Archives
Author Archive
December 15, 2010
ACQL CFPs (Member Organized Sessions) / ALCQ appels (Propositions de séances organisées par des membres)
Calls for papers (Member Organized Sessions)
Appels à communications (Propositions de séances organisées par des membres)
Association of Canadian and Québécois Literatures
Association des littératures canadienne et québécoises
Congrès des sciences humaines Université du Nouveau-Brunswick et Université St Thomas
Fredericton, Nouveau-Brunswick
du 28 au 30 mai 2011
May 28-30 2011
La modernité dans les littératures canadiennes anglophone et francophone
(English version follows)
L’étude de la littérature canadienne a atteint un point critique de réévaluation dans le contexte universitaire canadien anglais. Dans le cadre de ce colloque, nous proposons d’aborder les points de recoupement entre les manifestations francophones et anglophones de la modernité au Canada et chercherons à stimuler les collaborations entre universitaires anglophones et francophones en vue de relever les rapprochements et les points de rupture entre les «modernités» des deux langues officielles du Canada. Nous tenterons de déterminer comment un tel processus de réévaluation peut modifier notre façon de considérer non seulement les écrits modernes, mais leur documentation, leur archivage et leur étude. Voici quelques questions auxquelles les auteurs pourront tenter de répondre dans leur communication :
• Qui étaient les écrivains canadiens français dont les œuvres étaient marquées d’une esthétique moderne? Comment la culture, l’histoire et la société canadiennes-françaises ont elles influé sur cette esthétique?
• De quelles manières peut on considérer Montréal comme étant un terreau fertile de collaborations interculturelles entre artistes et universitaires francophones et anglophones?
• La modernité continentale et la modernité anglo américaine ont-elles eu des répercussions différentes sur la modernité au Canada français et au Canada anglais?
• De quelles manières les écrivains français de l’extérieur du Québec faisaient ils preuve de modernité dans leurs écrits?
• Comment la modernité s’est-elle manifestée dans la traduction des œuvres canadiennes?
• Quels sont les sites de la modernité canadienne française? Les œuvres littéraires ont elles été publiées à grande échelle ou ont elles plutôt été distribuées au sein de cercles fermés?
Veuillez envoyer une proposition d’environ 300 mots et un énoncé biographique d’une centaine de mots (en anglais ou en français) et un résumé de 50 mots aux deux vice-présidentes de l’ALCQ Sara Jamieson (sara_jamieson@carleton.ca) et Lucie Hotte (lhotte@uottawa.ca) ainsi qu’aux organisatrices de l’atelier Sophie Marcotte (sophimar@alcor.concordia.ca) et Vanessa Lent (vlent@dal.ca) au plus tard le 15 janvier 2011.
French / Canadian Modernisms
The study of Canadian modernist writing is currently at a critical point of reevaluation in English-Canadian scholarship. This panel proposes to address the interfaces between French and English manifestations of modernism and seeks to encourage collaboration between English and French scholars in tracing connections and / or disruptions between modernisms in Canada’s two official languages. How can such evaluations shift our understanding of the ways in which modernism has been written, documented, archived, and studied? Possible questions papers may address include:
• Who were the French Canadian writers who were engaging with modernist aesthetics? How did the context of French Canadian culture, history, and environment affect these aesthetics?
• In what ways can we see Montreal as a site of rich cross-cultural collaboration between French and English artists and scholars? Were there other such sites?
• Do the influences of Continental modernism and Anglo-American modernism reverberate differently in French and English Canadian modernisms?
• In what ways were French writers outside of Quebec engaging with modernism?
• How has modernism been translated in Canada?
• What are the sites of French Canadian modernism? Was it widely published or was it more privately distributed?
Please submit 300-word proposal, 100-word biographical statement (in English or in French) and a brief 50-word abstract to ACQL vice-presidents Sara Jamieson, sara_jamieson@carleton.ca and Lucie Hotte at lhotte@uottawa.ca and also to organizers Sophie Marcotte (sophimar@alcor.concordia.ca) and Vanessa Lent (vlent@dal.ca), by January 15, 2011.
Traversing Boundaries in the New Brunswick Literatures
(La version française suit)
From the early record of explorer Jacques Cartier’s first voyage and contact with aboriginal peoples in northern New Brunswick in 1534, New Brunswick has been at the crossroads of Canadian writing. In 1824, Fredericton’s Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart wrote the first novel published in Canada by a native-born Canadian. Two generations later, Charles G.D. Roberts pioneered the animal story in New Brunswick and Bliss Carman courted an early modernist readership with lyrics penned in the province. A generation after that, a young Northrop Frye spent his formative years at what is now Moncton’s Aberdeen Cultural Centre, then his old high school, a short distance from the imaginative territory that would be claimed by Antonine Maillet, who would become the first non-European winner of France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. Today, The Fiddlehead is Canada’s longest-living literary magazine, and New Brunswick writers David Adams Richards, Serge Patrice Thibodeau, Herménégilde Chiasson and France Daigle enjoy international audiences. The New Brunswick literary heritage has been rich indeed.
This Call for Papers is directed at engaging that rich literary heritage in order to showcase the New Brunswick literatures. Paper proposals in French or English are invited that treat any aspect of the New Brunswick literatures, whether authors, themes, criticism, movements, or language. Papers are especially invited that provide an overview of the province’s bi-cultural heritage while also dispelling some of the persistent myths of insularity and pastoral démodé that continue to be affixed to the province’s literatures. That Congress is in New Brunswick this year provides the perfect opportunity to carry out this examination of the imaginative and linguistic diversity of New Brunswick literature.
Please send 300-word proposals, a brief 50-word abstract, and a biographical note to panel organizer Tony Tremblay (tremblay@stu.ca), and to ACQL vice-presidents Sara Jamieson (sara_jamieson@carleton.ca) and Lucie Hotte (lhotte@uottawa.ca) by 15 January 2011.
La traversée des frontières dans les littératures néo-brunswickoises
Depuis la relation du premier voyage de Jacques Cartier et de sa description des contacts avec les peuples autochtones du nord du Nouveau-Brunswick en 1534, le Nouveau-Brunswick s’est trouvé au carrefour des écrits canadiens. En 1824, l’écrivaine de Fredericton, Julia Catherine Beckwith Hart, écrivait le premier roman publié au Canada par un écrivain natif d’ici. Deux générations plus tard, Charles G.D. Roberts a inauguré la tradition des récits animaliers au Nouveau-Brunswick alors que Bliss Carman courtisait les lecteurs friands de la nouvelle écriture moderniste avec ses poèmes écrits dans la province. Dans la génération suivante, se démarque le jeune Northrop Frye qui a passé sa jeunesse à étudier à ce qui est à présent le Centre culturel Aberdeen à Moncton et qui était alors son école secondaire, à quelques kilomètres à peine du territoire qui servira de cadre à de nombreux romans et pièces de théâtre de la renommée Antonine Maillet, la première écrivaine non-européenne à gagner le prestigieux Prix Goncourt. Aujourd’hui, The Fiddlehead est le plus ancien magazine littéraire canadien toujours publié et les écrivains néo-brunswickois David Adams Richards, Serge Patrice Thibodeau, Herménégilde Chiasson et France Daigle sont appréciés d’un lectorat grandissant tant au Canada qu’à l’étranger. L’héritage littéraire néo-brunswickois est effectivement des plus riches.
Cet atelier vise à étudier cet héritage littéraire afin de mettre en valeur les littératures néo-brunswickoises. Nous sollicitions donc des propositions de communications, en français et anglais, qui traitent de toute question liée à ces littératures : les auteurs, les thèmes, la réception critique, les mouvements littéraires ou la langue. Nous encourageons particulièrement les chercheurs qui s’intéressent aux mythes de l’insularité et du pastoral démodé qui continuent à être rattachés à l’imaginaire néo-brunswickois à proposer des communications sur ces questions. La tenue du Congrès au Nouveau-Brunswick offre l’occasion rêvée de mener à bien cette investigation de l’imaginaire et de la diversité linguistique des littératures anglo-néo-brunswickoise et acadienne.
Veuillez faire parvenir votre proposition de communication (maximum 300 mots) ainsi qu’une courte notice biographique et un résumé de 50 mots en un document Word ou RTF, aux deux vice-présidentes de l’ALCQ Sara Jamieson (sara_jamieson@carleton.ca) et Lucie Hotte (lhotte@uottawa.ca) ainsi qu’à l’organisateur de l’atelier Tony Tremblay (tremblay@stu.ca) au plus tard le 15 janvier 2011.
Canadian Literature and Collective Memory
(La version française suit)
This panel will focus on the ways notions of collective memory are invoked in Canadian writing and other cultural contexts, particularly the ways the history of mobility and migration emerges in formulations of communal memory in Canada. Papers are invited on all historical periods and genres, and might engage with conceptions of public memory or public history; pedagogical practices, including shifting disciplinary boundaries; the legacy and remembrance of imperial trauma; the connection between memory and communal subjectivities (local, national, or global); or aspects of cultural transmission and inheritance. Papers might consider notions of collective memory in Canadian writing from divergent perspectives, including diasporic contexts, settler perspectives, and Aboriginal contexts, or the ways that shared memories are disrupted by competing genealogies. Topics might include, but are not limited to, some aspect of the following:
– ruptures of public memory
– the impact of changing social, political, and technological frameworks
– collective and/or cultural amnesia
– collective mnemonics
– critiques of collective memorialization and/or public histories
– historical commemoration
– national consolidation or fragmentation
– collective memory and nostalgia
– memory and inheritance and/or genealogy
– foundational trauma or amnesia
– unconscious memory
– settler transplantation and memory
– cultural transmission and/or cultural memory
– memory and monstrosity
– memory and science
– collective memory and postcoloniality
– collective memory and globalization
– memory and forgetting
– memory, secrecy, and falsehood
– relics of memory and/or memory traces
– memory and psychoanalysis
– memorial rescriptings
– objects of memory
Please send 300-word proposals, a brief 50-word abstract, and a biographical note to panel organizer Cynthia Sugars (csugars@uottawa.ca), and to ACQL vice-presidents Sara Jamieson (sara_jamieson@carleton.ca) and Lucie Hotte (lhotte@uottawa.ca) by 15 January 2011.
Littératures canadiennes et mémoire collective
Cet atelier porte sur les diverses façons dont la notion de mémoire collective est sollicitée dans les écrits canadiens ou dans d’autres produits ou contextes culturels. Nous nous intéresserons plus particulièrement à l’émergence de discours sur la migration et à la mobilité des populations qui donnent forme à une mémoire commune au Canada. Les communications peuvent porter sur toutes les périodes historiques et tous les genres littéraires. Elles pourraient se pencher sur les concepts de « mémoire publique » ou « d’histoire publique »; les pratiques pédagogiques incluant la transgression des frontières disciplinaires; l’héritage et le souvenir de traumatismes découlant de l’impérialisme; la connexion entre la mémoire et les identités collectives (locale, nationale ou mondiale) ou tout aspect de la transmission culturelle et du patrimoine. D’autres questions, telles que l’inscription de la mémoire collective dans les écrits canadiens (tant québécois, canadiens-français, canadiens-anglais, amérindiens que « migrants ») abordée de points de vue divergents ou différents, en lien avec des situations de diaspora ou de colonisation ou encore la façon dont des souvenirs partagés peuvent être contestés par la coprésence de généalogies contradictoires, peuvent être des sujets abordés dans le cadre de cet atelier. Les sujets abordés peuvent être les suivants, ou toute autre question connexe :
– ruptures dans la mémoire publique
– l’impact des transformations sociétales, politiques et technologiques sur les cadres conceptuels
– amnésie collective ou culturelle
– souvenirs collectifs
– critique de la mémorialisation collective ou/et des histoires publiques
– la commémoration historique
– la consolidation ou la fragmentation nationale
– mémoire collective et nostalgie collective
– mémoire et patrimoine ou/et généalogie
– trauma et amnésie
– souvenirs inconscients
– la colonisation et la mémoire
– la transmission de la culture ou/et la mémoire culturelle
– mémoire et monstruosité
– mémoire et sciences
– mémoire collective et postcolonialisme
– mémoire collective et mondialisation
– mémoire et oubli
– mémoire, secrets et mensonges
– traces ou/et résidus mémoriels
– mémoire et psychanalyse
– réécritures mémorielles
– objets de souvenir
Veuillez faire parvenir votre proposition de communication (maximum 300 mots) ainsi qu’une courte notice biographique et un résumé de 50 mots en un document Word ou RTF, aux deux vice-présidentes de l’ALCQ Sara Jamieson (sara_jamieson@carleton.ca) et Lucie Hotte (lhotte@uottawa.ca) ainsi qu’à l’organisatrice de l’atelier Cynthia Sugars (csugars@uottawa.ca) au plus tard le15 janvier 2011.
December 9, 2010
Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at UVic seeks Digital Humanists
The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria is about to grow again! In the coming months, we will be actively seeking talented and energetic digital humanists as postdoctoral fellows and research associates/assistants, and to fill alternative academic roles. These opportunities are associated with professional reading and online library research, electronic scholarly editing, textual corpus management and analysis, prototype development, project administration and coordination. We are looking for engaged researchers interested in working on the lab’s ongoing and new work, including the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (http://dhsi.org/) and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (http://bit.ly/idaqrJ).
Please let people know, and do check our website at http://etcl.uvic.ca/ for details and position descriptions as they arise.
If you’d like to talk before then, please send [1] a copy of your CV and [2] a cover letter indicating your interest in working with the other digital humanists in the ETCL in the areas we’ve outlined, to Ray Siemens (siemens@uvic.ca). Members of ETCL will be at a number of gatherings over the next 6 weeks, including the MLA in Los Angeles, and we’d be really happy to talk with you. Feel free also to check in with us on Twitter, at #etcl.
All best,
Ray Siemens, Melanie Chernyk, Cara Leitch, Julie Meloni, Jenn Ross, Meagan Timney, and others at the ETCL.
November 30, 2010
Senior Programmer Position at the University of Alberta
The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) seeks a Senior Programmer/Analyst to play a vital role in developing online infrastructure for humanities scholars. CWRC will produce a virtual research environment for the study of writing in Canada, in partnership with other open-source software initiatives and with literary researchers. The position will build a repository, a layer of services for the production, use, and analysis of repository and federated materials, and an interface.
The Senior Programmer/Analyst reports to the Project Leader through the Project Manager, and will play a key role in the infrastructure development. As a member of the team required for consultation on and participation in high-level decisions in the development process, this staff member will advise, design, build, and augment technical components of the project.
This is a full-time position for a minimum of three years and carries full benefits. The deadline for submission of applications (resumé and cover letter) is December 10th.
The full job postings is available at http://www.careers.ualberta.ca/Competition/S110413061/
November 8, 2010
Mobility and Migration in Canadian and Quebec Writing
The theme of Congress 2011, “Coasts and Continents: Exploring People and Places,” emphasizes the ways in which the far-flung regions of the world are brought into contact by the people who inhabit, traverse, and move among them. In keeping with this theme, the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures invites proposals on the significance of mobility and migration in Canadian and Quebec writing. Representations of mobility and migration occupy a central place in the literatures of English and French Canada, yet their significance can vary widely across these different cultural and historical contexts. How do mobility and migration make visible the points of contact and conflict among the peoples of Quebec and Canada? What meanings do they have in First Nations and Metis writing? How do they function in narratives of immigration, or in narratives of migration within Quebec and Canada? How do they contribute to the formation of colonial, national, regional, local, and global subjectivities? How do mobility and migration intersect with gender, race, and class? We invite papers that explore these and other questions connected with mobility and migration in Canadian and Quebec writing both old and new.
Possible proposal topics could include:
Literatures of exploration
Travel writing
Narratives of exile
Diasporic literatures
Frontier writing
Road novels
Immigration/emigration
Hybrid, transnational, and transcultural identities
Mobility/migration and gender/sexuality
Migration/mobility within national boundaries (i.e. urban/rural)
Canadian/Quebec literatures as mobile/migrant (i.e. their exportation to and reception in other parts of the world)
Mobility/migration and First/Metis nations
Mobility/migration and nationalism/transnationalism
Interdiscplinary approaches (i.e. literature and geography; literature and anthropology etc.)
We also welcome member-organized sessions on topics related to any aspect of the study of Canadian and Quebec literatures. Call for member-organized sessions should be no more than 200 words. They are due on or before 30 November 2010 and will be posted on the ACQL website.
All paper or session proposals can be written in French or English. Those who propose papers or sessions must be members of ACQL by March 1, 2011. See the ACQL website (www.alqc-acql.ca) for membership registration information.
Please send paper proposals (no more than 300 words) with a short biography and a 50-word abstract to one of the coordinators listed below by 15 January 2011.
Coordinator (English)
Sara Jamieson
Dept. of English
Carleton University
1812 Dunton Tower
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON
K1S 5B6
e-mail: sara_jamieson@carleton.ca
fax: 613-520-3544
Coordinator (French)
Professor Lucie Hotte
Département de français
Université d’Ottawa
60, rue Université
Ottawa ON
K1N 6N5
Téléphone: 613-562-5800 poste 1078
Télécopieur: 613-562-6891
Courriel: lhotte@uottawa.ca
****************************
Migration et mobilité dans les literatures canadiennes et québécoises
L’Association des littératures canadiennes et québécoise vous invite à proposer des communications sur le thème de la migration et de la mobilité dans les littératures du Québec et du Canada dans le cadre de son prochain colloque qui aura lieu à Fredericton en 2011.
Le thème du Congrès de 2011, « Rivages et continents : exploration des peuples et des lieux » souligne les diverses façons dont les régions les plus éloignées du globe sont mises en contact grâce aux populations qui y habitent, s’y déplacent et traversent les frontières qui les séparent les unes des autres. En lien avec ce thème, l’Association des littératures canadiennes et québécoise vous invite à proposer des communications portant plus spécifiquement sur la migration et la mobilité telles que mises en scène dans ces corpus. Les images de la migration et de la mobilité occupent une place centrale dans nombre d’œuvres canadiennes et québécoises, pourtant leurs significations se transforment aux cours des ans, se modifient en fonction des régions géographiques et se modulent en lien avec les appartenances culturelles. Ce sont ces expressions variées des points de contact – et parfois de conflits – tels qu’ils sont représentés dans les œuvres canadiennes et québécoises d’aujourd’hui ou d’hier que nous vous invitons à explorer. Que signifient la migration et la mobilité pour les Autochtones et les Métis? Pour les néo-Canadiens? Pour les femmes? Pour ceux qui se déplacent d’une province à l’autre? Comment contribuent-elles à la fondation d’identités coloniales, nationales, locales ou mondiales? Dans quelle mesure ces littératures sont-elles elles-mêmes mobiles et parviennent-elles à migrer de leur lieu d’origine aux autres régions du globe.
Nous vous invitons donc à nous soumettre des propositions de communication portant sur l’un des aspects suivants de la problématique ou toute autre question s’y rapportant, en relation avec les littératures canadiennes et québécoise :
Littérature de voyage
Récits d’exploration
Littératures diasporiques
Littérature de l’exil
Récits de contacts interculturels
L’écriture des frontières
« Road novels »
Immigration et émigration
Hybridité narrative, identités transnationales et transculturelles
Migration et mobilité en rapport avec la sexualité et les genres sexués
Migration et mobilité à l’intérieur des frontières nationales (par exemple : urbanité et ruralité)
Migration et mobilité en rapport avec les Autochtones et les Métis
Migration et mobilité en lien avec les nationalismes et le transnationalisme
Les littératures canadiennes et québécoise comme « mobiles » et/ou « migrantes » : leur exportation et leur réception à l’extérieur de leurs frontières
Approches interdisciplinaires : littérature et géographie ; littérature et anthropologie…
Nous acceptons également des séances sur des sujets reliés à tous les aspects de l’étude des littératures du Canada et du Québec. Les propositions de séances organisées par des membres de l’association ne devraient pas dépasser 200 mots. Ces propositions doivent être envoyées au plus tard le 30 novembre 2010. Elles seront ensuite affichées sur le site Web de l’ALCQ.
Toutes les communications ou les propositions de séances peuvent être présentées soit en français, soit en anglais. Les personnes intéressées à présenter des communications ou des propositions de séances doivent être membres de l’ALCQ au 1er mars 2011. Vous pouvez consulter le site Web de l’ALCQ (www.alcq-acql.ca) pour avoir plus d’information au sujet des demandes d’adhésion à notre association.
Veuillez faire parvenir votre proposition de communication (maximum 300 mots) ainsi qu’une courte notice biographique et un résumé de 50 mots en un document Word ou RTF, à l’un des deux organisateurs du colloque, dont les noms apparaissent ci-bas, au plus tard le 15 janvier 2011.
Organisatrice et responsable du programme en français
Madame la professeure Lucie Hotte
Département de français
Université d’Ottawa
60, rue Université
Ottawa (ONTARIO)
K1N 6N5
Téléphone: 613-562-5800 poste 1078
Télécopieur: 613-562-6891
Courriel: lhotte@uottawa.ca
Organisatrice et responsable du programme en anglais
Madame la professeure Sara Jamieson
Department of English,
Carleton University
1812 Dunton Tower
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa (ONTARIO)
K1S 5B6
e-mail: sara_jamieson@carleton.ca
fax: 613-520-3544
June 11, 2010
IMTweet
#emicClouds
A little DHSI playtime for you. First, two word clouds: one of the DHSI Twitter feed, the other of the EMiC Twitter feed. Both feeds were collected using the JiTR webscraper, a beta tool in development by Geoffrey Rockwell at the University of Alberta.
#emic Twitter Feed in JiTR
How did I do this? First I scraped the text from the Twapper Keeper #dhsi2010 and #emic archives into JiTR. I did this because I wanted to clean it up a bit, take out some of the irrelevant header and footer text. Because JiTR allows you to clean up the text (which is not an option in the Twapper Keeper export) you don’t have to work with messy bits that you don’t want to analyze. After that I saved my clean texts and generated what are called “reports.” The report feature creates a permanent URL that you can then paste into various TAPoRware tools. I ran the reports of the #dhsi2010 and #emic feeds through two TAPoRware text-analysis tools, Voyeur and Word Cloud.
#emic Twitter Feed in TAPoR Word Cloud
#dhsi2010 Twitter Feed in TAPoR Word Cloud
If you want to generate these word clouds and interact with them, paste the report URLs I generated using JiTR into the TAPoR Word Cloud tool.
June 9, 2010
A Voyeur’s Peep] Tweet
To build on Stéfan Sinclair’s plenary talk at DHSI yesterday afternoon, I thought it appropriate to put Voyeur into action with some born-digital EMiC content. Perhaps one day someone will think to produce a critical edition of EMiC’s Twitter feed, but in the meantime, I’ve used a couple basic digital tools to show you how you can take ready-made text from online sources and plug it into a text-analysis and visualization tool such as Voyeur.
I started with a tool called Twapper Keeper, which is a Twitter #hashtag archive. When we were prototyping the EMiC community last summer and thinking about how to integrate Twitter into the new website, Anouk had the foresight to set up a Twapper Keeper hashtag archive (also, for some reason, called a notebook) for #emic. From the #emic hashtag notebook at the Twapper Keeper site, you can simply share the archive with people who follow you on Twitter or Facebook, or you can download it and plug the dataset into any number of text-analysis and visualization tools. (If you want to try this out yourself, you’ll need to set up a Twitter account, since the site will send you a tweet with a link to your downloaded hashtag archive.) Since Stéfan just demoed Voyeur at DHSI, I thought I’d use it to generate some EMiC-oriented text-analysis and visualization data. If you want to play with Voyeur on your own, I’ve saved the #emic Twitter feed corpus (which is a DH jargon for a dataset, or more simply, a collection of documents) that I uploaded to Voyeur. I limited the dates of the data I exported to the period from June 5th to early in the day on June 9th, so the corpus represents the #emic feed during the first few days of DHSI. Here’s a screenshot of the tool displaying Twitter users who have included the #emic hashtag:
#emic hashtag Twitter feed, 5-9 June 2010
As a static image, it may be difficult to tell exactly what you’re looking at and what it means. Voyeur allows you to perform a fair number of manipulations (selecting keywords, using stop word lists) so that you can isolate the information about word frequencies within a single document (as in this instance) or a whole range of documents. As a simple data visualization, the graph displays the relative frequency of the occurrence of Twitter usernames of EMiCites who are attending DHSI and who have posted at least one tweet using the #emic hashtag. To isolate this information I created a favourites list of EMiC tweeters from the full list of words in the #emic Twitter feed. If you wanted to compare the relative frequency of the words “emic” and “xml” and “tei” and “bunnies,” you’d could either enter these words (separated by commas) into the search field in the Words in the Entire Corpus pane or manually select these words by scrolling through all 25 pages. (It’s up to you, but I know which option I’d choose.) Select these words and click the heart+ icon to add them to your favourites list. Then make sure you select them in the Words within the Document pane to generate a graph of their relative frequency. If want to see the surrounding context of the words you’ve chosen, you can expand the snippet view of each instance in the Keywords in Context pane.
Go give it a try. The tool’s utility is best assessed by actually playing around with it yourself. If you’re still feeling uncertain about how to use the tool, you can watch Stéfan run through a short video demo.
While you’re at it, can you think of any ways in which we might implement a tool such as Voyeur for the purposes of text analysis of EMiC digital edtions? What kinds of text-analysis and visualization tools do you want to see integrated into EMiC editions? If you come across something you really find useful, please let me know (dean.irvine@dal.ca). Or, better, blog it!
June 7, 2010
A New Build: EMiC Tools in the Digital Workshop
DEMiC +1
On the occasion of our 2010 DEMiC summer institute I’d like to present an interim report on EMiC’s major digital initiatives, our new institutional partnerships, and our four streams of collaborative digital-humanities research: (1) digitization, (2) image-based editing and markup, (3) text analysis, (4) and visualization.
Last June I trekked out to Victoria to attend the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with a group of graduate students, postdocs, and faculty affiliated with the EMiC project. There were a dozen of us; some came with skills and digital editing projects in the works, others were standing at the bottom of the learning curve staring straight up. Most enrolled in one of the two introductory courses in text encoding or digitization fundamentals. Meagan Timney, who is our first EMiC postdoctoral fellow, and I enrolled in Susan Brown and Stan Ruecker’s seminar on Digital Tools for Literary History. They introduced us to a whole range of text-analysis and visualization tools. I started to pick and choose tools that I thought might be useful for the EMiC kit. These tools have been principally intended for the analysis of text datasets, either plain vanilla transcriptions of the kind that one finds on Project Gutenberg or enriched transcriptions marked up in XML. The common denominator is obvious enough: these tools are designed to work with transcribed texts. But what if I wanted tools to work with texts rendered as digital images? What if I didn’t want to read transcribed texts but instead use tools that could read encoded digital images of remediated textual objects? What kind of tools are being developed for linking marked-up transcriptions to images? How can these tools be employed by scholarly editors?
June 4, 2010
EMiC at Congress
Congress is always the one time of year when I have to admit to myself that I just can’t do it all. Inevitably, the panels I want to attend are scheduled in simultaneous sessions. Often I’m presenting on one panel and wish that I could be in another room at the same time. Until we develop the EMiC cloning tool, I’ll have to settle for the reality that our community has grown to such a size that it’s no longer possible to see everyone present at Congress. That said, I was extremely pleased with the panels I managed to find (even if they were sometimes at the bottom of a back stairwell in the basement of the old Faubourg). I was especially delighted with the papers by the armada of EMiC participants. The panel on radical modernist pedagogy that I co-chaired with Karis Shearer was well attended and featured papers by Paul Hjartarson, Linda Morra, and Vanessa Lent. Paul spoke to Wilfrid Watson’s radical theatre productions in Edmonton in the 1960s (my favourite moment was when Paul quoted Watson asserting that in the absence of a mainstream public for Canadian theatre, a playwright might as well go avant-garde). Linda addressed the public and national pedagogy of Ira Dilworth on CBC radio in the 1940s, calling particular attention to his role in broadcasting the work of Emily Carr. And Vanessa toured us through the life of Sheila Watson as a teacher and student, from a her stint during the early 1930s in a one-room schoolhouse in the Cariboo to her classes with Marshall McLuhan at the University of Toronto in the 1950s to her career as a professor of modernist literatures at the University of Alberta in the 1960s and 1970s. Vanessa’s reading of the Cariboo adaptation of Macbeth from Deep Hollow Creek stands for me as one of the highlights of the Congress.
Dean Irvine
May 12, 2010
New EMiC Postdoc
I’d like to take the opportunity to introduce to you Matt Huculak (matt-huculak@utulsa.edu), our new EMiC postdoctoral fellow. Matt recently finished his PhD at the University of Tulsa, with a specialization in modernism and periodical studies. His dissertation, “Middlebrow Politics and the Book War: Periodicals, Print History, and the Commercialization of Literature, 1905-31,’ was completed under the supervision of Sean Latham last August. He comes to us with many years of experience in editing and the digital humanities, including working as project manager and digital editor of the Modernist Journals Project, an editorial assistant with the James Joyce Quarterly, and webmaster for the Modernist Studies Association. His work in digital media involves designing collaborative environments to facilitate teaching and research–an objective that he has already achieved in providing online access to archival and rare print materials through the Modernist Journals Project, and that he plans to extend by creating for EMiC a digital bibliography and archive of modernist Canadian little magazines in English and French. Starting this September, he will be working with me and other graduate students at Dalhousie on his digitization project.
Please join me in welcoming Matt to our EMiC community.
Dean Irvine
Director, Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC)