgetting, sometimes in opposition to official versions of the past and the present. Within textual studies, the term invites us to consider the ways in which the past, the present, and the future are remembered, recorded, and anticipated by members of a collective and encoded into text. As a result, cultural memory touches on a number of key concerns, including identity, belonging, citizenship, home, community, place, custom, religion, language, landscape, and the recovery and preservation of cultural ancestries.
But what versions of Prince Edward Island, of Canada, of the world do Montgomery’s work and its derivatives encourage readers to remember? How do gender and genre (not to mention religion and power) affect and shape Montgomery’s selective and strategic ways of remembering in her fiction and life writing? What acts of memory can be found in the depiction of writers, diarists, letter writers, oral storytellers, poets, and domestic artists in her fiction? What roles do domesticity, nature, conflict, and war play in the shaping and reshaping of cultural memory? To what extent do nostalgia and antimodernism drive Montgomery texts in print and on screen? How have these selective images of time and place been adapted to fit a range of reading publics all over the world?
The LMMI invites proposals for papers that will consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, and the range of adaptations and spinoffs in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities. Proposals for workshops, exhibits, films, and performances are also welcomed. Proposals should clearly articulate the proposed paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see http://lmmresearch.org/bibliography for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the program chair, Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre (ben@roomofbensown.net). Submit a proposal of 200-250 words, a biographical statement of 70 words, and a list of A/V requirements by 15 August 2011 by using our online form at the L.M. Montgomery Institute website at http://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. Since all proposals are vetted blind, they should include no identifying information.
July 16, 2011
EMiC Funds Five New Graduate Fellows, One Postdoc
For 2011-12, EMiC has awarded five one-year graduate-student stipends ($12-15K) and one two-year ($63K) postdoctoral fellowship. For more comprehensive descriptions of these projects, see the newly revamped Projects page on the EMiC website. For bios of the stipend and fellowship recipients, please visit the About Us page of the website.
Vanessa Lent
EMiC Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2012-14
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Wilfred Watson, Cockrow and the Gulls
In January 2012, Vanessa will be leaving her post as EMiC Project Administrator for her new position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Alberta. Her postdoctoral project proposes to engage in a much-needed reassessment of Wilfred Watson by creating a hybrid print/digital edition of Cockcrow and the Gulls (1962). This project will be nested within a larger scholarly initiative at the University of Alberta where Paul Hjartarson leads the joint digitization of the Wilfred Watson Fonds, held by the University of Alberta, and of the Sheila Watson Fonds, held by St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. Her project adds to this work by initiating the digitization and analysis of Wilfred Watson’s dramatic works, a project that aligns with the first stage of the Wilfred Watson digitization initiative that runs from 1951 (when he was hired by as an English Professor by the U of A) to 1962, the year in which Cockcrow was mounted.
Kristin Fast
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
University of Alberta
Research supervisor: Paul Hjartarson
Project: Sheila Watson, A Genetic Study of Three Short Stories
This project is a genetic study of three short stories by Sheila Watson: “Brother Oedipus,” “The Black Farm,” and “Antigone.” The genetic study has a key role to play in the digital development of the Editing Sheila Watson and Editing Wilfred Watson projects underway at the University of Alberta. It will use the detailed knowledge of the archives built in the course of the genetic study as a driver for the digital implementation of the Watson projects online. This study is central to developing a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Sheila’s archive and Wilfred’s during this period. It will ensure that the EMiC UA team can design technological infrastructure to reflect the inter-related nature of these two archives; it will also guide design of an interface that makes these relationships visible to our users.
Melissa Dalgliesh
EMiC PhD Stipend, 2011-12
York University
Research supervisor: Stephen Cain
Project: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition
The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson: A Digital Edition will be an “archive of editions” of Wilkinson’s poetry. Rather than attempting to supplant or replace the existing editions of Wilkinson’s work, my edition seeks to encompass them; in so doing, the digital Complete Poems will illuminate the composition, transmission, and reception history of Wilkinson’s poetry, an ongoing process of which the published editions are material manifestations. The digital edition will present Wilkinson’s complete published and unpublished poems in all of their variant forms as marked-up images. The digital format of the Complete Poems will also allow readers to compare multiple versions of the same text so that they can examine the evolution of each work, in all of its variant forms, over time; readers will be able to select which versions of the text they choose to compare, providing them with control over their reading experience and selection of material for analysis. Alongside the variant and bibliographic markup, the poems will also include links to extensive explanatory notes. These notes will cross-link to other related poems, and as the collection expands, to Wilkinson’s letters, journals, juvenilia, and prose.
Reilly Yeo
EMiC MA Stipend, 2011-12
University of British Columbia
Supervisor: Mary Chapman
Project: Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton, Selected Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Journalism: A Digital Edition
This project will produce a digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far/Edith Eaton that will push the edges of this EMiC’s digital initiatives by integrating innovative approaches and tools from both inside and outside the academy. This digital edition of works by Sui Sin Far will have three primary goals: (1) bridge academic and public conversations about Canadian modernism and multicultural contributions to Canadian literature by experimenting with a “duplex” website, with one half targeted to academics and one half targeted to the interested public, connected through multiple opportunities for dialogue and exchange; (2) explore ways to innovate on the interface design for digital editions in order to allow the reader/user to have more authority in designing his or her reading experience; (3) bring the digital edition into the 21st century by making it a rich multimedia experience. This project will help EMiC be at the forefront of the movement to change readers’ relationships to texts through their digitization, to make reading Canadian literature an interactive, immersive experience that can rival other, more pop‐cultural online experiences that dominate the bulk of what Canadians now do online.
Leah Ellingwood
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Project: Wyndham Lewis, Tarr Resources
This project will contribute to the mandate of increasing the accessibility of Wyndham Lewis-related texts to those interested in unravelling his role in modernism. It will generate a Tarr Resources website with annotations of works relating to Tarr that are included in the C.J. Fox Collection housed at University of Victoria’s Special Collections. The Tarr Resources site will provide a description of longer works related to Tarr from the archive, including different editions and collections of criticism. In addition to summarizing each of the collection’s Tarr resources, this project will also involve digitization of materials relating to Tarr in the UVic Wyndham Lewis collection and works that are not already digitally available elsewhere. The Tarr Resources site is part of UVic’s Modernist Versions Project (MVP), a digital processing framework that will produce digital critical editions with searchable databases of variants. The 1918 and 1928 editions of Tarr are the first texts this project will digitize, and the resultant MVP Tarr editions will be invaluable and powerful digital tools for scholars interested in comparative analysis. The resources website will supplement the MVP as a starting point for critical inquiries on Tarr.
Jana Millar Usiskin
EMiC MA Stipend
University of Victoria
Supervisor: Stephen Ross
Project: Audrey Alexandra Brown, Collected Poems: A Digital Edition
This project will make Audrey Alexandra Brown’s work more accessible to modernist scholars and the general public by converting the published and unpublished poems to digital form. She published five volumes of verse and a prose diary in the 1930s and 1940s and her poems were published in newspapers across Canada. She won the Lorne Pierce medal in 1944 for “distinguished contributions to Canadian literature” as well as awards from the Royal Society of Canada (1948) and Canadian Women’s Press Club (1936). Given Brown’s success in the 1930s and 1940s, surprisingly little critical work on her poetry has been done, while other female writers such as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, Louise Morey Bowman, P.K. Page and Edna Jacques have enjoyed renewed scholarly interest. Working closely with Brown’s archive in the University of Victoria Special Collections, this project will enhance the digital form of her work with hypertext links to contextualize it. It will explore the social and political conditions that allowed Brown to achieve relative success in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the changes in those conditions that prevented her work from being recognized and discussed in subsequent academic discussion. In addition to the digitization of the poetry, this project will address three sets of questions. First, how did Brown see her own work in the context of the political and social conditions under which she wrote, and did changes in these conditions lead to Brown’s disappearance from literary publication? If so, how? Second, to what extent did Brown’s later poetry change with the Canadian literary landscape? Finally, how does her poetry submit to or transgress definitions of modernism and how can further study of her work contribute to the modernist project?
Congratulations to all of the award recipients. Many thanks to all of the students who submitted impressive application dossiers and supervisors who wrote letters of support for these highly competitive awards. We hope that prospective graduate fellows and postdocs will submit applications next year and that the website will provide more information on how graduate students at partner institutions can take advantage of EMiC’s training program.
Special thanks to the Fellowships and Stipends committee chair, Paul Hjartarson, and committee members, Alan Filewod and Neil Besner, for their work in adjudicating this year’s competition. We all look forward to hearing more about these projects at future EMiC events and reading about them on the EMiC community blog.
June 29, 2011
Measure and Excess
Please find below a call for submissions for next year’s issue of the journal TransCanadiana on the EMiC. The call is available on the website of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies: http://www.ptbk.org.pl/Aktualnosci,5.html. Deadline for abstracts: 15 November 2011. Submission of articles: 31 December 2011.
June 7, 2011
DHSI=>DEMiC=>Digital Editions
At our DEMiC 2011 orientation session, I had a chance to welcome 30 EMiC participants to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. Or, rather, 31 including myself. A long month of EMiCites. This is our largest contingent so far, and DHSI itself has grown to host over 200 participants attending 10 different courses. The EMiC community is represented at DEMiC by 13 partner institutions. EMiC has people enrolled in 7 of the 10 offered courses. But what really makes DEMiC 2011 different from previous years is that EMiC is offering its own DHSI course.
If you’re already dizzied by the acronyms, this is how I parse them: DHSI is the institute in its entirety, and DEMiC is our project’s digital training initiative that allows our participants to take any of the institute’s course offerings. With the introduction of EMiC’s own course, DEMiC has transformed itself. EMiC’s Digital Editions course draws upon the specializations of multiple DHSI course offerings, from Text Encoding Fundamentals to Issues in Large Project Management.
The course has been in the making for roughly six years, beginning with the pilot course in editing and publishing that Meagan and I first offered at Dalhousie in 2006-07. This course was not offered as part of my home department’s standard curriculum, which actually proved advantageous because it gave us the freedom to develop an experiential-learning class without harbouring anxieties about how to make the work of editing in print and digital media align with a traditional literary-studies environment. In other words, we started to develop a new kind of pedagogy for the university classroom in line with the kinds of training that takes place at digital-humanities workshops, seminars, and institutes. To put it even more plainly: we wanted to import pieces of DHSI to the Maritimes. That was pre-EMiC.
With EMiC’s start-up in 2008, we began flying out faculty, students, and postdocs to DHSI. After two years (2009, 2010) of taking various DH courses at introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels, we consulted with the EMiC participants to initiate the process of designing our own DHSI course. Meagan and I worked together on the curriculum, and Matt Huculak consulted with both of us as he surveyed the various options available to us to serve as an interface and repository for the production of EMiC digital editions at DHSI. After six months of trial and error, weekly skype meetings with about a dozen different collaborators, three different servers, and two virtual machines, we installed Islandora with its book ingest solution pack. That’s what we’re testing out in Digital Editions, keeping detailed logs of error messages and bugs.
I would like to thank the many people and institutional partners who have come together to make possible the first version of Digital Editions. This course is the product of an extensive collaborative network: Mark Leggott’s Islandora team at the University of Prince Edward Island (Alan Stanley, Alexander O’Neill, Kirsta Stapelfeldt, Joe Veladium, and Donald Moses), Susan Brown’s CWRCers at the University of Alberta (Peter Binkley, Mariana Paredes, and Jeff Antoniuk), Paul Hjartarson’s EMiC group at the UofA (Harvey Quamen and Matt Bouchard), EMiC postdoc Meagan Timney at UVic’s Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Image Markup Tool developer Martin Holmes at UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media Centre, and EMiC postdoc Matt Huculak at Dalhousie.
As I write this at the back of a computer lab at UVic, fifteen EMiC participants enrolled in Digital Editions are listening to Meagan, Matt Bouchard, and Alan walk them through the Islandora workflow, filling out MODS forms, testing out the book ingest script with automated OCR, and editing transcriptions in the web-based TEI editor. Some people are waiting patiently for the server to process their ingested texts. We’re witnessing the first stages of EMiC digital editions of manifestos and magazines, poems and novels, letters and short stories. We ingested texts by Crawley, Livesay, Garner, Smart, Page, Scott, Sui Sin Far, Watson, and Wilkinson. And we’re working alongside an international community, too: our newly born repository is also populated with editions of D.G. Rossetti, Marianne Moore, Tato Riviera, Hope Mirrlees, Catherine Sedgwick, and James Joyce.
This afternoon the server at UPEI processed 20 different texts. Hello world. Welcome to Day 1 of the EMiC Commons.
January 24, 2011
EMiC CEP Introduction
EMiC started not with one person, nor with many. It started with two. In many ways, it started at a little neighbourhood bar on the plateau in Montreal. Some of you will have been to Else’s, and if you spent any time there in the late 90s, you would have been likely to find me and Colin sitting alone in the bar, oblivious to the departure of the rest of the world, while the bartender hovered at a distance, waiting for us to finally exhaust ourselves and head home. Those conversations didn’t end as we departed ways at Saint Laurent, Colin heading south and I north; nor did they end when we graduated from McGill and took up positions at our respective universities.
No, those conversations were reprised for years, often when I was visiting Toronto, and at conferences like The Canadian Modernists Meet in Ottawa in 2003, where many of us in this room gathered for the first time in decades to ask a simple question that F.R. Scott first posed in 1927: no, not shall we have a cup of tea? but O Canada, O Canada can a day go by? That is, can another day go by before we acknowledge that the modernists in Canada no longer hold a position of canonical centrality in our national literature and that in the span of a few decades following their deaths many of them have fallen out of print, been dropped from syllabi, and disappeared from anthologies? To answer this question, EMiC has for the past two years facilitated collaboration among a transnational network of researchers and institutions to produce new print and digital editions of Canadian modernist texts from the early to mid-twentieth century.
EMiC’s mission statement, which appeared in the application that we collectively signed and sent to SSHRC in 2007, and now appears blazoned upon the first page of our website—in a design by Angelsea Saby indebted to typographic experiments initiated by the expressionists, vorticists, and surrealists—is decidedly un-modernist in its simplicity: “If we are to continue scholarship and teaching in the field of Canadian modernist studies, there is no more than ever before an urgent need to produce editions and to regenerate public interest in this formative period of Canadian literature whose visibility has been fading as fast as ink on foolscap.” That rallying call initially attracted 32 participants, with representatives from regions across Canada and from France, the UK, and US, from 20 partner institutions. We’ve grown significantly since: our transnational network now extends to New Zealand and Belgium, and has reached at last count over 90 participants—at the faculty, postdoctoral, doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate levels—from 33 partner institutions. Our original partnerships with five of Canada’s top university presses have expanded to include one of Canada’s finest small presses, the Porcupine’s Quill and two academic journals. Our affiliations with research centres and institutes have multiplied exponentially from a handful at our partner institutions in Canada to a collaborative research network whose rhizomatic growth is burrowing under our feet as I speak: its fascicles reach not just sea to sea, so to speak, but across borders and oceans. Modernism in Canada is now a global phenomenon. Or, better, it’s always been global—no, not just global, but all at once local, regional, national, and global.
Where we’ve made the most decisive changes have been in our migration toward digital technologies, repositories, and edition production. Much of our growth has involved the development of partnerships with technologists and researchers working in the digital humanities in Canada, the US, UK, and Europe. The motivation to grow in these digital directions has very much been local and particular to the desires of our participants, especially our emerging scholars. EMiC has always been concerned with the training and networking of students, postdocs, and new faculty, and with providing opportunities for these folks to learn from and collaborate with established mid-career and senior scholars. To this end, we have offered two annual summer institutes: one in textual editing at Trent, and another in digital editing at UVic. Over 60 students, postdocs, and faculty have attended these institutes in their first two years. More to the point: this is why we’re all here, today, for our first EMiC conference.
People often ask how I came up with the idea of EMiC: I didn’t; all of us here already had the idea. I came up with an acronym. To put it another way, I’d say that I came up with the idea because we know that Colin and I weren’t the only two modernists meeting at Elsa’s—or, rather, we know that there were for decades Canadian modernists meeting all over the place, but never in one place. It would be foolish to think that we’d ever occupy the same place. That’s why EMiC isn’t located in any one a place. You trip over stacks of it in an office at Dalhousie and retrieve it from a server in the basement of the Clearihue Building at UVic. You scan it at Library and Archives Canada, OCR it at Brock, and add metadata to it at McGill. You make tools for it at Maryland. You encode it at UVic, collate it at Queen’s, ILL it at Penn State, and visualize it at UBC. You devise skeleton keys for it at Otago. You annotate it at Miami, draw up placeographies for it at Birmingham, and add appendices to it in Leuven. You stare up up up to the ceiling looking for it in the reading room at the Thomas Fisher. You compile stemma for it at York, chart its word distributions at Guelph, and create a cascading style sheet for it at UNB. You draw up timelines for it at Alberta. You theorize it at Trent. Or maybe you avoid it altogether until 2012 when the next EMiC conference is held, when suddenly it’s all you can think about, not because you’ve contracted archive fever, been bitten by a TEI tick, or come down with an incurable case of variantitis. No, it’s probably because when we next meet, it won’t be in a bar on the plateau, but in Paris, at l’Université Sorbonne Nouvelle.
Bienvenue à EMiC