DHSI-East

DHSI-East: Tuesday May 4th to Friday May 7th 2027

Join us in person Tuesday, May 4th to Friday, May 7th 2027, at St Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia for DHSI-East. Hosted by St. Francis Xavier University's Digital Humanities Centre. Faculty, staff, students, and all interested welcome.

Participants will be able to choose one of two workshop options:

1. Digital Micro-Editions
2. Wiki for Academics: Critical Engagement, Teaching, and Knowledge Dissemination

These workshops run concurrently over four days, so it is not possible to attend them all.

Workshop Option 1: "Digital Micro-Editions"

Instructor: Dr. Jason Boyd, Associate Professor, Toronto Metropolitan University

Online publishing makes feasible the publication of texts of varying lengths, from the very long to the very brief. While many digital editing projects have very broad scopes (i.e., the complete works of a single author), it is also possible to produce an edition of a single short document — one publication venue for such tiny editions is the journal, Scholarly Editing. This workshop introduces students to the creation of micro-editions using the XML-based markup specification developed by the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium. Participants will develop a digital micro-edition of a short text of their choosing: this could be a letter, a poem, a short story, or another short document. Participants should send a description of the text they wish to edit to the instructor in advance of the workshop.

Max Participants: 20

Workshop Option 2: "Wiki for Academics: Critical Engagement, Teaching, and Knowledge Dissemination"

Instructors:
Dr. Pascale Dangoisse, Program Officer, Wikimedia Canada
Chelsea Chiovelli, Program Officer, Wikimedia Canada

This course introduces humanists to the Wikimedia ecosystem and its applications in teaching and research. The course will address questions of authority and content attribution, the reliability of sources, knowledge equity, and the political dimensions of open knowledge. Participants will learn how Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wiki projects function, and how they can be leveraged as tools to foster critical thinking, teach about misinformation, engage students in collaborative editing, and make scholarly knowledge more discoverable and accessible according to FAIR principles. Through a mix of hands-on editing, critical discussion, and guided planning, participants will leave with: a draft course plan for integrating Wiki tools into their teaching; and a draft research plan for using Wiki projects in their scholarship and knowledge mobilization.

This course emphasizes both theoretical and practical approaches, equipping scholars to critically analyze Wiki platforms while also contributing meaningfully to them. This course also integrates critical theory and practice in understanding and using the Wiki ecosystem.

Max Participants: 20

Keynote Lecture: “‘Show Your Work’: Linking, Platforming, and Deplatforming for the Future of Born-Digital Scholarship”

Date and time to be announced

Dr. Janelle Jenstad, University of Victoria 

While the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays is still available in 230 copies more than 400 years after its 1623 publication, digital versions of Shakespeare’s work risk vanishing like “insubstantial pageants.” Impressive interfaces and user functionalities rely on fragile software stacks that need regular updating and on external code libraries that might fail or change. The principles of the Endings Project (https://endings.uvic.ca/) bring long-term citability, preservability, and stability to digital editions by re-adopting the traditional publication model that has served us so reliably for centuries: periodic, static, coherent, complete, and stable editions, which are never changed, but merely, in due course, superseded by new editions. Taking the now-defunct Internet Shakespeare Editions, its successor the New Internet Shakespeare Editions, and other projects created or remediated for (re-)publication by Linked Early Modern Drama Online, this keynote argues that book history offers us a model for publishing digital editions in many citable, archivable, stable copies.

This keynote is free and open to the public. 

Staying in Antigonish

We recommend staying at the StFX Hotel. We have a block of 40 rooms set aside for DHSI-East 2026.

Please visit the Visit Antigonish website to see a list of all Accommodation in the area.

Travel to Antigonish

Please note that Antigonish is not near any major airports and it is up to participants to book their own travel. The closest airport is the Halifax airport (YHZ), which is about two hours' drive from Antigonish.

Travel options from the airport include:

• the Maritime Bus (leaves from Halifax airport to Antigonish once a day, 3:50pm departure)
• Ridebooker Shuttle (leaves from Halifax airport to Antigonish once a day, 2:00pm departure)
• Island Shuttle  (departing Halifax between 12:30-1:30)
• Ceilidh Shuttle (departing Halifax between 10:30-noon)
• Shuttle 24
• Premier Car Service
• rental cars (multiple companies available)

Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities

DHSI-East can count towards The Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/Certificat canadien en Humanités Numériques. For more information on the certificate, please see the website: ccdhhn.ca.

Credits

DHSI-East is part of the international DH Training Network and takes its name from DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. 

For information on past DHSI-East training events, see our archive page.