Nearly 40 participants from across the country and internationally converged on StFX May 5-8 for a major four-day Atlantic training hub for digital humanities.
The Digital Humanities Summer Institute East (DHSI-East), hosted by StFX's Digital Humanities Centre, brought together participants from as far afield as the University of Texas and Ohio State as well as numerous Atlantic sister institutions for three four-day concurrent workshops focused around teaching and research in humanities fields using digital resources.
“Often, digital humanities training takes place outside traditional curricula in intensive multi-day workshops such as these,” says Dr. Laura Estill, StFX English professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, who organized the event with StFX Systems & Data Services Librarian Margaret Vail; Meghan Landry (ACENET); and StFX student research assistant Abby Ives.
It is important to provide educational opportunities such as the summer institute, now in its sixth year, she says.
“Our attendees include undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and librarians and archivists. These workshops are valuable professional development to help ongoing learning as technologies and methodologies evolve.
“The themes of these workshops are the ‘research data management lifecycle.’ Research data management is a big topic nationally now, but often humanities research can be excluded from the discussion,” she says. “These workshops are about making humanities teaching and research accessible online and thinking about their digital future.”
This year’s instructors have come from far and wide including from CUNY (New York), the University of Victoria, Mount St. Vincent University; and Indiana University.
The three concurrent workshops held over the four days focused on project management in the humanities (led by Indiana University history professor Dr. Jennifer Guiliano); research data management for humanities researchers (co-instructed by Shahira Khair, University of Victoria Libraries, and Sandra Sawchuk, Mount Saint Vincent Libraries): and digital publishing in the humanities classroom (delivered by Dr. Andie Silva, English professor at York College and Digital Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center and zelda montes, CUNY Graduate Center.)
A highlight from the event included Susan Brown, a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair from the University of Guelph, delivering the keynote address, ‘Show Your Work: Linking, Platforming, and Deplatforming for the Future of Born-Digital Scholarship.’ This talk was generously sponsored by the Léger Lecture Series in the Arts.
DHSI-East is part a national network of training opportunities in digital humanities, which are part of the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/Certificat canadien en Humanités Numériques, which currently has 23 partner organizations from across the country. Dr. Estill is the director of cc:DH/HN.
