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.

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)

Les écritures numériques, en ce qu’elles façonnent l’espace dans lequel nous évoluons, doivent être considérées comme composante indissociable dans une réflexion pour une reconfiguration de l’avenir. Plus particulièrement, comment inclure l’importance croissante du numérique (et ses implications épistémologiques) pour envisager une réinvention des institutions, figures d’autorité pour la transmission des savoirs ?

Notre table ronde proposera quelques pistes de réflexion ; nous explorerons les formes de collaboration qui se déploient dans plusieurs projets de recherche en humanités numériques. Très divers dans leurs objectifs, tous ces projets envisagent le travail collaboratif de façon innovante et dynamique : de l’édition collaborative ouverte à des ateliers spécialisés entre étudiants et professeurs, en passant par la conceptualisation théorique de la dynamique du pouvoir ou encore la considération de la reconnaissance dans le processus collaboratif de production de connaissances.

Nous interrogerons le développement de projets de recherche articulés autour de l’équipe TalEN – nouveau regroupement de chercheur·e·s pour les théories et approches littéraires des écritures numériques – , en nous concentrant sur les formes de collaboration au sein même des projets. La constitution de l’équipe, subséquente à la plupart des projets qu’elle enveloppe, se fonde sur un désir et un besoin de déborder des cadres institutionnels et des disciplines respectives des professeur·e·s et des étudiant·e·s participant aux divers projets énoncés. Elle a notamment pour objet de réimaginer des modes de collaboration et de déstabiliser la hiérarchisation qui caractérise le monde de la recherche, en sciences humaines.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest among many digital humanities practitioners, especially those rooted in computational literary studies, to adopt a mixed methodology of distant reading and close reading. Distant reading, as the name suggests, engages with texts from a distance, thus offering the possibility of analyzing a large number of texts simultaneously. Close reading, on the other hand, involves a more in-depth analysis of individual texts or passages. By combining these two approaches, researchers can gain a more comprehensive understanding of literary and cultural texts. So far, a number of DH scholars have championed this approach in their works (e.g., Hermann 2017; So 2017; Sá Pereira 2019; Eve 2019), and some of them have coined terms for their proposed mixed methodologies; example terminology includes “computational hermeneutics” (Piper), “scalable reading” (Mueller), and “parallax reading” (Sample). This paper presents a survey of theoretical DH works of recent years that have presented a framework for and ultimately adopted mixed methodology in text analysis.

The methodology of this survey adopts a mixed approach, similar to the methodology that it aims to survey. First, the abstracts of recent annual ADHO DH conferences are analyzed to identify references to a mixed methodology. The goal of this step is to get a sense of the general state of the field and how the use of mixed methodology has evolved over time. Secondly, individual attempts at defining a new methodological paradigm are pinpointed. This is done by searching for articles and books that discuss mixed methodology in digital literary studies and reviewing them to see how different scholars understand and define the concept. Finally, the usage of this mixed methodology is showcased in example projects. This involves identifying projects that have used mixed methodology and analyzing their results, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.

The use of a mixed methodology in digital literary studies is a relatively new and exciting development, and its future looks promising. However, despite the growing popularity of mixed methodology, the number of “successful” projects that use it is still relatively small. There are several challenges associated with using a mixed methodology, such as the need to balance the benefits of distant reading with the importance of close reading. Nevertheless, the potential benefits of mixed methodology are significant, and researchers in the field are continuing to explore and refine it. As digital humanities continue to grow, the use of mixed methodology is likely to become more widespread and refined, allowing us to gain a deeper understanding of literary texts and literary history.

Words Are Hard: Untangling Understandings of How Places were Important in REED London’s London

We introduce the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) by outlining crucial design considerations informing this intersectional feminist project, and provide an overview by means of a representation based on the classic London Tube Map diagram of what LINCS offers to scholars interested in using Linked Open Data (LOD) for cultural research.