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
Great news for EMiC scholars: The MLA has released its guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship. I encourage everyone to look through this important document as a way of thinking about your own projects. http://www.mla.org/guidelines_evaluation_digital. Does your individual project meet these basic guidelines? How can EMiC help you attain the goals set forth in this document?
In other news: in the next few weeks we’ll be launching a new “resources” page put together by Kaarina Mikalson. We’ll make sure these guidelines are a part of this new resource.
2012 has been a very eventful time for the EMiC community. To keep everyone informed about some of the exciting advancements and contributions made by our project members this year, we have put together a Spring Bulletin full of updates, upcoming events and recent publications.
We are taking this as an opportunity to introduce some of our new co-applicants and graduate fellows, as well as to highlight on-going research and new publications. Enjoy!
[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]
Mount Allison University, Sackville NB, 20–23 September 2012
Poetic discourse in Canada has always been changing to assert poetry’s relevance to the public sphere. While some poets and critics have sought to shift poetic subjects in Canada to make political incursions into public discourses, others have sought changes in poetic form as a means to encourage wider public engagement. If earlier conversations about poetics in Canadian letters, such as those in the well-known Toronto Globe column “At the Mermaid Inn” (1892-93), sought to identify an emerging cultural nationalism in their references to Canadian writing, in the twentieth century poetics became increasingly focused on a wider public, with little magazines, radio, and television offering new spaces in which to consider Canadian cultural production. In more recent decades, many diverse conversations about poetics in Canada have begun to emanate from hyperspace, where reviews, interviews, Youtube/Vimeo clips, publisher/author websites, and blogs have increased the “visibility” of poetry and poetics.
Acknowledging the work that emerged from the 2005 “Poetics & Public Culture in Canada Conference,” as well as recent publications considering publics in the Canadian context, we are interested in examining a growing set of questions surrounding these and other discursive shifts connected with Canadian poetry and poetics. How have technological innovations such as radio, television, and the Internet, for example, made poetry and poetics more accessible or democratic? How does poetry inhabit other genres and media in order to gesture toward conversations relevant to political, cultural, and historical moments? What contemporary concerns energize those studying historical poetries and poetics? How do commentators in public and academic circles construct a space for poetry to inhabit?
The conference sets out to explore the changing shapes of and responses to poetic genres, aesthetic theories, and political visions from a diverse range of cultural and historical contexts. In the interest of reinvigorating conversations about the multiple configurations of poetics, poetry, and the public in Canada, we invite proposals for papers (15–20 minutes) on subjects including, but not limited to:
–Public statements/declarations of poetics
–Publics and counterpublics in Canadian poetry
–The politics of public poetics
–Tensions between avant- and rear-garde poetics in Canada
–Shifting technological modes of poetic and critical production (print/sound/video/born-digital)
–Poetics of/as Activism
–Public Intellectualism and Poetics
–Recovery and remediation of Canadian poetry and poetics
–Poetics and collaboration in Canada
–People’s poetry and /or the People’s Poetry Awards
–Poetry and environmental publics in Canada
Proposals should be no more than 250 words and should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biographical note. Please send proposals to publicpoetics@mta.ca by 29 February 2012. For more information visit www.publicpoetics.ca.
In conjunction with the conference, a one-day workshop will be hosted by The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada. This purpose of this workshop (CWRCshop) is to introduce, in accessible and inviting ways, digital tools to humanities scholars and to encourage digital humanists, via a turn to close reading, to connect with the raw material, which is the basis of digitization efforts.
The PUBLIC POETICS conference is organized by Bart Vautour (Mt. A), Erin Wunker (Dal), Travis V. Mason (Dal), and Christl Verduyn (Mt. A). The conference is sponsored by the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University, the Canadian Studies Programme at Dalhousie University, and The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada. We plan to publish a selection of revised/expanded papers as a special journal issue and/or a book with a university press.
Interdisciplinary Multidisciplinary Woolf
7-10 June 2012
University of Saskatchewan
This conference invites explorations of Virginia Woolf’s work from a range of different disciplinary perspectives and practices. We welcome proposals on any aspect of Woolf studies, and especially papers or performances that:
• respond to Virginia Woolf and her texts from interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches;
• respond to the inter- and multidisciplinary work carried out by Virginia Woolf and her circle; and/or
• respond to the implications of Virginia Woolf’s work by applying its themes and claims to other disciplinary, institutional, social, or cultural contexts.
Proposals may reflect (but need not be limited to) methodologies and knowledge from disciplines such as:
Queer Studies, the Digital Humanities, Native Studies, Literary Studies, History, Translation Studies, Art and Art History, Drama, Psychology/ Psychoanalysis, Business Administration, Media and Communications, Music, Political Science, the Study of Sexualities, Postcolonial Theory, Children’s Literature and Studies, Editing and Publishing, Creative Writing, Religious Studies, Economics, Film, the Study of Teaching and Learning, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Ecocriticism, Health, Women’s and Gender Studies, Anthropology, Disability Studies, Law…
Submissions from artists, writers, community activists, administrators, “common readers,” independent scholars, teachers, academics, and students are welcomed.
For paper proposals, please send a 250-word abstract as a Word attachment. For panel proposals, please submit a 250-word description of each paper to be presented by the three panel participants along with the proposed panel title. Because we will be using a blind submission process, please do not include your name on your proposal. Instead, in your covering e-mail, please include your
name(s), institutional affiliation (if any), paper title(s), and contact information.
Proposals and inquiries should be directed to Ann Martin, Department of English
306.966.5527 • woolf@arts.usask.ca
The deadline for submissions is: 1 February 2012.
We have come together…to make one thing, not enduring—for what endures?—
but seen by many eyes simultaneously. (The Waves)
I have been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Editing Modernism in Canada for just over a year now, so it gives me great pleasure at this midpoint in my position to announce two major partnership agreements signed last week. First, EMiC has finalized it contract with Islandora at the University of Prince Edward Island to build our very own Digital Humanities module. Second, EMiC has partnered with another DH project with which I am involved: The Modernist Versions Project. Both partnerships promise to provide resources, training, and infrastructure not only EMiC scholars, but to the DH community as a whole.
1. Integrated Digital Humanities Environments: Islandora
Anyone who has been in DH for a while knows that there is a long history of tool-creation for our scholarly endeavours. Some of these projects have been successful (The Versioning Machine, Omeka, etc.), and some, unfortunately, have not. One “problem” we face as DH’ers is that there is simply so much to do. Some of us are interested in visualization software and network relations (Proust Archive), some are interested in preserving disintegrating archives (Modernist Journals Project), and others of us are firmly rooted in TEI and textual markup. Moreover, with the growth of GIS software, mapping texts has become a great way to have students interact with texts in spatial terms and to communicate with a non-academic public using a language most of us are familiar with: maps.
But what happens in DH when we move into the classroom?
I recently read a stunning syllabus created by Brian Croxall at Emory University, in which he provides his students with a solid (and diverse) introduction to the Digital Humanities. But one thing researchers and teachers like Brian, or any other DH’er faces, is providing students integrated learning environments where they can edit texts in a common repository AND have all the tools they need at their disposal in the browser. If you want to teach TEI right now, you have to buy Oxygen (a life-saving program when it comes to XML markup); For versioning, you must install Juxta or The Versioning Machine. For publication/exhibition you must install Omeka. But what if we had ALL of those things in one learning environment, in one common and open system? This is what we’re trying to accomplish with the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout.
EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout
An issue EMiC faces in providing tools for our researchers is the sheer diversity of work being undertaken right now by EMiC scholars who have varying levels of experience with digital environments. EMiC needed to find a way to allow its members to preserve, edit, and publish digital editions of archival material in an intuitive way; moreover, we wanted to make to sure our archival practices conformed to international standards. Moreover, most of us are teachers too. How do we teach our students what we are doing in our research? Enter Islandora.
Islandora
Nine months ago, I Googled the phrase “TEI, ABBYY, XSLT” on a whim (actually, I was being lazy: I was looking for an XSLT sheet that would transform ABBYY HTML to simple TEI). The first result listed was a page from the University of Prince Edward Island—just down the road so-to-speak. Not knowing much about Prince Edward Island outside of L. M. Montgomery, I keep browsing, and to my amazement, found that the library at UPEI had created a project called “Island Lives,” a resource developed using the home-grown Islandora digital repository. Mark Leggott, Donald Moses, and others, had built precisely what I was looking for: a digital asset management system using a Fedora Commons repository wrapped in Drupal shell. Islandora allows users to easily upload an image of text to its database, edit that image (TEI), and then “publish” a complete text (book, pamphlet, etc.) to the web. Dean Irvine and I realized that if we could expand this system to fit EMiC’s needs, we could create a Digital Humanities module that would serve our members perfectly. We decided to focus on the core issues facing EMiC editors: Ingestion (including OCR based on Tesseract), Image Markup, TEI editing, Versioning, and Publication (for the full list of what we’re building, see below*). Moreover, Islandora is tested and true and is being used by NASA, the Smithsonian, among many other institutions.
Thank You, DH.
We have years of successful work to emulate for this DH module. And just as the DH community has given to us, we expect the give back to the DH community by keeping the DH module open to use. Yes, we plan on creating an EMiC/Islandora DH install that you can download and use in your classrooms.
If you’re interested in what we’re building, please email Dean Irvine or Matt Huculak with your questions.
As part of this initiative, I have moved to Prince Edward Island to work with the Islandora crew as we develop this module. There’s some other news about what I’ll be digitizing there to “test” our system—but you’ll have to wait to hear about that. In the meantime, we are planning unveiling our functioning module at DHSI2012.
2. Modernist Versions Project
If you haven’t been to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute hosted by Ray Seimens at the University of Victoria, do plan on going! It is an incredible week of DH training, and it is one of the most memorable “unconferences” I have ever attended. One wonderful result of this year’s camp was the creation of the Modernist Versions Project (MVP), an international initiative to provide online resources for the editing and display of multiple witnesses of modernist texts. In what was truly a conversation over coffee, Stephen Ross shared with me his desire to create the MVP. Having served the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) at the University of Tulsa and Brown University for over six years, I said, “Stephen, let’s do this!” And we did. With the help of James Gifford, Jentery Sayers, and Tanya Clement (who along with Stephen and I serve as the Board of the MVP), we have secured tremendous support for a major SSHRC application this fall. The MVP promises to be an important project in the field of Digital Humanities and modernism.
But what does this have to do with EMiC?
I am impressed by two aspects of EMiC. First, the recovery of modernist Canadian texts in our project is truly spectacular. Second, the training EMiC facilitates at the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, The University of Victoria, and Trent University (among many other institutions) is edifying. Just look at our graduate student editors who are engaged in serious textual editing projects across Canada: http://editingmodernism.ca/about-us/. We are really building the future of Canadian studies here.
As an international scholar, I am concerned, like many of you, with the networking of Canadian modernism across the globe. How does Canadian modernism fit into the greater narrative of modernity across the world? (this is a topic we’ll be exploring in Paris 2012: http://editingmodernism.ca/events/sorbonne-nouvelle/).
The Modernist Versions Project is one way of creating networks of modernist textual criticism and production across the world; that is, the MVP is interested in the editing and visualization of multiple textual witnesses no matter where those witnesses were created. Though located in Canada, the MVP’s scope is much larger, and EMiC’s partnership with the MVP will allow EMiC scholars interested in “versioning” to use MVP resources as they are developed. The MVP has already developed partnerships with the Modernism Lab at Yale University, Modernist Networks at Chicago, and NINES, which is letting us use and develop their Juxta software for periodicals and books.
Dean Irvine has been very generous in allocating my Postdoctoral hours towards the formation of the MVP. Once again, EMiC is nurturing young projects and helping create a truly global network of digital modernist studies. And I think I’ll end on this note: EMiC’s primary focus has been collaboration: collaboration among peers, and now collaboration among projects. And by collaborating with other projects around the world, we hope to create tools that will last, be useful, and really change the face of modernist studies.
Welcome to EMiC. Let’s go build something.
*Details of the EMiC Digital Humanities Sprout
Existing Islandora Code
1. Islandora Core
a. Integration with the Fedora repository and Drupal CMS
b. Islandora Book Workflow
c. Islandora Audio/Video
d. Islandora Scholarly Citations
New/Enhanced Functionality for the EMiC Module
1. Smart Ingest
a. Use open source Tesseract OCR engine
b. Integration of TIKA
2. Image Markup Tool
Proofs of concept and models:
Image Markup Tool (IMT)
Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE)
3. TEI Editor
Proofs of concept and models:
Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) – CWRC Writer
Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT) – Editor
4. Collation Tool
Proofs of concept and models for development:
5. Version Visualization Tool
Proofs of concept and models:
On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces
6. Dynamic Version Viewer
Models:
Hypercities database: Transparent layers interface
7. Digital Collection Visualization Tool
Proof of concept:
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
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.
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.