Visualization is the new knowing. From big data to complex processes, visualization tools and data walls are deployed for discovering knowledge and representing it back to others. The tools, however, are not accessible to most scholars, especially humanists who are trained to work with text. The Visual Matters project takes a speculative design…[Read more]

In August 2019, I defended the first digital history dissertation at Vanderbilt, an outcome I had worked towards since 2011. But getting to that point took me far longer and further afield than anything I had initially envisioned when I first entered graduate school. To help make visible the process of a DH dissertation, my talk will trace my…[Read more]

This paper proposes to examine these issues through the case study of publications associated with the hashtag #PokemonSwordShield, #PokémonÉpéeBouclier and #ポケモンソードシールド(#Pokemonswordshield) produced on Twitter between September 2019 and February 2020. Through mix analysis methods that bridge qualitative and quantitative approaches, we analyze a…[Read more]

This poster outlines the development of SpokenWeb UAlberta, a website for the digital collection of literary audio recordings at the University of Alberta. The collection consists of about 200 open reel recordings of literary audio events held at the University of Alberta from the 1960s-1980s. SpokenWeb UAlberta is a node of the SSHRC-funded…[Read more]

Body image concerns affect the well-being of a generation coming of age immersed in digital culture. This is particularly true for young women and gender non-binary individuals of diverse intersectional backgrounds who regularly confront appearance-related pressures. The “Writing New Bodies” project (“WNB”; SSHRC IG 435-2018-1036) address…[Read more]

Despite claims to interdisciplinarity, universities typically organize knowledge along disciplinary lines in departments and faculties. Institutes like KIAS at the University of Alberta (UofA) have been set up to encourage the development of interdisciplinary research projects, but what do we really know about the research of our colleagues and…[Read more]

Nearing the completion of my PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities, I have been taking stock of my experience working between digital humanities (DH), art history, visual culture, and literary studies. One of my first doctoral courses was in DH; I remember repeatedly having to provide basic definitions of the field for both professors and colleagues…[Read more]

Polychromy in ancient classical sculptures is a historical fact. However, for centuries, archeologists and museum curators have scrubbed away traces of color before their public display. This omission has led to the incorrect idea of a Greco-Roman predilection for pure whiteness—and to the equation of white marble with beauty—with a tendency tow…[Read more]

Historians are often confronted with the challenge of defining words or ideas in an historically appropriate manner. Language evolves; words lose some meanings and gain others over time, and it is important, when examining the past, for the historian to ensure that their analysis accurately reflects the language in use during the chosen period of…[Read more]

In 1971, Paul Fortier created a computer program to save significant time in analyzing French literary theme words connected to semantic fields. The system, aptly called THEME, harnessed the capabilities of computer-generated keyword concordances with frequency and distribution calculations to create research reports for user-defined literary…[Read more]

The central objective of this paper is to analyze anti-immigrant rhetoric towards Syrian refugees in the framework of Barker’s (2001) ‘new racism’ (cultural racism) on YouTube. This mediated-cultural racism is, in principle, based on the idea that third world migrants are a group of “othered-others,” who disrupt the taken-for-granted stable na…[Read more]

This paper describes the background and development of Check Your Privilege (https://privilege.huc.knaw.nl/), a digital privilege game designed to create awareness in the context of diversity and inclusion workshops.

In this presentation we quantify the signs of abandonment to measure the planned obsolesce of online digital humanities projects. We intend this study to be a step forward towards better preservation strategies for the planned obsolesce of online digital humanities projects.

Loyalist Migrations is a spatial history project in its early stages. It visualizes the movement of exiles and refugees who fled the United States in the aftermath of the American Revolution. The project is a partnership between the Huron University College’s Community History Centre, the Map and Data Centre at Western, and the United Empire L…[Read more]

While a range of approaches and techniques for linguistic annotation and classification are currently available, they have not been designed to handle multimodal texts with a pronounced visual dimension such as posters, webpages, or moving images (i.e., film, TV). In this paper, we present an approach for annotation and classification of…[Read more]

Images present in paper for CSDH 2020 but available here as reference.

“The Culture of Curiosity Project” studies the discourse and cultural context of early modern collections of rarities and curiosities in England and Scotland, 1580-1700. Central to this research is the Digital Ark, a web archive of some fifty XML-encoded catalogues, inventories, and records of these collections. Our focus in phase two of this pro…[Read more]

This conference paper represents a work in progress on interface in the videogame Life Is Strange: Before the Storm’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. By observing the ways in which the user is able to make Shakespeare’s work their own, this paper argues that the failure and reimagining of the early modern work is celebrated and that in…[Read more]