DHIL Updates for February 2023

Dear DHIL Community, 

We hope you're having a wonderful start to 2023! We have some exciting updates to share with you, including staffing news, open office hours, and upcoming workshops that may be of interest to you and your project teams.

Meet the new DHIL Developer, Andrew Gardener
The DHIL is delighted to announce the appointment of Andrew Gardener as the Web and Data Services Developer. Andrew joins SFU with more than a decade of experience as a full stack developer in post-secondary teaching and learning, having previously worked as a Programmer at the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology, as a Software Developer at the Concordia University Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance, and as a Web Developer at Vanier College. Andrew has a Bachelor of Computing Science from Concordia University. Welcome to the DHIL, Andrew!

More staffing updates
We’ve had lots of staffing changes over the last few semesters! Last summer, we said farewell to Michael Joyce, long-time DHIL Developer, as well as former Digital Fellows Saba and Sophia. In the fall, we welcomed four new graduate student Digital Fellows to our team: Brenda, Julianna, Sophie, and Sulan. Read more about our team here.

New: Join us Monday mornings for drop-in DHIL office hours
Do you have a question for the DHIL team? Would you like to build a community with other DH researchers at SFU? Starting on January 30th, 2023, join the DHIL team on Monday mornings from 10:00am to 11:30am in the SFU Burnaby Bennett Library Research Commons Seminar Room 7010. Please drop-in, no registration is necessary!

Reflections on the 2022 Digital Pedagogy Institute
In this blog post, Sulan R., the Digital Fellow, Digital Pedagogy in the DHIL reflects on her experience attending the 8th Digital Pedagogy Institute conference last August. Her post explores each of the DPI 2022 conference themes by addressing the questions raised under each theme based on the DPI 2022 presentations.                                                

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

Unlock your research impact: TikTok for academics
Friday, March 10, 2023 – 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Via Zoom
Curious about using TikTok in your academic work but don’t know where to start? Content creation is ultimately about knowledge mobilization and can be a useful tool for your research communication. Join Penína Sara-Lynn Harding as she shares the tips, tricks, and tools she uses as an Indigenous scholar, TikTok content creator, 2021 alumni of the National Screen Institute. This workshop is part of the Knowledge Mobilization Lunch and Learn series.

Unlocking XML Data with XPath
Wednesday, March 29, 2023 - 10:00am to 12:00pm
Burnaby, Bennett Library, Lab 2105
XML (eXtensible Markup language) is a ubiquitous data format across the social sciences and humanities, structuring every web page you see on the internet and powering an array of digital resources like library catalogs, vast scientific datasets, API responses, and digital textual editions. This workshop introduces XPath (XML Path Language): the query language designed specifically for traversing, analyzing, and parsing XML datasets. With its simple syntax, XPath offers a straightforward mechanism for interrogating XML data, allowing researchers to identify patterns, spot inconsistencies, and ask questions of their XML without any previous knowledge of programming languages or query syntaxes.
 
This workshop is aimed toward anyone who works with XML data and will provide participants with hands-on experience with using XPath. Using the Folger Shakespeare corpus as a sample dataset, this workshop will outline how to construct and execute XPath queries using oXygen XML editor and will demonstrate how participants can answer various research questions ranging in complexity about their data (for example, "What is the average length of Hamlet's soliloquies? To whom does he speak most often? Who speaks the highest number of verse lines across all of Shakespeare's plays?")

CALL FOR PAPERS

CSDH/SCHN Congress 2023
Deadline for submissions: 30 Jan 2023
“The Canadian Society for Digital Humanities invites scholars, practitioners, and graduate students to submit proposals for papers, panels, and digital demonstrations for its annual meeting, which will be held at York University, Toronto, as part of the 2023 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities on May 29th-May 31st, 2023. We encourage submissions on all topics relating to both theory and practice in the evolving field of the digital humanities.”

Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) 2023 Conference & Colloquium
Deadline for submissions: 10 February 2023
“The Conference & Colloquium is a relatively informal, collegial venue for sharing work and ideas, and we encourage presenters to think beyond the traditional conference paper format for their presentations and to invite feedback and engagement from the DHSI community. Presentations may focus on any topic relating to the digital humanities. Submissions are welcome from all members of the digital humanities community, including faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, early career scholars, independent researchers, librarians and other members of the GLAM community, alt-academics, academic professionals, those in technical programs, and those new to the digital humanities. This year, we are holding this event in a hybrid format, with in-person sessions during the first, in-person week of DHSI (June 5–9) and virtual sessions during the second, online week (June 12–16).”

Digital Humanities Pedagogies in Times of Crisis
Deadline for submissions: 15 February 2023
“From the COVID-19 pandemic, to the Russian war against Ukraine, to accelerating climate change, to the rise of neo-fascist politics that target racial and ethnic minorities, refugees, and gender minorities, the last several years have found us teaching in times of overlapping crises. For some, recent years have been an introduction to teaching under crisis, while others have been enduring and teaching under such conditions for a long time. For this special issue, “Digital Humanities Pedagogies in Times of Crisis,” we solicit essays that take up the question of how to tackle the challenge of teaching under such constraints.”

Call for projects 2023: Textual data in SSH
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2023
"As part of Coalition Publica activities, Érudit is developing large corpora of textual data through partnerships with the country's leading documentary institutions: Library and Archives Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Canadiana / CRKN and the Bibliothèque de l'Assemblée nationale du Québec. These corpora include the full text of entire collections of newspapers, scholarly and cultural journals, magazines and government documents published in Canada. Eligible projects must be solely for research purposes and may not be commercially oriented. The research corpora are accessible from the Digital Research Alliance of Canada and Calcul Québec infrastructure. They can be batch downloaded by SSH key or by the big data transfer tool Globus. The processing of textual data corpora requires skills in computer analysis of big data, automated text mining and/or digital humanities. We invite you to submit your research project via this short form so that we may efficiently evaluate your data needs."