Projects

Map of Early Modern London

You could walk across London of the 1500s in about 20 minutes. And now, thanks to the survival of a 450-year-old woodcut map, Shakespeare’s world can also "open up to us like a Google map,” says Dr. Janelle Jenstad, project director of UVic’s constantly evolving Map of Early Modern London (MoEML).

MoEML has some claim to call itself a "late first-generation digital humanities project," having launched as an intranet site and pedagogical tool at the University of Windsor in 1999.1 MoEML’s history begins in 1997, however, when I (Jenstad) first "remediated" the "Agas" map. As of January 2015, MoEML is in Version 5.1, after a early history of fits and starts. Since we re-encoded the entire project in TEI in 2005-2006, followed by a quiet internet launch in August 2006, MoEML has had a continuous web presence. Most major project developments since April 2013 are documented on our News page, our Blog, and our Facebook and Twitter streams.

More information

The Maker Lab

About the Maker Lab

The Maker Lab in the Humanities: With research priority areas in physical computing, digital fabrication, and multisite exhibits, the Maker Lab intersects cultural criticism and comparative media studies with computation, prototyping, electronics, and experimental methods. For more, see http://maker.uvic.ca/.

Project director: Dr. Jentery Sayers

The Kits for Cultural History

About the Kits for Cultural History

The Kits for Cultural History: The primary aim of this project is to express the histories of media, technologies, and science through new media, especially physical computing and digital fabrication techniques. For more, see http://maker.uvic.ca/kch/.

Project Director: Dr. Jentery Sayers

Modernist Versions Project

About the MVP

The Modernist Versions Project (MVP) aims to advance the potential for comparative interpretations of modernist texts that exist in multiple forms by digitizing, collating, versioning, and visualizing them individually and in combination. Its primary mission is to enable new critical insights that are difficult without digital or computational approaches.
Working with established Digital Humanities (DH) research teams both within and beyond Canada, the MVP will establish a set of best practices and a shared workflow—as well as help build the necessary tools and resources—to allow scholars to digitize modernist texts, compare multiple versions, mark-up the variants to facilitate easy searching and comparison, and display the results in an agile and extensible way. The value of doing so emerges in two ways: first, because many modernist texts are now emerging from copyright in Canada (well ahead of their emergence in the United States), the MVP is positioned to make a significant contribution to modernist studies and edition production. We have an opportunity in this regard that is nearly unparalleled in the rest of the world. Second, the MVP will enable new critical insights and facilitate new modes of scholarly production by making modernist texts accessible and queryable.

While this work is in progress, you can follow MVP developments—and access texts it is digitizing and encoding—at mvp.uvic.ca.

For more information please visit http://ghostprof.org/mvp/

Project Director: Dr. Stephen Ross

Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL)

The Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL) is a digital humanities research lab at the University of Victoria engaging in cross-disciplinary study of the past, present, and future of textual communication, and is a hub for digital humanities activities at the University of Victoria, across the country, and around the world. The ETCL acts as an intellectual centre for the activities of approximately twenty local and visiting faculty, staff, students, and scholars who work with research centres, libraries, academic departments, and projects locally and in the larger community. Through a series of highly collaborative relationships, ETCL's international research community comprises over 300 researches.

Our speaker series and training activities have brought several hundred faculty and graduate student speakers to our campus, and our conference organization and outreach activities have brought the best of our work to the world. Researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate student assistants affiliated with the ETCL have gone on to further positions in industry and academia.

You can find out more information on our website.

ETCL projects include:

A Study of Professional Reading Tools for Computing Humanists

The Exeter Manuscript

A Knowledge-base Toward an Edition of Shakespeare¹s Sonnets The ReKN Project (Renaissance Knowledge Network)

Iter: Renaissance Bibliography

Iter Community

PReE: Professional Reading Environment

z-axis research

Personas for Open, Networked Peer Review

Digital Humaniies Summer Institute (DHSI)

DHSI, our summer institute held annually at the University of Victoria, provides an ideal environment for discussing and learning about new computing technologies and how they are influencing teaching, research, dissemination, creation, and preservation in different disciplines, via a community-based approach. In its tenth year, the DHSI has welcomed more than 1200 people from around the world as it has grown over the years to include 40 courses and around 600 students. Described by one participant as an event that "combines the best aspects of a skills workshop, international conference, and summer camp," the DHSI spans three weeks of intensive coursework, seminars, and lectures, and prides itself on its friendly, informal, and collegial atmosphere. We invite you to join the DHSI community in Victoria for a time of practice, learning, and connecting with (and making new) friends and colleagues.

For a complete list of the DHSI courses for 2015 please see our conference page.

Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE)

The INKE project is a collaborative group of researchers and graduate research assistants working with other organizations and partners to explore the digital humanities, electronic scholarly communication, and the affordances of electronic text. INKE began in 2004-2005 as HCI-Book: Human Computer Interface and the Electronic Book, and is now funded by a $2.5 million, 7-Year SSHRC Major

Collaborative Research Initiatives grant plus an additional $10.4 million in contributions from institutional and research partners. The project is currently directed by Ray Siemens (UVic) and over the life of the project, its two international research groupings (Modelling and Prototyping and Interface Design) have brought together 35 researchers across 20 institutions and 21 partner agencies, with work involving postdoctoral research fellows and graduate research assistants, at the forefront of computing in the humanities, text analysis, information studies, usability and interface design into a network comprised of those who are best-poised to understand the nature of the human record as it intersects with the computer.