News

You can also visit the projects page for updates on ongoing work.

Marc Renaud Visit

"The CDHI was pleased to welcome Marc Renaud, President of SSHRC, and Pamela Wiggin, Vice-President of SSHRC's Knowledge Products and Mobilisation department. The two representatives of Canada's premier funding agency for Social Sciences and Humanities research were visiting Malaspina on March 8, 2004 to discuss SSHRC's transformation from "granting council to knowledge council". During their visit to the CDHI, they had an opportunity to see some of the lab's ongoing research projects, many of them supported by SSHRC funding. Also seen in the photograph are (from left to right): Jenny Horn (Office), Liz Hammond-Kaarremaa (Director, Research and Scholarly Activity), and Karin Armstrong (research assistant)."

The CDHI in Malaspina's Strategic Plan - February 2004

As part of its institutional planning responsibiltities, a task force at Malaspina articulated a vision for research in which the CDHI figured prominently: "In recent years, we have been active in the emerging field of humanities computing. We have hosted conferences, supported academic seminars, and affiliated ourselves (through our relationship with the University of Victoria) with the TAPOR project, a major humanities computing collaboration among Canadian universities. We intend to use this as a strategic means of supporting the theme of cultural communication and expression. Malaspina's Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation will serve as a vital link between technological aspects of this theme and expertise found in many disciplines" (3).

"Created in 2002 with support from CFI and BC KDF, the CDHI was designed to promote computer-assisted research and training in the arts and social sciences. In the arts, the computer assists in writing, composition, arrangement and staging. The electronic medium also affords new possibilities for display, performance, and dissemination. In disciplines where the research culture emphasizes knowledge transfer, the computer serves as a pedagogical tool of enormous importance, and this subject ranks among CDHI priorities. The CDHI employs techniques in digital representation of image-, text-, and sound-based cultural artefacts, production and study of new digital artefacts, and research into pedagogical concerns associated with computing. It focuses on the following kinds of research tasks: electronic publishing and re-purposing of materials previously stored in traditional archival forms; use of automated means to represent print-, visual-, and audio-based material in tagged and searchable electronic textual form; and sophisticated textual analysis processes that, originating in the humanities, have much broader application. The CDHI is closely aligned with the humanities computing scholarly community, and has partnered with the University of Victoria in its successful summer seminars. In 2003, the CDHI sponsored "ReFrame: Video at the Crossroads", a symposium of eighteen specialists in new media technology. As a research support, the CDHI has close links to other institutional facilities linking research and technology, including the Music MIDI Lab (which assists students and faculty in basic aspects of the study of music, such as ear-training, as well as more complex research involving composition and scoring), and the Graphics and ITAS Labs (state-of-the-art facilities dedicated to the knowledge and production of graphic design materials and digital mediated technologies)" (6).

<< data.stream >>

March 18 - March 31 (lower gallery) Opening Thursday, March 18, 5-7 PM.

Faculty, staff and students working in new media will exhibit the results of their research and collaborations. To reflect the stimulating--and sometimes disorienting--flow of data that surrounds us, multiple installations will juxtapose images, explore chance combinations, recover urban landscapes, and provide opportunities for interactivity. Members of the Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation, the Digital Media Technology program, and the Educational Technology Centre are collaborating on << data.stream >> to provide a stimulating, engaging, and thought-provoking gallery experience.

Visiting Professor

Dr. Roland Lorimer, director of the Masters in Publishing program and professor of Communications at Simon Fraser University, visited the Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation on January 27, 2004. Seen here with CDHI director Marshall Soules (standing) in a photo by John Lund, Dr. Lorimer was visiting Malaspina to deliver a lecture later that evening on trends in academic research and publishing. In his lecture, he identified the following trends in academic publishing: increasingly electronic and online; growth of institutional repositories; increasing integration of multimedia and visual elements; new media. Dr. Lorimer's current research involves mapping magazine readership in Canada.

Navigating New Media: How Editors Can Chart the Digital Humanities - Patrick Finn, St. Mary’s College, Alberta.

In the landscape of Digital Humanities, many projects work from the assumption that using computers to record all available materials in archives and libraries renders the critical editor obsolete. While digital archives are an excellent means of storage and primary delivery, they create a need for a new kind of editor. The pathways these digital docents pursue provide a variety of options, each of which leads to testable text. There is a growing need for skilled editors who can posit pathways through digital archives. Future scholarship is best served by abandoning the adversarial model of editing and instead encouraging a variety of coexistent practices.

Dr. Patrick Finn is Assistant Professor of English at St. Mary’s College, Calgary. His research and teaching focus on Late Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Textual and Media Studies, Bibliography and Information Technology. He is currently at work on a collection of essays entitled Shakespeare and Information Technology, is creating an electronic, critical edition of Q1 Hamlet, and is co-authoring a book with Samuel A. Chambers entitled The Culture of Politics, the Politics of Culture. His visit to Malaspina University-College was January 16, 2004, and a video version of his lecture should be available at a future date.

ReFrame: Video at the Crossroads Conference

The CDHI recently hosted the successful ReFrame conference, which brought together experts both local and national to discuss recent changes in filmmaking.

The Humanities Computing Summer Institute

In response to local needs for training in areas key to computing in the Arts and Humanities, U Victoria and Malaspina U-C are offering a series of interrelated workshops focusing on digitisation, text encoding, multimedia, and text analysis tools. In 2004, the CDHI again plans to send a crack team of highly trained digitalisation specialists.