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)
