In a world where digital technologies can be rapidly changing, a four-day institute at StFX from May 5-8 brought together participants from across the region and as far afield as Germany, Iran, and the United States for training to support digital projects.
The Digital Humanities Summer Institute East (DHSI-East), now in its fifth year at StFX, brought together 33 participants for two four-day concurrent workshops, plus additional attendees who joined for the event's keynote address, and about 20 people who took part in the aligned Gaelic Song and Digital Archives Workshop, held May 9-10.
"The overall focus of this event is about how we can use digital tools to ask humanities research questions," says StFX English professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities Dr. Laura Estill, who with StFX Systems & Data Services Librarian Margaret Vail and StFX student research assistant Abby Ives were members of the organizing team.
"The overall focus of this event is about how we can use digital tools to ask humanities research questions."
~ Dr. Laura Estill
This year, the summer institute was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant, with Ms. Vail as primary investigator. Participants, who included StFX faculty, students, and librarians, represented a range of disciplines, including libraries, English, religious studies, art history, musicology, women and gender studies, and more.
Dr. Estill says the multiple events at DHSI-East, including for the first time two concurrent workshops, considered the importance of humanities data, with an emphasis on building websites with an eye to long-term preservation, databases and data modeling, and the importance of creating and linking to equitable metadata.
"These issues are important because the ways we present information affects how it is findable. As scholars like Lisa Goddard, Luis Meneses, and others have demonstrated, it is all too common for digital humanities to simply disappear. The 2023 special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on 'Project Resiliency' edited by Martin Holmes, Matt Huculak, and Janelle Jenstad emphasizes the exigence of thinking about our data and its preservation from the very earliest stages of project creation," she says.
Dr. Estill says this workshop, and others like it, are important because they offer people a chance to learn new skills and methodologies beyond the curriculum. "Many attendees are librarians and faculty members who might not be able to take an undergraduate class, if one is even offered, but who want to learn more. Digital technologies can be rapidly changing, and we need training to support digital projects."
One of the highlights of the event was Dr. Stacy Allison-Cassin's keynote lecture. Dr. Estill says Dr. Allison-Cassin, an assistant professor at Dalhousie University, discussed the current and future challenges and possibilities in metadata in relation to representation, justice and ethics.
"Dr. Allison-Cassin gave an incredibly compelling example of how current political turmoil affects our research practices: our library catalogue, Novanet, uses Library of Congress subject headings, as do most universities in Canada and worldwide, and in our library catalogue, we now have the subject heading 'America, Gulf of' on a book titled The Gulf of Mexico."
The two concurrent workshops held over the four days focused on digital sustainability and preservation in digital archives projects (led by Dr. Constance Crompton, Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities, University of Ottawa, and Meghan Landry, ACENET) and an introduction to databases for humanist data (led by Dr. Jon Bath, an associate professor of art and art history at the University of Saskatchewan.)
DHSI-East is hosted by StFX's Digital Humanities Centre, and is part of both the Canadian Certificate for Digital Humanities and the DH Training Network. It began at StFX as an offshoot of the original DHSI at the University of Victoria (now Montreal), where Dr. Estill was an Associate Director at Large. She led the group that started DHSI-East at StFX.
