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)

This panel examines the ways in which media archeology is an effective research methodology for Digital Humanities (DH) scholarship, as its simultaneous focus on larger media infrastructures, such as globalised corporate entities networking with nation states, alongside the detailed histories and bureaucratic materials generated by specific media technologies and their data structures, make visible and legible the production and circulation of power within contemporary networks of media technologies. Extending from DH scholars such as Alan Liu (2012; 2013) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (2013), this panel examines how media archeology is crucial to reckoning with the historical and ongoing targeting of marginalised and vulnerable individuals and populations, in particular those who are racialized and gendered, and sourcing what Ezikiel Dixon-Roman calls “hauntings” (2017) of technical progress, funding, data practices and other historical trajectories within AI and AI-enabled technologies in 2023.

As outlined by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is cross-disciplinary and nomadic, and its nimbleness and tolerance for multi-pronged analysis allow for a greater understanding of digital media’s “interactivity, navigability, and digital representation and transmission” (3; 2012). This flexibility and simultaneous attention to the invisible and visible, material and immaterial, make it well suited to understanding the particular data-driven algorithmic processes that define contemporary digital media and DH scholarship. The genealogies of power revealed through media archeologies, resulting from rival technologies vying for control, trace how the hegemon came to be, and ascend to the pole position of the socio-technical apparatus (Monea and Packer 2016). Media archeologies understood thus enables DH scholars to engage in inter-/cross-disciplinary conversations with scholars in science and technology studies, philosophy of science, DH and other disciplines.

Machine Translation and Politics: Mapping the media genealogy of digital humanities collaborations and opportunities

Arun Jacob

This paper will shed light on the legacies, logics, and cultural techniques that have shaped and formed the early collaborations and opportunities in digital humanities projects in machine translation research and computational linguistics. The media history of the machine translation project led by Léon Dostert, the Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University in collaboration with IBM, helps unpack how war is the motor-force of history. By tracing the lineages of the machine translation media technologies, i.e. their discursive formation, the networks through which the discourse was circulated and the apparatuses that were formed in the process. We are able to gather how these instruments of knowledge production render the world knowable and representable through the production, storage, and distribution of particular kinds of data, shaping knowledge creation and producing and sustaining power relations. Alex Monea and Jeremy Packer’s media genealogical intervention insists on suturing questions of power’s genealogies and subjectivation to the media archaeological mode of analysis. This approach enables me to consider the agential potential and embeddedness of media technologies operationalized in digital humanities vis-a-vis relations of power. My analyses will show how the institutional systems that work to gather, collect, store, transcribe, and distribute the data of machine translation are inconspicuously tangled in relations of power.

“Reconstructing the Constellations of Technical, Political, and Representational Protocols within Facial Recognition Technologies via Media Archeology”

Aaron Tucker

This presentation outlines how a multi-pronged media archeological methodology is an incredibly effective way to reckon with the complex centuries of racist and misogynist history related to the development of facial recognition technologies (FRTs). Such a media archeology leverages the fact that FRTs have long and well-documented technical histories of their computational vision and visualities. In turn, documents and developments related to the technical protocols contain within them the mappings of FRTs representational and political protocols. Likewise, materials related to the representational and/or political protocols often describe the necessary technical protocols needed to operationalize such logics. Knowing this, a three pronged media archeology effectively illustrates FRTs’ development: tracing FRTs in the context of Wolfgang Ernst’s understanding of the operative moment helps to reconstruct the evolutions of technical protocols; utilizing Lisa Gitelman’s framing of digital media as structured, maintained and controlled by hegemonic bureaucratic functioning reveals FRTs’ political protocols; and Anna Munster’s work, wherein intense attention is paid to the flux of relationships forming and unforming in durational and dynamic pulses within the image-making of technological-biological networks, recreates how FRTs’ representational protocols are formed. This paper will illustrate the value of a three-pronged media archeology by examining the specific example of the Woodrow “Woody” Bledsoe’s archive, a man considered to be the “father” of FRTs. Evaluating the materials in the archive via a media archeological methodology showcases the complex interactions of protocols within Bledsoe’s work while simultaneously pointing backwards towards past histories of the technology that his work aligns with, while also highlighting the influences Bledsoe has had on contemporary FRTs.

Genealogies of Pain: Wounded Attachments and the Queer/Trans Archive

Kanika Lawton

Leelah Alcorn’s death, in particular the suicide notes she left on her Tumblr and in a handwritten letter, is the focus of this paper. A trans teenager who died at 17, Leelah was subjected to conversion therapy while alive and sustained misgendering and deadnaming by her parents in death. Her online suicide note, which named her parents as the cause of her death and pleaded that “My death needs to mean something,” was deleted at her parents’ request, while a handwritten suicide note was also destroyed. Working with objects that only exist in the traces of digital archiving (as screenshots, news sites, and social media platforms), how can media archeology make Leelah’s death mean something without bringing her back to a life rendered unbearable?

In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka argue that “on the basis of their discoveries, media archaeologists have begun to construct alternate histories of suppressed, neglected, and forgotten media that do not point teleologically to the present media-cultural condition as their ‘perfection’” (2011, 3). A “rummaging” methodology that takes as its objects the deadened, the cast-aside, and the “bad,” media archeology is an apt means of thinking through incomplete media histories— especially in the ephemeral, contested space of the digital archive—as well as the suppressed, neglected, and forgotten histories of queer/trans people and the media objects they produce.

This paper argues for media archaeology’s value as a DH and queer/trans methodology of sitting with the painful histories, encounters, and feelings that permeate the queer/trans archive and its disproportionate collection of violence, suicide, and anger. Drawing from Wendy Brown’s concept of “wounded attachments” and Heather Love’s argument that “queer history is, in a sense, nothing but wounded attachments...[which] just might be another name for the practice of history” (2007, 42), such attachments to a “genealogy of pain”—which entangles the past, present, and future in non-teleological encounters with debilitating histories—attempts to fill the gaps endemic in the queer/trans archive while drawing attention to the painful conditions that brought them about.

How, then, can sitting with the wounded attachments to Leelah that have festered in my own encounters—I was active on Tumblr during her death—make queer/trans archival work both difficult yet all the more essential? Media archeology provide ways to sit with such bad feelings that are nevertheless conducive to present and future historical and historiographical work.

Patents and Problematization -- A Digital Humanities Approach

Paula Nunez de Villavicencio

This paper offers a novel approach to patent research as a site of cultural discourse for the production of subjectivities through modes of problematization. It considers patents produced for wearable technologies and their imagined solutions for shaping human information practices. Using patents produced by major technology companies such as Amazon, this project considers the ways in which we are always already conditioned to certain information practices and cultures of productivity.

This paper examines modes of subjectivation produced through wearable technology as imagined by Amazon and presented in their patents for a labouring system. Delfanti, Pottenger, and Struna and Reese critically examine the labor processes that are currently practiced in Amazon warehouses and distribution centers. These sources among others note the ways in which the human is made to work at breakneck paces, how the labourers are currently surveilled, directed, and encouraged to ensure a level of efficiency demanded by consumers and upper management alike. Amazon has made changes to the material labor system following in the steps of Taylorism, Ford, LEAN, and Industry 4.0 in their drive to optimize the process and rid themselves of the obstacles in their path toward perfect productivity. This paper is a response to this argument, and seeks to analyze how Amazon problematizes labor processes, and produces technological solutions that shape the future of work through modes of subjectivation.

With well over 2000 patents produced in the last 10 years, this paper uses a mixed method approach of distant reading, stylometry, and produces a media genealogy of the cultural artefact, to determine imagined modes of governance and the role of wearable technology as the imagined solution to the problem of human deficiencies in a digital network and labour process. This paper highlights the potential of digital humanities and patent research to examine contemporary cultural perspectives and future uses of digital technologies.

We must be unfortunately aware of the ways in which different minorities are undermined either through extreme visibility or extreme invisibility, unrepresented or represented in ways that don’t correspond to their identities nor their idiosyncrasy as individuals. As we all know, the history of moving images was decided by people who had the money and power to shape the social imaginary through big, expensive tools and big, expensive budgets. However, as the tools for image making became smaller and easier to reach, many people, especially artists from underrepresented and oppressed group, could take upon the new access to some media and make a stand for who they are, their bodies and their history. And now, in an era when digital fabrication is the new tool by which the master shapes our idea of our bodies, ourselves and others, artists take these new (media) tools to dismantle the master’s house.

This paper will analyze the possibilities of 3D and VR technology as an artistic tool to explore the body and identity outside of the normative ideas imposed upon it. By allowing artists and digital users to create new ways in which a body could exist and be represented, 3D in contemporary art has a powerful political potential. Many artists are currently using CGI and other new media means of expression, but this essay will focus only on a group of artists coming from social groups that have suffered and still suffer from oppression. 3D and VR technology allows these artists to represent themselves and their stories in new ways that help them resist and repair the endured oppression and gives them freedom to find unique identities for themselves and/or their social groups. At the same time, 3D technology used in this critical manner enables artists and users to place these digital bodies within a virtual space where traumatic events (personal or/and historical) can be depicted, described and lived within the protection of virtuality. I will argue how in the digital realm, bodies and identities can exist, tell their stories and meet others through the protection of a proxy element – the avatar – and a spatial and temporal distance – the virtual – that allows them to think, dialog and express hard experiences without being directly exposed to them. Avatars allow artists to choose whether to represent or camouflage themselves, to hide or show - or to hide showing, to show while hiding. in any case, to take power back to their representation and to the way they tell the stories that were unheard or heard to with pain.

As a widely used, popular medium, digital games successfully circulate a variety of narratives, discourses, and practices among highly diverse audiences. While games are often riddled with references, players sometimes encounter narratives that draw on recent or more distant pasts or that engender connections with contemporary issues and topics. This paper explores how digital games may be read, studied, and crafted as cultural texts. I argue that games have the potential to address and document topics and concerns that are contextual to, and reflect discourses which are prominent in the public imaginary. I first discuss some examples, such as the experience of living with anxiety and depression as portrayed in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (Ninja Theory, 2017), and Red Dead Redemption 2’s (Rockstar Games, 2018) interpretation of racial and ethnic discrimination in the US during late 1800’s. Then, I draw on my ongoing textual analysis and ethnographic research of the game The Elder Scrolls Online (Zenimax Online Studios, 2014). I focus on examples that are woven into the narrative architecture of the game, whereby quest narratives are reminiscent of real-world testimonies linked to collective traumatic pasts, or where the dynamics between different types of characters bear familiarity with current debates and perspectives surrounding climate change emergency. Finally, I propose some of the ways through which digital humanities scholars and practitioners could consider engaging with digital games and the constellated bodies of knowledge they produce through various channels. Throughout my discussion, I draw on Sanford et al.’s (2016) expanded definition of intertextuality as they exemplify some of the ways through which game texts connect to a wide range of other types of texts and could enable the development of pedagogical frameworks for fostering a literacy of intertextuality. While digital games are slowly finding their way into the classroom as pedagogical support, much like films, literary texts, and other media, digital humanities practitioners may tap through several ways into this still-young medium for addressing pressing issues and to explore solutions that could help us to create a more equitable and sustainable world.

Gamergate – the infamous anti-feminist “born-digital” movement (Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016) thinly disguised as activism for ethics in gaming journalism – was comprised of dozens of harassment tactics, hundreds of individual figures, and an expanse of interactions across multiple platforms and several years. While the online hate and harassment campaign began to proliferate through the gaming subculture back in August 2014 following accusations of adultery between a prominent game developer and games journalist (Dockterman, 2014), Gamergate remains relevant today. The movement has had a marked impact as the precursor to modern-day reactionary movements such as MAGA and QAnon, offering digital humanists the complex yet important challenge of unpacking its vast network of events, individual agents, ideological submovements, and their constituent tactics (Mortensen, 2020). This challenge is intensified when researchers are interested in tracing the ontology of particular memetic threads –such as the emergence of transphobia or white supremacy– given the complexity of the web and the cascade of relevant data from multiple social media platforms.

Developed in response to these challenges, the Interactive Gamergate Network is an open-source web-hosted utility created using the network software Gephi (Bastian et al, 2009). The project is designed to allow users to visualize, parse, compare, and interact with specific subsets of the Gamergate movement, including temporal events, important figures, relevant media platforms, and Gamergate-adjacent concepts such as specific harassment tactics. Specifically, we approach the Gamergate quagmire from a standpoint informed by network science (Brandes et al, 2013), parsing the above categories into a series of divergent nodes joined through weighted edges based on extent of participation and interrelationship, ultimately aimed at mapping the complex interconnectedness of the movement. The resulting system benefits from the traditional boons associated with network analysis, including measurements of centrality and betweenness for various figures, events, and ideas (Borgatti, 2009). We additionally integrate a temporal element by utilizing Gephi’s ability to create dynamically ‘phased’ network analyses, featuring research done by our sister team on the different ‘phases’ of Gamergate as informed by multiple means of textual analysis on Gamergate-related tweets (Rockwell & Suomela, 2015). Through this lens, Gamergate can be both understood and analyzed as a movement which was far from static and monolithic, but one which morphed, fractured, and reinvented itself across time.

In the context of this paper, we demonstrate the possible applications of the interactive network through an examination of a specific case study; the development and propagation of transphobic rhetoric and transphobic conspiracy across Gamergate. With this in mind, the tool assists in revealing how transphobia gradually manifested itself within the Gamergate movement as the intersectional culmination of several malicious patterns defined by researchers to be at the ideological crux of Gamergate; namely misogyny, conspiracy, anti-progressivism, paedophilia, and ‘militant meninism’ (O’Donnell, 2020). Ultimately, we believe our project can connect and share methods with other researchers investigating contemporary hate movements and the unique ways they propagate in virtual spaces, drawing a roadmap for future research aimed at combating online bigotry.

Galatea, a piece of interactive fiction (IF) by Emily Short, begins by presenting your player character (PC) – an art critic – with an exhibit of Galatea, a statue-like woman who has come to life. This piece of interactive fiction does not contain any puzzles or quests. You cannot move into other rooms, interact with other non-player characters (NPCs) besides Galatea herself, and there is no clear winning state. There is only conversation between you and Galatea. The narrative of Galatea is driven solely by the dialogue, resulting in a story that reflects your choice of prompts. Interactivity and narrative is closely tied together in this sense – Galatea’s gameplay is centered around discovering and writing a story.

This paper argues that the driving force of the narrative comes from the interactivity of the work itself. This is achieved by virtue of Emily Short’s non-player character (NPC) design in the character of Galatea herself. As Montfort (2003) describes, Galatea is essentially a “chatterbot with a more sophisticated architecture for behaviour than had been seen in IF before”. Galatea’s responses vary based on multiple factors that the game keeps track of. These statuses, along with the current topic of conversation, all interact with one another to make conversation flow more realistically. By examining Short’s NPC design and the current state of NPCs in interactive fiction, the paper argues that the design of Galatea creates a “desire to confide in her” (Galatea).

I argue that this is what drives the narrative of the story – the “desire to confide” in what we logically know to be only a computer. This paper claims that it is the interactivity itself that creates the narrative. Many scholars have spoken about the contentious relationship between interactivity and narrative, with some claiming that the two cannot exist simultaneously without working against each other. However, this ignores the unique storytelling capabilities of mediums like interactive fiction.

By centering its entire gameplay on developing and telling a narrative, Galatea is able to explore a multitude of themes that would have been difficult to express through another medium. I argue that it is the combination of NPC design, the rewarding dialogue and writing, and the relationship of interactivity and narrative that highlights the strengths of the interactive fiction genre, with Galatea being an especially pertinent example.

References

Galatea. Self-published by Emily Short, 2000.

Montfort, Nick. Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction. The MIT Press, 2003.

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.

A significant number of (largely non-digital) Humanists resist the idea that they “have” data. This translates into critical scepticism to the role of data in humanities research and the loss of the essence of what characterized humanistic objects and their treatment (see Marche 2012, Sinykin, 2021). This scepticism reflects a failure to recognise and understand the implications of a fundamental use of data in the Humanities, which we call “representational data.”

“Representational data” — the collection, analysis, and especially dissemination of cultural materials in the form of mediated research objects such as scholarly editions, curated museum or gallery catalogues, facsimiles and models — were not easily processed using the early systems of humanities computing. For this reason, the work of these early computational projects was often quite distinct from its analogue counterpart.

Much of the resistance to data in the humanities comes from an intuitive and largely unarticulated sense among analogue researchers that this primary use case has been overlooked, i.e. that debates about the definition of “data” ignore or deemphasise how such data have been used in the humanities. Here, we examine how the use of ‘representational data’ illuminates some of the issues involved in both the resistance and adoption of data in humanities scholarship.

Analogue humanists speak of “sources.” “Primary sources” are texts, objects, and artefacts they study; “secondary sources,” the work of others with whom they engage. Research objects such as editions of historical texts or models of artefacts can be both “primary” and “secondary”: proxies or representatives of the original objects and works of interpretation and analysis that can be engaged with by others in their own right depending on the use given to them at a particular time.

Computers, in the 1950s, understood data: the processing of “given things.” Busa’s Index Thomisticus was an ideal early application precisely because its textual nature and its end use were something that took full advantage of the computer’s capacity to process information.

Joanna Drucker’s influential suggestion that Humanists don’t have data (“given”) but rather capta (“taken”) separates what is recorded (data) from was is constructed (capta) (Drucker 2011). Although Father Busa was passively using data, the spirit of his work was not that of constructing an interpretation but of building tools to allow the navigation of Aquinas’ works. Computation historically forced scholars to talk about data in ways that seemed alien to analogue Humanists.

We conclude, based on the case of representational data, that the way analogue humanists think has not been fully understood by research data management specialists or infrastructure developers, whose practices have been developed almost entirely with a different understanding, in which “data” are things to be counted rather than represented and which are generated through experiment, observation and measurement. This explains the poor support such infrastructure provides for humanities research objects that work with representational data. It provides an agenda for a Humanities-informed approach to research infrastructure that can address the resistance to data that is still widely felt among Humanities researchers.

That the humanities has ‘a data problem’ is now a common refrain amongst many communities. Humanists often argue that humanities data is a problem because they don’t have or work with data (Borgman, 201. Librarians and information professionals, by contrast, believe that humanists have data, but assume they don’t realize it — meaning that the problem is that they must be trained to appropriately recognize and work with data (Flanders, Julia, and Trevor Muñoz, 2012; Ikeshoji-Orlati, Caton, and Stringer-Hye, 2018). Digital humanists know that they have data but believe that their data are special and that these data require special strategies and techniques as a result (Drucker,2011; Schöch,2013). Each premise informs a mélange of assumptions, advice and best practices that comprise the emerging literature on research data management (RDM) in the humanities (Gualandi, et. al, 2022; Thoegersen, 2018).

We argue that this focus on the discovery and definition of what is “special” about humanities data is a mistake. Humanities data are not special because of what they are, but rather because of how they are used (Borgman,2017; Leonelli, 2015), and hence how data are designed and structured by systems to meet particular ends. Data are data whether they are produced and used by scientists or humanists. The “problem” with humanities data lies in the use-case, or the system requirements of the scholarly tool or infrastructure that shapes data for particular purposes.

Our argument draws on evidence and analysis derived from a series of comparative case studies exploring the development of scholar-led data intensive projects over time. We examine how humanists conceptualize data as they build, navigate, and utilize research infrastructure for scholarly purposes. Originating in software engineering, use-case modeling (Jacobson et al. 1992) is a means of specifying, validating, and eliciting system requirements. Models describe, communicate, and facilitate all the ways a user interacting with a system or product may work to realize a desired end. We highlight how these models mediate between user-agency, the purpose of a scholarly project, and the ‘infrastructural work’ necessary to meet a project's goals.

In fields where use-case modeling are less well explicit, as is the case in the Humanities, humanists have worked far more improvisationally (Ciula, 2022), experimenting and innovating by designing and building infrastructure that have specific requirements, but often without clear requirements modeling. As a result, humanists often create custom information systems, data infrastructures or tools and interfaces developed by researchers for the collection, analysis, and presentation of their own data. The problem in humanities RDM is not that humanists don’t have a common understanding of what data are, it is that they don’t recognize the degree to which they are using these data for common ends or in generalizable ways.

In conclusion, we point to some ways to shift the conversation away from ‘the problem of humanities data’ and towards developing and interfacing with scholarly use-cases, the scenarios and problem-sets scholars are concerned with, and engage with the custom infrastructural strategies they have developed to speak to them.

"Archive of the Digital Present for Online Literary Performance in Canada (COVID-19 Pandemic Period)" is a research and development project that arose out of the need to address foundational, practical and theoretical research questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and attendant social disruptions and restrictions, on literary communities in Canada through the collection of information about organized literary events as they occurred from March 2020-March 2022.

Our paper will first present some of the design and development work pursued in building a searchable, open access database and directory – The Archive of the Digital Present (ADP) – to allow scholars, literary practitioners, and the public to gain knowledge about the nature and significance of events that occurred (mostly online) during the pandemic period, through the collection and structuring of metadata, and limited additional assets.

Our discussion will then focus in on the work in data collection and structuring we have pursued to bring content to the directory site. The ADP project necessarily began with questions about the data we were seeking to collect. In February 2021 we performed a preliminary analysis of online and social media postings for listings of literary events hosted in Canada. This revealed 77 discrete organizers of over one thousand (1,011, to be exact) literary events between 20 March 2020 - 31 December 2020. This list served as the starting point for an expanded catalogue of events, and for team discussions about the nature and number of metadata fields we would use. We proceeded by adapting extant categories of the SpokenWeb metadata schema that has been designed for the description of historical literary audio recordings. This allowed us to repurpose the backend of the Swallow Metadata Ingest System (Swallow), built for metadata management of historical research collections, through the development of a crosswalk that best serves the goals of data collection for ADP. Data fields we have shaped for this project include categories related to Title, Creator/Contributor, Language, Production Context, Genre, Duration, Date, Location, Online Platform, and Contents, among others.

As we now have a live site, even as data continues to be added, our presentation will recount our ongoing methods of discovering events to be included in the ADP database, explain the rationale of our selection of metadata categories and our approach to structuring those fields, rehearse some of the philosophical and ontological questions that have arisen in the process of abstracting the complex and mediated literary activities of the pandemic period into categories of searchable data, and will end with reflections on the relationship between quantitative data and the qualitative data we are now collecting in the form of interviews from the organizers of the events we have catalogued. Drawing upon our experience of data collection from a diverse range of literary organizations and communities, our paper concludes with an argument about the value of thinking about quantitative and qualitative data as functioning productively in an ongoing dialectic of data curation, presentation, and community consultation, and suggestions for methods of realizing such an approach.

Historical Social Network Analysis: The Apprenticeship Networks of London Brewers, 1530-1800

This paper represents one part of a larger project about the history of beer and brewing in London. Our research group is building a social network of the Brewing Guild's apprenticeship training program in the years from about 1530 to approximately 1800. During this 270-year period, the Worshipful Company of Brewers, first established by Henry VI in 1438, logged nearly 10,000 records of (mostly) young men being apprenticed to master brewers in order to learn the craft. At first glance, the apprenticeship records look somewhat unpromising, but with some clever deduction and analysis, they collectively become an illuminating dataset that shows not just an important "Who's Who" of the brewing industry but also the waxing and waning of England's brewing culture and how it responded to important British historical events.

At first glance, the catalogue of brewing apprentices and their brewing masters is a remarkably sparse dataset rife with symbols and codes. For example:

Briggs Thomas s Henry, Skipton, Yks, husbandman† to William Pistor 16 Jan 1581/2

This record tells us that Thomas Briggs, son of Henry Briggs (deceased), a husbandman from Skipton, Yorkshire, was apprenticed to William Pistor on the 16th of January 1581 (Old Style Date, or 1582 New Style Date).

The Briggs family does not appear again in the records. However, we can learn a good deal about William Pistor (or Pystor or Pister or Pistar), who first took on an apprentice from a Mr. Peltar in 1563. Between the years 1565 and 1584, William Pistor took on fifteen more apprentices. By the fall of 1584, Pistor's health began to fail and he died in the first half of 1585. By combining records, then, we can begin to draw portraits of various individual's brewing careers. Simultaneously, we can construct a social network of the various relationships detailed in the records.

The argument of our paper, then, is twofold: a) an exploration of what we can learn about the historical social networks of England's brewing industry using sparse records combined with modern social network techniques, and b) a methodological question of reconciling record matches across disparate datasets, especially during those times when our data overlaps with other rich resources such as London Lives (1690-) or the Old Bailey records (1674-). Which of these actions can be automated via digital techniques, and which must still be done "by hand"?

Toward that end, we seek to answer the following research questions:

• how did the apprenticeship program rise and fall over the course of this time period? --Who are the most important people in any given time period?

which masters attracted the most apprentices and why?

• how long were careers in the brewing industry? Did many apprentices later become masters of other apprentices?
• to learn more, can we contextualize these records against other record sets (marriage, birth, death, criminal proceedings) and what might those records tell us about England's brewing industry?

Among the books owned by Lord Byron and sold in one of the two sales of his library – 1816 and 1827 – was the 1800 English translation of Joseph Alexandre Pierre, Vicomte de Ségur’s Women: Their Condition and Influence in Society (from which the title quotation is taken). Finding Ségur’s three volumes of research amongst Byron’s books is not overly notable, but the presence of women in the roles of authors and editors of the books that Byron owned and prized is formidable. In transforming Byron’s library sale lists into a database comprising the books’ constituent metadata and fulltext, women feature as some of the most prominent authorities of canonicity, from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s fifty volume The British Novelists to Elizabeth Inchbald’s 25 volume British Theatre and 7 volume Collection of Farces. In Macroanalysis (2013), Matthew Jockers experiments with stylistic analysis to detect the author’s gender in nineteenth century novels, revealing the relative ease of this, but also noting that “far more interesting […] is an examination of which authors get misclassified as being of the other gender” (95). With anonymity and pseudonymity a relative norm for first editions of novels in the Romantic period, an author’s gender was often unknown to the public with the launch of their work. Byron, in contrast to many literary figures in the period, openly acknowledged his love of novels. Taking Byron’s library and the representative database and network, how might stylistic analysis aligned with metadata on roles beyond simply authorship reveal the influence of women in Byron’s books? Moreover, what influence might these women have had upon Byron’s works, as visualized in Euclidean distances and network graphs? To further this experimentation, might the inclusion of further works by women – works not catalogued as part of Byron’s library, but works by authors of whom he owned a single work – might these reveal close stylistic proximity to Byron’s works such that we might conjecture that Byron had read or even owned these works? Comparing this corpus of Byron’s books by female editors or authors to some of Byron’s most important poetical works – like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Manfred, and Don Juan – raises the questions about methods used to stylistically compare prose and verse, editors and writers, and the complexities of gender. However, ultimately this experiment reinforces the convictions of scholars like Paul Douglass, that “Byron’s reading of several thousand works of popular fiction (most of it by women), certainly impacted his work” (“Lord Byron’s Feminist Canon: Notes toward Its Construction” Romanticism on the Net, vol. 43, 2006, p. 2) or as Peter Cochran describes it in the case of Charlotte Dacre’s influence upon Byron, “[her] books had sunk into his subconscious, whence he had, in his own idioms, regurgitated them” (“Byron the Vampire, and the Vampire Women.” Newstead Abbey Byron Society Website. http://newsteadabbeybyronsociety.org/works/downloads/vampires.pdf, Jan. 23, 2023, p. 9).

As internet overtakes most aspects of modern life, the impact of internet protocols exceeds the limits of the virtual world and becomes intertwined with ethics and justice. As illustrated by Peter J. Wilson regarding the analog world (1991, p. 153), structures and architectures have direct effects on the power dynamics between the groups using them. In this presentation, we will show how internet protocols have the same impact on human societies as architectural elements (Vitali-Rosati, 2020), and shape disparity within communities of users.

Internet protocols can either involve equal partners or unequal partners. However, even when putting aside the physical infrastructures that support the Internet, most interactions between equal partners include a third and unequal party (Galloway, 2004, p. 142). Top-down and bottom-up structures imply vertical pipelines and the concentration of informational and structural power within select hands.

Furthermore, security concerns around such systems are split between two unequal players with widely different tasks. Few protocols such as BitTorrent, DAT, IPFS treat users as nodes without the overview of a corporation or government. All three of them are open source free protocols designed for sharing files from a client. These peer-to-peer standards allow one to make available for or to download files from many users at the same time, to reduce the uploading stress of users.

While DAT and IFPS prescribe a radical decentralization of the network by abolishing trackers -- which assist communication between peers in BitTorrent -- torrenting is by far the most widely used of the three. In fact, BitTorrent takes a non-negligible part of worldwide internet traffic. For instance, in 2013 (before the streaming burst), it represented 3.35 percents of all bandwidth (Paloalto Networks, 2013).

Hence, our presentation will put the emphasis on BitTorrent, its architecture and effects on communities of users, and its structural ethics.

Are peer-to-peer protocols a bottom-down alternative to the more usual top-down and bottom-up Internet traffic, as some research has argued since the early 2000s (Oram, 2001)? And if so, what are the implications of BitTorrent and its many clients (both open source and corporate) in terms of accessibility, equity and reduction of control? How to explain the impact of "what seems to many the intrinsic vitality" of a bottom-up approach on the organizations and culture that it supports (Terranova, 2004, p. 120)?

This presentation covers some of the most discussed issues on the subject, such as pirating and malware, but focuses mainly on the intrinsic and structural consequences of peer-to-peer protocols.

Bibliography

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol. How Control Exists after Decentralization. Leonardo. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.

Oram, Andy, ed. Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. Beijing ; Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2001.

Paloalto Networks. 2013. https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/blog/app-usage-risk-report-visualization/#. Last consultation: 01/19/2023.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics For the Information Age. London ; Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2004.

Vitali-Rosati, Marcello. « Pour une théorie de l’éditorialisation ». Humanités numériques, nᵒ 1 (1 janvier 2020).

Wilson, Peter J. The Domestication of the Human Species. Revised ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

How to understand the cultural impact of computer technologies? What theoretical tools does our humanistic tradition offer us? This talk will present the conditions for developing a hermeneutics of matter. Our reflections will then be applied to the analysis of one of the most used protocols for today's web services: the de-facto REST standard and its most popular applications, the REST APIs.

Milad Doueihi (2012) has shown that theoretical methods must adapt to the nature of their objects of study. In continuity with Doueihi's philosophy, we stress that rethinking the hermeneutic tradition is useful and necessary for the future of Digital Humanities and for our understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of contemporary information technologies.

Originating in ancient Greece, the hermeneutic tradition defines the interpretive act as a practice and method, or - starting from Heidegger - as a way of being, in the ontological sense. Emphasis is placed on the interpretation of human languages and artifacts, considered as cultural objects. According to the hermeneutic perspective, the impact of such objects does not depend on who created them, but on how they are understood, used, experienced, reproduced. Hermeneutics is about human inscriptions, in the broad sense of the term.

Similarly, protocols, computer languages and source codes are cultural objects (Marino, 2020) and exist as they are inscribed on a material support. As material and cultural entities, the same inscriptions affect our reality. They describe, model, thus define the analog world (Vitali-Rosati, 2020).

Consider the case of REST, which enables the production and dissemination of much of the information online. REST proposes to establish a difference between the resource and the representations of the same object. It forces us to think about the actual object (the resource), and to define its specifications (the representations). This modelisation clashes with the dominant tendency of the western thought which puts the accent on the identity of the objects and does not describe them as assemblages of traits and characteristics (Gracia, 1988).

Architectures such as REST depend on human needs and ideas, but also on the material nature of the machines that make them possible. Such systems are both human and machinic forms of thinking(Levy, 1999). It is therefore necessary to renew our hermeneutic tradition to make it a method of analyzing the agentivity of machines. To do so, I propose to integrate concepts from three methodological fields to philosophical hermeneutics: post-structuralism, which detaches the definition of text from human production; new materialism, which emphasizes the transformative agentivity of matter; and critical code studies, which stress the cultural significance of code. Starting with the case study on REST, the presentation will detail some principles for a hermeneutic approach adapted to digital technologies and their material and cultural influence.

“Code is speech!” From the Electric Frontier Foundation to the CryptoParty Manifesto, one of the rallying cries of cyberlibertarians is that machine speech—the algorithm, the google search, code—are protected by the First Amendment on Free Speech. My talk addresses the labyrinthine ‘culture war’ and multi-layered mosaic of arguments surrounding whether the Google search engine constitutes speech, and is therefore protected under the First Amendment. One theory in the affirmative is the “Editor Theory,” which argues that the search engine's editorial judgment is comparable to a newspaper editor's judgment. Lawyer Eugene Volokh portrays search engines as editors of content who enjoy the same shield extended by the First Amendment to editors of newspapers. In opposition to this, the Conduit Theory paints search engines as neutral digital architecture, merely existing as conduits "to carry the speech of others" with "little or no speech interests of their own." The Conduit Theory argues that search engines are assumed to be objective and thus are legally liable if they are tainted by bias. The Advisor Theory breaks the Manichean binarism and argues that there is both a denotative (neutral, fact-based) dimension to the Google Search as well as a connotative one (subjective) whereupon the Google search takes on a role akin to an advisor, and it is the latter that can claim the status of speech.

One case that Google won on this matter is “Search King, Inc. v. Google Technology.” The website Search King alleged Google maliciously decreased the ranking it had previously assigned to Search King. However, the court concluded that Google’s ranking of pages were subjective results that constituted “constitutionally protected opinions” entitled to “full constitutional protection.” Curiously, after years of insisting the Google search was unbiased and objective, Google now vociferously claimed the Google search was an expression of opinion, thus blithely dropping the bomb on the “objective Google Search” utopia.

However, many dismiss the argument that the Google search constitutes speech as naive folklorism. Derived from Thurman Arnold’s term “the folklore of informationalism,” it refers to the specious assumption that because communication generated by machines as part of functional processes meets a technical definition of speech, it is the same as other social practices involving speech and therefore merits the same constitutional protection. Finally, the dark side of the “Google Search is Speech/Code is Speech” doctrine is that it is emblematic of the neoliberalization of the First Amendment—that is, the weaponization of the Free Speech First Amendment into a pretext for capitalist deregulation. “Code is speech” is a runaway escape clause for corporations to avoid government regulation as long as the corporate actor takes action using programming code, leading to bizarre scenarios such as Apple being hailed as a civil rights hero for successfully litigating the “Code is speech” doctrine. Like the Citizens United case (i.e. ruling that corporations are people), it marks the pernicious expansion of corporate personhood and the coalescing of corporations as the foci point of constitutional rights.

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.

Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, lived a life of nonstop writing and constant traveling. Organizing his scholarly works was a task initiated by his disciples, continued by medieval biobibliographers, and grappled with by modern historians of philosophy and science. In my doctoral project I am interested in two of his many fields of scholarship as well as the interaction between the two—namely celestial natural philosophy (celestial physics), and mathematical astronomy. Like my fellow medieval and modern historians of Ibn Sīnā’s corpora, I found his wanderlust and prolificacy a complicating factor in tracing his authorship in time and space. In a milieu of constant political turmoil, he wrote on a multitude of topics during his nonstop journey that took him from Central Asia to West Asia. For instance, Ibn Sīnā wrote different parts of some of his summae of philosophy, such as al-Shifāʾ (The book of healing), in different times and places. In my project I needed to establish a relationship between Ibn Sīnā’s works on the general physics, celestial physics, and astronomy to trace the development of his thought, and any major shifts in the key concepts of the two fields in his corpora over time. In this paper, I first show how, using ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS online, I resolved this complication by visualizing Ibn Sīnā journey and scholarly production as a multilayered, temporally dynamic map. In my doctoral research I also ask whether or not there was a correlation between the subject matters of Ibn Sīnā’s works and the places in which they were produced. Detection of such correlation in the case of his works on celestial physics and astronomy would open the way for my historical research to focus on the moments and places where he dedicated himself to these two topics to investigate the historical causes behind it—such as patronage, existing intellectual traditions, networks of local or regional scholars, teaching those subjects, etc. In the second part of my paper, I show how, the vector data that I produced in the process of mapping, allowed me to run a geospatial analysis on ArcGIS Insights to detect the times and places where Ibn Sīnā was active in the two abovementioned fields of knowledge, and to demonstrate the quantified extent of his intellectual production. In my presentation, I will outline and discuss the workflow behind my digital humanity project including data collection, thinking about a taxonomy for data organization, choice of platform, building a geodatabase with multiple layers, temporal data visualization, and geospatial data analysis.

How can DH projects can make more sustainable choices in their approach to labour, infrastructure, methods, and access? To address these questions, we discuss our shared experience spearheading the Dragoman Renaissance Research platform, a website dedicated to the study of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) and their role in mediating relations between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbours from ca. 1550 to ca. 1730. This decade-long collaborative DH project co-led by digital-humanities researcher and historian Natalie Rothman and digital librarian Kirsta Stapelfeldt, features research outputs (long-form narratives, visualizations, multimedia presentations) as well as comprehensive structured datasets and digital surrogates of relevant archival records. Our ongoing work on this project has provided ample opportunities for tackling the challenges of online interoperability and sustainability, and for addressing complex research needs with limited resources.

Our presentation introduces the project’s underlying Islandora-based infrastructure and approach to team work, as well as the challenges and rewards of growing a multilingual project that centres multilingual, non-Eurocentric conceptual frameworks. First, we situate the project’s genesis in relation to the academic biographies of the co-PIs and the institutional context of the Digital Scholarship Unit (DSU) of the University of Toronto Scarborough Library. We explore the inherent tensions in the DSU’s mandate to provide extensive campus-specific DH support while limiting long-term maintenance challenges. For this project, this has meant prioritizing robust data modeling and core research and presentation functions over bespoke interfaces.

Next, we explore the project’s core datasets and the methods leveraged to draw together and describe materials from multiple, multilingual archival sources and years of secondary-source publications. The resulting, iterative data model is designed to engage with complex questions of knowledge production and circulation, including emergent and evolving genres of diplomacy and statecraft. Given the project’s focus on a nuanced understanding of understudied forms, sites, and agents of knowledge production, a high level of data complexity is essential to the project’s main questions. The project thus relies on the ability to faithfully render and query heterogeneous, partial data sources as well as their layered, plural organizational systems and complex interrelationships. We discuss the project’s current entity relationship structure and reflect on the complexity of the querying it aims to facilitate.

The project is designed to license datasets and analytical outputs as open access and to allow ongoing data additions over time. In the final segment of our presentation, we address how we seek to leverage best standards in the information science community for mobilizing knowledge and participating in the emerging web, and to forward the goal of building shared vocabularies for disambiguation, and by extension linking, the work of separate scholars and communities worldwide. Specifically, we address the suitability, benefits, and challenges of using Islandora for a complex DH research project, as well as the features and workflows that the DSU has developed to accommodate the needs of this project with an eye to their wider applicability and reusability in other contexts. The approach taken in this project may help others looking to address complex DH projects sustainably.

This paper focuses on the MA thesis work of two scholars: Kim Martin, now an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Guelph, and Thomas Smith, a Master’s student of the Tri-University program in History. Martin completed her Master’s in the same program in 2004 and is now Smith’s thesis supervisor. Both projects focus on the annual Lord Mayor’s Day Pageants in London, England during the early modern period, with Martin focusing on gendered representations of the city between 1585 and 1630 and Smith focusing on the physicality of the pageant performance during the 1616 Lord Mayor’s Show Chrysanaleia. The two foci mean, of course, that the research material will differ slightly, but both are largely building from the same primary sources and leaning on secondary literature that is similar in scope.

What has undeniably changed since 2004, however, is the research process: How we, as historians, conduct our searches, locate primary and secondary sources, and access archives (Solberg, 2012, Martin and Quan-Haase, 2016, Milligan, 2019). This paper will compare and contrast the academic journeys of Martin and Smith and will document these two historian’s experiences to demonstrate the rapidly changing environment of academic history research to benefit future digital historians. To demonstrate these differences, each author will reflect upon their methodology and results, taking the following into consideration:

• What are the effects of digital tools on the search and discovery process?
• Does digital infrastructure speed up historical research?
• What new questions do digital tools allow historians to answer?

Finally, this paper will discuss the difficulties of doing digital humanities work within an academic structure that predates it. While Martin’s thesis was in a traditional written format, Smith has been working on a 3D reconstruction of a pageant cart in the London street in order to understand how it may have been understood by contemporaries. The work expectations, length of the written thesis, and skills required for completion, however, have not changed much in 20 years. How can we ensure that the labour involved in a DH thesis gets recognized, and reimagine this process so the next generation of DH scholars doesn’t have to do double the work?

Works Cited

Martin, K. and Quan-Haase, A. (2016), "The role of agency in historians’ experiences of serendipity in physical and digital information environments", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 72 No. 6, pp. 1008-1026. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2015-0144

Milligan, Ian. History in the age of abundance?: How the web is transforming historical research. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019.

Munday, Anthony. “Chrysanaleia”. The Map of Early Modern London, Edition 7.0. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. Victoria: University of Victoria. mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/CHRY1.htm. Accessed May 05, 2022.

Solberg, Janine. "Googling the archive: Digital tools and the practice of history." Advances in the History of Rhetoric 15, no. 1 (2012): 53-76.

A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. I adopt an ethnographic methodology, with Sina Weibo and bilibili as ‘fieldsites’. The primary data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation on everyday national(ist) discussions on both platforms. Objects for observations on the two ‘fieldsites’ are dissimilar because of their differential socio-technical affordances. For Sina Weibo, observations centre upon targeted discussions on topics/objects that may evoke national(ist) sensibilities, whilst for bilibili, emphasis is located on ‘barrage’ comments and postings in the comments section attached to specific videos and other textual content which may elicit national(ist) feelings. On each ‘fieldsite’, I observe how different socio-political actors contribute to the discursive (re)generation of Chinese national identity on a day-to-day basis with attention to forms and content of national(ist) accounts that they publicise on each ‘fieldsite’, contextual factors of their posting and reposting of and commenting on national(ist) narratives and their interactions with other users about certain national(ist) discourses on each platform. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to December 2022, I conducted 36 weeks’ observations with 36 sets of fieldnotes. The strategy adopted for the initial stage of observations was keyword searching, which means typing into the search box on Sina Weibo and bilibili any keywords related to China as a nation and then observing the search results. For 36 weeks’ observations, I concentrated much upon textual content created by ordinary users. Based on fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili, targeted both at national ‘Others’ and ‘Us’, both on the historical and real-world dimension, both aligning with and differing from or even conflicting with official discourses, both direct national(ist) expressions and articulations of sentiments in the name of presentation of national(ist) attachments but for other purposes. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. Besides, there are also disputes and even quarrels between users in terms of explanations for concrete components of ‘nation-ness’ and (in)direct dissent to officially defined ‘mainstream’ discourses to some extent, though often expressed much more mundanely, discursively and playfully. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also, to a larger degree, some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in the offline China, e.g., the authorities' acquiescence of citizens’ freedom in understanding and explaining concrete elements of national discourses while setting the basic framework of national narratives to the extent that citizens’ own national(ist) expressions do not reach political bottom lines and develop into mobilising power to shake social stability.

A music performance space constitutes the frame as well as the content of the listeners’ experience. The acoustic environment forces continuous negotiations that differ according to a listener’s role and position as composer, performer or audience member. The aim of my research is to investigate the acoustics of a performative space, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence, following two complementary paths, both based on an interactive model. The first offers an impulse-response experience: the user can virtually explore the opera hall by choosing between the binaural reproductions of 13 different listening positions. The second is about the aural and visual perception of a performance of the romance “Una furtiva lagrima” from Donizetti’s opera L’elisir d’amore. The user, through ambisonics, 360 degree videos and virtual reality, will experience this performance from three different positions in the theatre: on stage, in the orchestra pit and in the audience seating.

LEAF-Writer is an open-source, open-access Extensible Markup Language (XML) editor that runs in a web browser and offers scholars and students a rich textual editing experience without the need to download, install, and configure proprietary software, pay ongoing subscription fees, or learn complex coding languages. This demonstration will highlight the range of functionality and affordances of LEAF-Writer and showcase new functionality including named entity recognition through NERVE (the LINCS Project’s Named Entity Recognition Vetting Environment, now based on the LINCS infrastructure) and a read-only viewing mode.

This session will demonstrate (with an accompanying poster for context) Event Builder and Event Viewer, tools built at the University of Saskatchewan to model events as represented in historical documents related to early modern collections and collectors of curiosities. The Builder (and the viewer that provides various ways to view and options for exporting these events) pulls data from TEI compliant XML documents and from a reference database that provides data on the people, places, and objects referenced in these documents. The events are CIDOC compliant and can be viewed in plan language descriptions and also as network graphs within Event Viewer, with options for sorting, searching, and indexing by people, places, and object descriptions; and the data can be exported as csv, XML, or RDF files. The RDF files will ultimately be deposited in the LINCS (Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship) triplestore. The accompanying poster will elaborate the process of establishing the ontology that would inform the idea of event in the context of the research project these tools were designed to support—a project to visualize the social networks of early modern collectors of curiosities and their interactions with these objects. The demonstration will show the process of building events and the options for viewing and exporting the data, as well as some sample visualization based on the whole dataset of early modern collectors and collections of curiosities created using the Builder.

This demonstration showcases tools from the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS). It enables LOD creation and conversion, hosts LOD in the LINCS triple store, and offers access through APIs, a SPARQL endpoint, and several GUIs. This demonstration highlights three LINCS tools. However, a poster of the LINCS Tube Map will invite CSDH participants to inquire about additional ones.

The LINCS Context Plugin

This plugin for the Chrome web browser allows LOD to travel beyond any particular platform to enrich web content. It scans web pages for entities and, if a user confirms a match with an entity about which LINCS has data, it provides access to that data within the web page itself, allowing for contextualization of content by trusted scholarly data.

VERSD: Vetting for Entity and Relationships in Structured Data

Reconciliation--augmenting data with external Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to link to other data sources--is a crucial step in converting data into LOD, and one of the most onerous. VERSD, an open-source web application for reconciling bibliographic records with authorities such as VIAF, Wikidata or Getty, uses probabilistic record linkage to match multiple entity types simultaneously, parallelized processing for speed, and provides an efficient vetting interface.

ResearchSpace

ResearchSpace, created by the British Museum, is the front end to the LINCS triplestore. LINCS has extended ResearchSpace to house multiple linked datasets from a variety of research projects. Users can explore LINCS data through timelines, charts, and interactive network graphs, and edit the relationships between entities to create new connections.