This panel showcases three historians pursuing public, digital history as part of the University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative. How are digital historians pursuing public humanities projects that reach broader publics? These three digital history projects are working within an alternative genealogy of digital humanities sketched by Tara McPherson, a history that might be traced to Charles and Ray Eames rather than Father Busa and IBM. Rather than emphasizing text and processing, these public-oriented DH projects align digitality with visuality, emphasizing aesthetics and design. The three papers sketch out various approaches to the creation and communication of public history projects in the digital age. Collectively, they engage with challenges facing digital historians relating to digital preservation, research creation, audience engagement, and the pitfalls of corporately-owned social media platforms.

Session Chair: Prof. Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto

Paper #1: “An Essential Tension between Presentation and Preservation: The Case of Visualizing the Americas,” Kevin Coleman, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto Mississauga

Digital humanities projects are often pulled in two different directions. The scholar has an interest in presenting research in the most attractive way to garner a larger audience, while the librarian must ensure that the project remains accessible in perpetuity. This tension between the researcher’s emphasis on presentation and the librarian’s on preservation is essential. This paper describes how the competing interests between presentation and preservation were negotiated in the Visualizing the Americas project at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM).

Visualizing the Americas examines the history of capitalism through the production and consumption of a single commodity, the banana. The project also preserves rare, endangered records that are integral to the histories of the multinational banana companies and the Latin American and Caribbean communities in which they operated. This project digitizes these archives and makes them freely accessible to anyone in the world. This history and the archives through which we know it enable us to better understand corporate techniques of dividing labor forces along lines of race and ethnicity, of enclosing land that was previously held in common, and of converting biodiverse tropical forests into plantations with genetically identical banana plants.

I will argue that the tension in digital humanities projects between presentation and preservation does not result primarily from miscommunication or personality conflicts or administrative divisions between faculty and librarians. Rather, this tension arises from rapidly changing aesthetic preferences and technologies. Hence solutions to it must be negotiated between scholars, librarians, and designers. I will describe how the Visualizing the Americas project came into being through a collaboration between myself as PI and the UTM librarians. I hired Underline, an award-winning Toronto-based studio to design the website and the UTM Library had a contract with Adam Matthew Digital to host our archival collections. In the end, the Principal Investigator and the designers had to give up beautiful features of the original proposal and the Librarians and Adam Matthew Digital had to develop new parts of the platform to handle our newly negotiated design. This negotiation slowed the project down and made it less pleasing to the eye, but it hopefully guarantees that Visualizing the Americas—its radical content and its counterarchives—will be available to students and researchers around the world for decades to come.

Paper #2: “Instascholar: Effective Research Engagement Strategies for Big Social Media Audiences,” Dr. L.K. Bertram, Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto, St. George campus.

How do we make accurate data go viral? This presentation offers insights and advice gleaned from running a large-scale, anonymous open classroom on Instagram (13.5 million views). It describes five of some of the most important data packaging strategies that researchers must consider for generating higher public engagement with their work. Responding to widespread concerns among BIPOC, women, and queer scholars, it also discusses safety and equity approaches that are essential to surviving the power imbalances embedded in these privately-owned and deeply biased platforms.

While some within academic communities simply attribute the disinformation crisis to social media platforms as a whole, the World Health Organization reminds us that the infodemic has only been made possible by a corresponding vacuum of quality, public-facing data online. Building from the interdisciplinary work of scholars like Joy Buolamwini, Ruha Benjamin, Cathy O’Neil, Serge Noiret, and Timnit Gebru, this presentation discusses opportunities for building better data pipelines out of universities on the scale required to address some of the most pressing challenges of the digital age.

Paper #3: “Research Creation and Queer Oral History,” Dr. Elspeth Brown, Professor of History, University of Toronto, Mississauga.

On September 15, 2000, five Toronto police raided the Pussy Palace, an exclusive sex party and bathhouse event for 350 queer women and trans people. The police charged two organizers with violating liquor laws, resulting in a public trial. There has never been an oral history project about this event, the last police raid of a queer bathhouse in Canadian history. The LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, in collaboration with The ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives, has collected 36 interviews with bathhouse patrons, event organizers, and community activists. The research enables us to historicize this event within the longer history of Toronto police hostility towards non-normative sexuality, exemplified by the gay male-focused bathhouse raids of 1975-1984 (Warner, 2002; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010; Hooper, 2016).

We have completed our collection and preservation work for this project, having collected the interviews, written the metadata, created transcripts and captions, and donated the materials to The ArQuives, all in collaboration with our narrators.

We are currently working to animate and activate these interviews through research creation in the form of audio portraits, video shorts (via You Tube and Tik Tok), Instagram stories, a digital exhibition, and a series of public events. This paper will reflect on our work in research creation to address the lack of user engagement with digitized, full length oral histories. First, I will outline a critique of digitization, on its own, as an approach in engaging with audiences in relationship to oral history practice. Second, I will offer research creation as a partial strategy in connecting with queer public history audiences. Research creation, as now defined by SSHRC, is “an approach to research that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, scholarly investigation, and experimentation.” My presentation will showcase some of our strategies, situating them in the DH literature relating to oral history and public history praxis.

Comments: Audience.

Participants:

Kevin Coleman's research examines the intersection between capitalism and photography, primarily in Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a number of book chapters and journal articles, as well as the Principal Investigator of Visualizing the Americas, a major digital humanities project. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. With support from a SSHRC grant, he led three major collaborative inquiries into the relations between capitalism and photography: Capitalism and the Camera (2021), Photography and Culture (2020), and Radical History Review (2018). He has recently completed a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, that attempts to make visible how physical violence gets repeated at the level of the archive.

L.K. Bertram is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Toronto specializing in the delivery of critical historical data through social media algorithms and the history of migration, gender, sexuality, and colonialism in the 19th century North American West. She is the author of The Viking Immigrants: Icelandic North Americans (Winner CHA Clio Prize/ UTP 2020) and is currently finishing a book on the financial lives of sex workers in the 19th century West. Bertram's newest work focuses on how scholars can more effectively combat digital disinformation campaigns. As the anonymous curator of a large-scale public history campaign that hit 9 million views, she focuses on high-yield data packaging strategies for larger scale publics using video-based algorithms (TikTok and Instagram). This new SSHRC-funded project asks: “how do we make good data go viral in the disinformation age?”

Elspeth Brown is Professor of History at the University of Toronto. She is the Director of the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory, a multi-year digital history and oral history public, digital humanities collaboration. At the University of Toronto, she is also to Faculty Lead for the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, a three-year Institutional Strategic Initiative. She is the author of Work! A Queer History of Modeling (Duke University, 2019); co-editor of “Queering Photography,” a special issue of Photography and Culture (2014); and Feeling Photography (Duke University Press, 2014), among other books. Recent articles include “Trans Oral History as Trans Care” (with Myrl Beam) and “Archival Activism, Symbolic Annihilation, and the LGBTQ+ Community Archive” (Archivaria 2020). She has published in GLQ, TSQ; Gender and History; American Quarterly; Radical History Review; Photography and Culture; Feminist Studies; Aperture; No More Potlucks, and others).

Cultural heritage is a universal good; it is not called the heritage of all humanity without reason. Nevertheless, as a product of the global organisation UNESCO, it is a brand, often embattled and associated with not inconsiderable monetary activity. And even if participation plays an increasingly important role in heritage management, the direct involvement of the immediate heirs is often only idealistic and less real. Traces of colonialism can still be found when it comes to preservation and development, but interpretation finds expression in the concrete approach, even if it is merely museumisation, which makes actual and above all natural, uninfluenced, unencumbered use difficult or even impossible. Here, digitisation offers possibilities to counter this dilemma in two ways. On the one hand, dealing with cultural heritage can be done completely virtually, not only non-invasively, but above all asynchronously and heterogeneously from completely different perspectives, thus also with completely different cultural premises. On the other hand, in a form that goes beyond the concrete and searches for possible motivations, intentions, aims of the creators, not only verbally as usual, but also visually. The focus on visuality quite literally opens up new perspectives, it allows for the targeted consideration of even individual aspects of cultural heritage, the universality of which only becomes visible in scientific representations such as those developed in the Digital Humanities, namely when other aspects are deliberately masked out. For such a form of focussing on the architectural structure, namely the spatial layout, the authors, in cooperation with the respective cultural and scientific institutions, have developed the method of the visualisation of uncertainty. In this, instead of buildings, the spatial architectural design idea is shown with a clarity that gives architecture a universality that neither the surviving fragments nor a speculative life-like representation could ever achieve. In this way, ethnic distortions or folkloristic misinterpretations are being avoided. An undistorted view of architecture enables marginalised groups in particular to highlight the qualities of their cultural heritage. Examples are the royal city of Naga in Sudan, the metropolis of Ctesiphon in Iraq, the metropolis of Pergamon in Turkey and, in comparison, the imperial palaces on the Palatine in Rome as well as the German former Roman metropolis of Cologne around the building history of Cologne Cathedral. The paper will use these examples to illustrate how abstraction can bring architecture of different cultural contexts into a state of architectural comparability. The projects shown were created in collaboration with the institutions responsible for their preservation or their research and were exhibited partially as permanent installations in Cologne Cathedral, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Egyptian Museum in Munich, among others.

(Please note that there should be a strikethrough the character "r" in every instance of the word "Whrite," including in the title of this abstract.)

In this paper, I argue that we—digital humanities (DH) scholars, practitioners, educators, and especially those of us in dominant groups—must engage in symbolic projects to rename information and communication technologies (ICTs) in ways that announce their racial politics. Language describing ICTs deployed by Big Tech, turning on reductive and misleading metaphors, often enacts real harm on minoritized individuals. By way of renaming, we can recast ICTs in terms of what they do to individuals as opposed to what Big Tech maintains they do for individuals.

My specific intervention is to rename Google’s word-prediction AI, called Smart Compose, as “Whrite.” While it alludes to the AI’s function—writing— Whrite also draws attention to the identities the AI privileges. I make this argument based on a counterdata project I carried out with Whrite in my doctoral work. Counterdata projects challenge assumptions that data collection and datasets are generally complete (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). Rather, they acknowledge that data collection is often done by dominant groups for dominant groups (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). As such, they “cal[l] out missing datasets… and advocat[e] for filling them” (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020, p. 34). My counterdata project consisted of transcribing more than 30,000 words from five texts into Google applications, meticulously documenting where and how Whrite intervened. The results of this work corroborate claims Rashmi Dyal-Chand (2021) has made about autocorrect and Halcyon Lawrence (2021) has made about Siri: language technologies make implicit suggestions about the communities for whom language technology is designed, and to whom language belongs.

As such, symbolically renaming ICTs serves as one important step toward an anticolonial technology praxis. When we—members of dominant groups for whom technology is best designed—continue to work, without resistance, with ICTs as they are marketed and deployed, we become complicit in and tacitly accept their politics. I argue that DH community members belonging to dominant groups with a stated interest in social justice have a responsibility to intervene in normative narratives surrounding ICTs. Symbolic renaming is one way to carry out this intervention.

References

D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press.

Dyal-Chand, R. (2021). Autocorrecting for whiteness. Boston University Law Review, 101(1), 191-286.

Lawrence, H. (2021). Siri disciplines. In T.S. Mullaney, B. Peters, M. Hicks, & K. Philip (Eds.), Your computer is on fire. MIT Press.

The isolation and distance created during the COVID-19 pandemic have increased the use of distance learning services worldwide. According to UNESCO (2020), the education system found over 1.5 billion children and nearly 60.2 million teachers out of their classrooms globally. Despite the initial struggle, institutions adopted remote learning services to continue educating students. Post-pandemic, these services remain highly important, particularly in remote communities that lack education resources and funding. This paper documents the design of a culturally appropriate distance learning platform for students from the Tlicho region of the Northwest Territories.

Existing literature on distance learning, design, Tlicho and Indigenous research practices provided background research. In addition, three case studies were conducted on current distance learning services in remote communities as examples of practical adaptations. Furthermore, I identified gaps in knowledge and a lack of a specific design problem. For instance, I did not precisely know the community's technological conditions, target audience or subjects they wanted to be taught. Lastly, the visual design of the platform required inputs and insights to create a suitable design language that connects with the community.

The solution to these gaps required the involvement of Tlicho citizens in the design process. A human-centred design (HCD) approach was adopted since it prioritizes human needs, capabilities and behaviours and then creates designs to accommodate those factors. HCD uniquely avoids narrowing the pain points for as long as possible but instead iterates upon repeated approximations. This design process involves rapid testing of ideas and building upon the feedback of each test to constantly modify and improve a solution (Norman, 2013, p.8-9).

I conducted three user testing sessions for 90 minutes each (distance learning model, medium fidelity mockups and high fidelity prototypes) with four participants from the Tlicho Government. Various design alternatives were shared with the participants, and they offered their insights and selected their preferred approach. As a result, problems were discovered and narrowed through repeated trials, producing a distance learning service that genuinely meets the needs of the people. The research showcases the design and development of 50 interfaces of a Distance Learning platform, Hoghadeeto (learn in Dogrib). The website was built with the support of personas, scenarios, wireframes, sitemaps and low/medium and high fidelity prototypes tested at every stage by Tlicho Government representatives.

I was aware of the hesitancy and stress that comes with studying online for people who are not comfortable working in a digital environment. However, from my first experience speaking with the participants, they were deeply enthusiastic about creating a Distance learning platform as a means to preserve Indigenous knowledge for future generations. This study documents the insights offered throughout the research, such as; the importance of sustainability, accessibility and visual storytelling through symbolism. Lastly, this research discusses the importance of establishing trust with the community through active listening and flexibility in the design process.

References

Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.

Education: From disruption to recovery. (2020, March 4). UNESCO. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponseˆ

The tragic and brutal death of Deborah Emmanuel on May 12, 2022, at the hands of Muslim students on her college campus in Sokoto, Nigeria, has brought attention to the ongoing religious tensions in the country. This incident sparked outrage and concern among the country's Christian population, who fear that the government's inaction in bringing the perpetrators to justice may indicate an 'Islamization agenda'. This study examines eight YouTube channels with the most comments related to the incident in question. The corpus was created using the Google Sheets Apps Script, which enabled the use of a code that directly accessed the Youtube Data API v2 and authorized the retrieval of comments.

To better understand the perspectives and sentiments surrounding religious conflicts in Nigeria, a sentiment analysis of the comments made on YouTube will be conducted, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The five main words in the data - God, Religion, People, Islam, and Nigeria - have been chosen as they are central to the topic of religious conflicts and will be used to manually read and code the comments. This choice is justified by the fact that the comments in the corpus constructed and reproduced understandings of God, religion, people, Islam, and Nigeria, and how they might be related to power relations. The analysis will be informed by the social identity theory, which shows how individuals define themselves and others based on group membership and how these identities shape their perceptions and interactions, and the speech act theory, which demonstrates how language, even when used in the virtual world, can trigger physical action. These theories will help to examine how the comments in the corpus constructed and reproduced understandings of they most frequent and significant words in the corpus, and how they might be related to power relations in this context. This study aims to better understand the religious conflicts in Nigeria and the sentiments surrounding its major agents.

This paper sets out to analyse the discourse on the crisis in the German Democratic Republic in the decade between 1976 and 1986 through a computer-assisted approach. Using the DIMEAN methodology developed by Spitzmüller and Warnke (2011), the paper aims explicitly to analyse both the articulation of the political discourse on the crisis in the last phase of the East German state’s life and the diachronic evolution of its constitutive strategies. To achieve this, three constitutive levels (intertextual, actoral, and transtextual) have been studied quantitatively and qualitatively to clarify the nature of the discourse. The dataset is constituted by the speeches of the most prominent political leaders in the discursive community, such as the secretary general as well as the other members of the political office. The speeches were contained in the protocol of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany congress published by the Dietz Verlag, at the time one of the main publishing houses of the party, if not the most influential. A total of five volumes, relative to the ninth (two protocol), tenth (two protocol), and eleventh party congress, have been digitalised using optical character recognition software. In order to tokenize the data, I used AntConc to convert them into machine-readable TEXT files. The results ultimately showed how the discourse on the crisis is multifaceted being characterised by an exceptional structural complexity. Concretely, the crisis is such only insofar as it is relegated to the external capitalist context and never internal. These two fundamental dimensions are differentiated according to the greater or lesser degree of explicitness. The results of this research on the political language in an authoritarian environment support the idea that discursive features can be inferred although rhetorically obscured or even absent, suggesting that further research in this direction should be undertaken.

Reference List

Spitzmüller, Jürgen, and Ingo Warnke. Diskurslinguistik: eine Einführung in Theorien und Methoden der transtextuellen Sprachanalyse. De Gruyter Studium. Berlin ; Boston: De Gruyter, 2011.

Intellectual property is key to our work as humanists. After all, our objects of study are cultural productions, whether works of literature and philosophy, works of art, historical records, or music. The ability to analyze and interpret the intellectual property of authors, artists, and other creators of cultural artifacts, some of which may be under copyright, is essential to our work, as is the creation of our own intellectual property in the form of journal articles, books, and digital projects. Indeed, the importance of intellectual property and copyright to our work is compounded when that work—our objects of study and our scholarship—lives in an online, digital environment, in which reproducing works of intellectual property, whose copyright status is often unclear, is only a click away.

In this presentation, I will argue that an understanding of copyright is essential to our work as digital humanists, as users and creators of intellectual property. What do we need to know when reproducing digital images from a digital archive? Or when we copy text from Project Gutenberg for textual analysis? How can we protect our own work from being modified and reproduced against our wishes?

Thinking about the Canadian copyright context, and with the disclaimer that I am not a legal expert, I will explore some common copyright issues that digital humanists are likely to face based on my own experiences using digital resources and creating digital projects. To do this, I will use a case study approach, taking as an example my in-progress online digital edition of the novel Destiny: Or, the Chief’s Daughter (1831) by the nineteenth-century Scottish novelist Susan Edmonstone Ferrier. I will outline the potential copyright issues that need to be considered at each stage of the project, from building the text corpus to sourcing images for the website to deciding how users will be allowed to modify and reproduce the editorial notes, if at all. Beyond the digital project itself, decisions must be made about where to publish any articles based on the project, and whether and how to make that work open access.

Building on the findings of the case study, and drawing on knowledge gained through my work on open scholarship policy and through my MLIS studies, I will offer some suggestions for using digital materials and managing one’s own copyright, including through the use of Creative Commons licenses.

I will end the presentation by focusing on a recent policy development related to copyright in Canada: the extension of Canada’s general copyright term that came into effect on January 1, 2023. Due to this policy change, no works will enter the public domain in Canada for the next 20 years. By discussing some potential effects of this drought on digital humanities, and on digital literary studies in particular, I will emphasize the importance for digital humanists on being familiar with the copyright environment in Canada and how it affects our work.

Data translation processes like visualization and sonification can be used to “tell stories with data” (Lenzi & Gleria 2018, p. 89), providing researchers with innovative approaches to analyze research data and communicate findings to broad audiences (Sawe et al 2020). Sonification has recently gained popularity as an alternative to the more established process of data visualization because of how it can enable an immersive experience of multidimensional and large datasets (Cooke et al 2017). As an emerging method for analyzing and communicating data, sonification presents new and exciting opportunities for researchers to engage critically and creatively with data. However, like data visualization, sonification can also obscure the politics and normative cultural assumptions about the relationship between quantitative data and objectivity if it is wielded as a neutral approach to translating data into information.

Our contribution harnesses these tensions by putting forward preliminary considerations for sonification as a critical experimental method for communication and media studies. We examine how sonification as a method can create an analytic space to draw out the unspoken relations that structure the imagined objectivity of data-driven approaches to research (Campt 2015; Benjamin 2019).

Sound is widely recognized as an efficient yet complex means of communicating meaning and emotion through time, space, and frequencies, giving listeners a distinct and subjective perspective of data that may otherwise be inaccessible. Some musicologists who work with data sonification fixate on the idea of accurate representation (i.e. mapping sounds that represent the data as closely as possible). For example, the sound of a ticking clock might represent the passage of time through a particular data set. But these kinds of sounds are often culturally determined. Instead, our presentation examines how sonification can tune us into silences, omissions and intensities when employed as a counterintuition.

In our exploration of data sonification as a method, we integrate examples of how we have applied it as a method in research, teaching and learning. Sonification, as we argue, is an exploratory and explanatory method to activate different “modalities of perception, encounter and engagement” (Campt 2015 p.4). We turn to queer and post-colonial sound studies to look at how sonification can encourage alternative engagements with data, particularly marginalized data that may not be recognized through existing frameworks. It allows for a way to engage with disobedient data that is messy, marginal, and otherwise incomprehensible under dominant modes of data translation.

Digital storytelling provides new opportunities for DH as both academic fields seek to encourage dialogue, make the world comprehensible, and discover new ways of interaction with the support of digital tools (Barber, 2016). It gives us the opportunity to hear the voices missing from the historical record. How might we reimagine the democratization of and challenges to the human record?

Digital storytelling is regarded by many media researchers as an important way of embodying folk creativity with the assistance of new media forms (Burgess, 2006). From the perspective of media research, the act of storytelling itself can be closely related to the expression of social rights and unequal power distribution; the act of storytelling in traditional media channels often lacks the ability to fully represent society, thus the emergence of digital storytelling is argued by some be a part of social justice movements that challenge the power of the mainstream discourse (Canella, 2017). For GLAM practitioners, working with local communities, digital storytelling is one of their essential tools for collecting important pieces of evidence and material for preserving the memory of the community. These contain more diverse and efficient memory materials than the traditional single-form historical records used in the past, such as scattered textual archival records, undigitized old photos, un-transcribed oral history materials (audio and video recordings) and so on. We argue that it is essential to include the voices of the marginalized to democratize the historic record.

The Shanghai Memory Project gathers and aggregates data from its rich holdings, and we use a critical research method to examine and reflect on the use of digital storytelling as part of the project. These data include the voices of the ordinary people of Shanghai, and particularly the traditional vernacular (Shanghainese) dialect, which can help to redress the biases and the historical record. We acknowledge and reflect on the biases within our records that have impacted on the selection process along with ideological and other consequences to rectify the historical record (Guilliano, 2022). This is an important additional dimension to the wider Shanghai Memory project. These data fill the gaps in the historical and cultural record so that we can ‘ensure that the stories and voices which have been underrepresented in both print and digital knowledge production […] can be heard’ (Risam, 2018. p.129).

There is a great potential for DH practitioners to make use of GLAM collections to discover new material and support knowledge creation through the lens of digital storytelling. More importantly, it moves the focus from the mainstream and gathers individual and collective memories from the marginalized, the minority, the overlooked, and forgotten, what Castells (2011) calls ‘counter power’ to challenge the established historiography. Digital storytelling can be a powerful tool to influence the ‘ways in which narratives are crafted and […] the struggle over how dominant paradigms are established, reinforced and [also importantly, how they are] resisted’ (Canella, 2017. p.26). These diverse viewpoints are needed to achieve balance in the historical and cultural record.

This presentation discusses how digital humanities scholars working with archives necessarily must re-imagine their approach to communication of research findings in order to create more equitable access for community members and stakeholders. We will consider SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta as an example of a public-facing and community-engaged approach to de-archiving, and then showcasing the results of how we ultimately share and are reframing/recontextualizing archives of literary audio (recorded from the 1960s-1980s) for the public. “De-archiving,” to borrow a term from David Berry, rethinks archival practice as a process of activation rather than preservation, with the goal being to open up these collections to the public and to artists, who are in turn engaged in the process of reflecting on and responding to these works and in this way invigorating them with new meaning.

SpokenWeb at the University of Alberta houses a collection of rare literary audio recordings, and in fact our local research group began with the discovery of a cardboard box of these reel-to-reel tapes. The recordings—which include poet and sound artist performances, classroom lectures, and campus radio shows, dating back to the 1960s—are an example of the audiotext or sounded text as an emergent object of literary study (Kahn; Perloff and Dworkin; Camlot). These audiotextual works have inspired new forays into public-facing scholarship, from podcast episodes to participant-driven listening practice sessions, which seek to engage the local artistic community and wider public with these archives and, in doing so, reinvigorate them with meaning.

Our paper builds on recent theorizations of what O’Driscoll and Fong term “ethical listening,” engaging with critical questions such as: How do we be good caretakers of audio data, aural/audio histories? Who are the stakeholders represented in the collection and also what is at stake, not just in terms of our legal obligations, but our ethical and moral responsibilities? In our paper, we will discuss how creating a digital audio collection can create opportunities to open up a dialogue between scholars and artists, as well as addressing the practical implications of contacting rights holders and the process of making archival audio available and accessible to the broader research community.

Illness narratives, or autobiographical accounts of the lived experience of pathology or disability, have been established as an effective therapeutic intervention for responding to emotional well-being related to illness (Couser, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2009; Frank; Hartman; Hawkins; Irvine & Charon; Kleinman; Mintz; Sontag). The scholarly field related to illness narratives is currently grappling with the medium’s expansion from the traditional book to digital-born narratives, however, there is limited research analyzing illness narratives built through literary hypertext. Literary hypertext is a form of digital story writing that calls on the reader to participate in the narrative’s unfolding by selecting hyperlink options which branch the narrative into nonlinear directions. There has been a revival of scholarly and public interest in literary hypertext in the past decade, owing to the genre’s culture of free production and distribution (Anthropy; Harvey). This project questions how women and nonbinary individuals with the endocrine disorder hyperandrogenism can use hypertext technology to write illness narratives that construct positive relationships between their identities and the world. Ten participants with hyperandrogenism completed a pedagogical module on building hypertext illness narratives. The corpus of this research, including participant narratives and interview transcripts, was analyzed through a feminist new materialist theoretical framework and a novel methodology called Critical Discourse Analysis for Digtial-Born Narratives. The findings of this research argue that literary hypertext technology was used by participants to visually map and manually chart experiences through the practice of hyperlinking in order to create a structure perceived as best suited for therapeutic reflection.

When Digital Humanists envision the future of Digital Humanities, Linked Open Data (LOD) often features prominently. First conceived by Tim Berners-Lee and collaborators in the World Wide Web Consortium, LOD is the connective tissue of the Semantic Web (Gracy, Maeda, Verborgh and van Hooland, Berners-Lee, Niu). Its key innovation is an ability to link data across disparate sources; its central promise is to connect data that has been hitherto siloed, and only storable and searchable in bespoke forms (W3C Consortium). In our own practice as digital humanists who lead the AdArchive Project, we have explored the potential for LOD to enrich our understanding of the complicated networks that sustained feminist periodical publishing in the 1970s. AdArchive is an LOD experiment that represents components of feminist periodicals in RDF; its goal is to build a digital archive of feminist advertisements in order to digitally represent a rich ecosystem of relationships that existed between a range of disparate entities within a larger movement (publications, publishers, editors, organizations, and authors). Using LOD, we set the groundwork for representing the connections among feminist datasets and enriching understandings of the histories of feminist cultural production.

Insofar as they both lend themselves to a decentralization of knowledge and a rejection of hierarchy, there are some clear points of harmony between feminist epistemologies and the networked logics of the Semantic Web. Nevertheless, like other classification systems, LOD is not inherently feminist. This paper argues that the feminist orientation developed in the AdArchive project can contribute to reimagining LOD’s future in digital humanities. We make this argument through a detailed description of five practical principles for authoring data in ways that align with feminist orientations. These principles include:

1) Describe everything - data democracy

2) Description is interpretation

3) Vocabularies and ontologies should not conceal data

4) Embrace messiness

5) Hold space for absence

Drawing on feminist digital humanities scholars including Catherine D’Ignacio and Lauren F. Klein, Joanna Drucker, and Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, and considering the work of Martha Nell Smith, Susan Brown, and Julia Flanders, we approach LOD data authoring as an active practice of remediation that requires careful reflexive and open-ended practice. It is vital for us to be clear that our goal is not to author feminist data, but to author data in ways that align with feminist methods, ethics, and projects. We view feminism as a practice and an orientation, not as a static quality of things, objects, artifacts, or even individual researchers. Our practice involves applying feminist principles when we author RDF triples for LOD. By outlining the principles that guide our project - and complementing them with practical descriptions of the work - we hope to provide encouragement for other researchers to participate in the praxis of imagining the equitable digital spaces of the future, digital spaces that complement humanistic and feminist thought.

This paper uses the interdisciplinary analytical methods of feminist technoscience to reveal discrepancies between Apple’s public-facing Inclusion and Diversity commitments (which report their improvement in more inclusive and diverse opportunities and corporate representations) and its design of blatantly biased software, with a focus on Apple’s AI assistant Siri. While Big Tech corporations evoke efficiency, modernity, and innovation, they also repeatedly raise concerns about exclusion and a lack of diversity through the design of products with demonstrable bias toward underrepresented groups (Noble 2018; O’Neil 2016). In particular, by mimicking and reproducing limited concepts of gender through embedded design, Siri sustains a vicious cycle of reinforcing gendered stereotypes in technoculture and to users en masse.

By combining methodologies from critical discourse analysis, critical software/code analysis, and critical design analysis, this paper draws upon the interdisciplinary approaches of feminist technoscientists who analyze artifact and platform design to reveal underlying ideologies and potential biases of technologies; specifically, we draw upon the methods of Anne Balsamo (2011), Daniela K. Rosner (2018), and Judy Wacjman (2004; 2010). Our paper contributes a comparative analysis of Apple’s proposed diversity in its workforce and its investment towards such initiatives with how Siri has evolved in design to see if these actions are mutually constitutive. In other words: are the money and efforts Apple invests into inclusion and diversity being reflected in the products they put out?

Our close reading of Apple’s Inclusion and Diversity commitments reveals the following data: from 2014 - 2021, Apple’s overall workforce improvement is a generally static pattern, with women being in the minority, and an overall 4.8% increase of women over eight years. Apple’s technology workforce had similarly minimal improvement, with men vastly dominating and a 4.4% increase of women. We compare this data with our qualitative critical code and design analysis of Siri’s available code scripts, which reveal that the software has been minorly tweaked over the years. The Anglo American software was originally voiced as female, programmed to sometimes perform “wifely” duties and even respond flirtatiously. While Apple has since removed some more flagrant traits and offensive responses, developers have not offered standardized guidelines against sexist representations (UNESCO 2019; Fan 2021), thus excusing themselves from changing other problematic design decisions unless called out by the public.

We argue that, while Apple’s more recent UX/UI design decisions reduce the immediate association of Siri’s utterances with women, Siri still presents a binarized notion of gender, showing that Apple has not done enough to mitigate their biased language models. As Big Tech companies pledge corporate social responsibility yet create technologies that diverge from these promises, this paper concludes that it is important to maintain critical discourse on harmful user effects, their mitigations, and social considerations for equitable technological development. Our identification of discrepancies among technological products’ theoretical design, company values, and product applications is ultimately in an effort to hold Big Tech companies accountable for their public-facing commitments, toward creating meaningful policy, challenging gendered systems, and creating more equitable products.

This panel considers the new Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities / Certificat canadien en Humanités Numériques (cc:DH/HN), which will start offering certificates in fall 2023. The importance of digital humanities workshops beyond established undergraduate and graduate curricula is well documented (see, for example, Rehbein and Fritze 2012, Morris 2017, Estill and Guiliano 2023). A wealth of digital humanities training opportunities take place across Canada. To date, however, there has been limited coordination across these separate digital humanities workshops and courses, and no official certification process that acknowledges the time and labour of those pursuing digital humanities training. Working with key digital humanities training communities across the country including the longstanding Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), cc:DH/HN will be a mechanism through which undergraduates, graduate students, librarians, faculty, academic staff, and members of the engaged public can receive credit for their professionalization and development as highly qualified personnel. In turn, this will emphasize the importance and impact of the robust digital humanities training network already existing across Canada. The cc:DH/HN program is not a for-credit certificate: it rewards extra-curricular learning and so is not intellectually governed by a single institution. Indeed, cc:DH/HN responds to the call for “Reckonings and Reimaginings” by bringing together collaborators from across institutions and at different career stages to reflect on the possibilities afforded by a formal partnership collaboration when it comes to microcredentialing extracurricular digital humanities training opportunities.

In 2012, Lisa Spiro envisioned a certificate program that would be open, global, and modular. Spiro’s vision, radical at the time, imagined cross-institution partnerships, shared course materials, and community-driven collaboration. While Spiro’s imagined certificate never came to be, our proposed partnership and the cc:DH/HN project responds directly to some of her calls: for a collaborative, cross-institutional certificate “certified by professional organization or community” (p. 337); with a curriculum defined by the “digital humanities community.” In future years, cc:DH/HN has potential to grow into a global partnership. The creation of cc:DH/HN is intended to benefit students, academics, staff, and community members who participate in, organize, or teach digital humanities workshops, as well as encouraging increased participation in these events.

We note that we have submitted a version of this panel for DH2023 at Graz; we recognize the importance of building community both nationally and internationally. We would look forward to sharing information and getting feedback from those in the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities community on this initiative, which gathers Canadian partners and with aims to build on and bolster the success of Canadian digital humanities training.

Paper 1: “Why a Canadian Certificate for Digital Humanities?”

Laura Estill (St Francis Xavier University)

This paper introduces the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/Certificat canadien en Humanités Numériques (cc:DH/HN), which will offer a certificate to people who complete 100 hours of digital humanities workshops. This certificate will offer value to job seekers and knowledge workers who have committed the time and energy to engage in life-long. The website (following international models such as the European “Digital Humanities Course Registry”) will raise the profile of digital humanities training, will help practitioners find appropriate training events, and, by gathering information about past, present, and future workshops will also open avenues to analyze the state of the field when it comes to digital humanities training and collaboration. The cc:DH/HN partnership accomplishes something no individual scholar or institution could accomplish: it brings together the people who offer key digital humanities training organizations across Canada in a partnership to offer a learner-driven extracurricular training certificate that can be earned by students, faculty, staff, and community members for attending workshops offered at a range of institutions. The formal partnership proposed to establish cc:DH/HN will also lead to cross-pollination of ideas and collaboration between instructors, organizers, and participants in these training events. Collaboration and building community are and will be key to cc:DH/HN’s success.

Paper 2: French-Language Digital Humanities Training in Canada: The Case of Québec

Michael E. Sinatra (Université de Montréal)

The question of the plurality of epistemological models is particularly important for the French-speaking community whose language does not correspond to the dominant language in international research. The major companies involved in the circulation of knowledge in a digital environment are almost all English-speaking and it is undeniable that technological developments (tools, platforms, environments) are fundamentally designed and developed in the English-speaking world. A critical approach to the training offered through the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques based at the Université de Montréal allows us to identify the particularity of Francophone approaches on at least two levels: first, because Francophone methodologies and theoretical approaches are characterized by a specificity due to a cultural tradition and a research culture that was formed around a particular linguistic community; second, because technically the French language poses challenges that are particular to it and that are fundamental in the preservation of textual inscriptions: for example, the encoding of diacritics and the set of challenges that this poses for indexing, research and preservation. All these questions are at the heart of the training we offer, but also of the exchanges and collaborations with our colleagues outside Quebec.

Paper 3: “ccDH/HN: Theorizing Challenges and Opportunities as a Graduate Student/Postdoctoral Collaborator”

Kyle Dase (University of Victoria)

For any graduate student, postdoctoral fellow, or early career researcher, collaborating on a major, federally-funded project such as a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant is a huge opportunity: merely being able to be a fly on the wall during the composition of a large application or the process of administering and developing a grant project is a learning experience unto itself, let alone being actively involved in the conceptualization, formulation, and application of such a project. Such experiences help students and early career researchers take a valuable next step as members of the academic community and grant insight into aspects of federal funding and larger collaborative projects that are often difficult to grasp as an isolated academic working on one’s own project.

At the same time, any project that includes students, postdocs, or early career researchers should account for the increased need for mentorship and professional development of members in the early stages of their academic career. Just as “a postdoc is not your opportunity for cheap labor,” and ought to consider the mentorship required to help postdoctoral researchers progress in their professional goals, early stage academics’ involvement in projects ought to be informed by an understanding of their distinctly tenuous position and implement supports that allow them to contribute to the project without overloading them (Alpert-Abrams et al. 3).

This presentation focuses on the role of students, postdocs, and early career researchers as collaborators on SSHRC PDGs. It examines how these temporary (and often tenuous) positions make collaboration on such grants an important and valuable experience that can contribute to professional development and network building, but also makes individuals in these positions both limited in the number of ways in which they can engage in these projects (both in terms of a grant or application’s infrastructural requirements and the limitations of a student/postdoc/early career researcher’s time and resources). It develops a brief set of guidelines to help both principal investigators and student/postdoc/early career researchers ensure such projects and grants are the valuable opportunity for budding academics they are intended to be rather than another commitment for a group of stakeholders that are already pushed to the limit by the expectations of an intensely competitive job market.

Paper 4: Title: Decades of Digital Humanities Training in Canada: The Digital Humanities Summer Institute

Ray Siemens (University of Victoria), Alyssa Arbuckle (University of Victoria) and Randa El Khatib (University of Toronto – Scarborough)

Presenting Author: Ray Siemens

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), founded in 2001, is a community-based annual training institute for the development and sharing of digital humanities skills, tools, and approaches, taking place in Victoria, BC, Canada. This contribution surveys elements of the last several decades of DHSI, and reflects on how an initially small-scale, regional event has grown into an internationally-attended offering that welcomes ~850 attendees every year—amounting to the largest digital humanities curriculum in the world. A particular focus is on how open, community interests have expanded to include open social scholarship concerns and approaches, something which saw initial articulation by Siemens in the context of communities of practice, methodological commons, and digital self-determination in the Humanities (2014, 2016, 2017). Building on these foundations, we align with recent calls by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Generous Thinking, 2019) and Katina Rogers (Putting the PhD to Work, 2020)—among others—to take a values-based approach to training in the academic context.

(See attached file for complete works cited)

Paper 5: Title: Graduate Students, Collaboration, and Digital Humanities Training and Microcredentials

Arun Jacob (University of Toronto)