About us

The HCMC is essentially a permanent research and development office for the faculty staffed by full-time software developers and experts in research and instructional design.

Our primary responsibility is to support and collaborate on the research and teaching projects of scholars from the other departments in the faculty.

Our formal education and background is in the humanities and education, much more than in computer science or engineering. Among us we have graduate education or professional expertise in:

  • linguistics, philosophy, education, literary analysis, history
  • English, German, French, Japanese, Indonesian
  • English as a second language, American Sign Language
  • instructional design, curriculum development, classroom teaching
  • instructional audio, video and computing hardware and software
  • project planning for software development
  • conference management and ecommerce
  • publishing
  • playing, recording and editing various genres of music

We average over 20 years experience covering a wide range of software technologies, including:

  • XML, XHTML, XSLT, XSL:FO, SVG
  • PHP, ECMAScript (javascript) including AJAX
  • CSS
  • xQuery (eXist engine), SQL (mySQL and postGres)
  • Object Pascal, Java
  • Cocoon + Tomcat (server frameworks)
  • OS (clients and servers): Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS X
  • desktop publishing, office productivity
  • audio and video editing

We have no formal academic teaching or publishing responsibilities. However, we collaborate on research and teaching projects with scholars from other departments in the faculty. Moreover, we publish and present independently and with those scholars.

As much as possible, we:

  • implement projects using internationally recognized standards
  • and use open-source technologies so that our technology and practices can be repurposed or applied to future projects

The HCMC is a department in the faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. We report to the Dean of Humanities, and are guided by our mandate as interpreted through the policy and priorities established by the Digital Humanities Committee.