Mount Allison University in Sackville New Brunswick will provide an idyllic setting for the exciting upcoming conference Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics. Held from September 20-23, this conference will feature Keynote Speakers Diana Brydon and Sina Queyras. EMiC UA will be represented by Andrea Hasenbank with her paper “Canadian Pamphleteers and the Poetics of Refusal” and Vanessa Lent and EMiC UA with “Disrupting Poetry: Wilfred Watson’s Let’s murder Clytemnestra according to the principles of Marshall McLuhan at the 1969 ‘Poet and Critic ’69 Poète et Critique’ Conference.” In addition to these papers Lent and Hasenbank will also participate in a CWRCshop on Sunday September 23^rd. They will join Bart Vautour, Emily Robins Sharpe, and Erin Wunker on a roundtable on creative/critical projects to discuss the digital turn within the humanities.

The move cements the relationship between EMiC UA and the University of Alberta Libraries (UAL). UAL’s commitment to digitization focuses on preserving the history and culture of the Canadian west. This interest stems back to 1956 when Bruce Braden Peel, Chief Librarian of the University of Alberta from 1955 to 1982, published Bibliography of the Prairie Provinces. According to Digitization Librarian Peggy Sue Ewanyshyn, this bibliography was updated ten years ago and is continuously added to as an online database called Peel’s Prairie Provinces. While this is the flagship project of the library’s digital initiatives it is by no means the only focus. Another major project is “The Sir Samuel Steele Collection.” Steele’s importance to the history of western Canada – combined with the extensive archival records left both by Steele and his family – make the collection a unique opportunity for the UAL to bring the digitization work they do to a wider public audience. While the digitization work is ongoing, the Sir Samuel Steele Collection website gives public access to Steele’s documents. This website is accompanied by a public exhibition that runs from June 1^st to September 30^th at the Enterprise Square Gallery in downtown Edmonton.

The use of digitization to theorize and understand the culture of the Canadian west is paramount to both the UAL and EMiC UA. What makes the EMiC UA’s presence unique is that we are a specifically literary project. While our current digitization initiative is on archival material in both the Wilfred Watson and Sheila Watson Fonds, our concurrent and upcoming projects, including Andrea Hassenbank’s “Canadian Manifestos 1910-1960,” Hannah McGregor’s “Martha Ostenso Project,” Kristin Fast’s work on Sheila Watson’s short fiction, and Vanessa Lent’s work on Wilfred Watson’s play Cockcrow and the Gulls broaden this focus. EMiC UA’s new home base in the Cameron Library will provide an ideal space from which to add to the rich and exciting digitization and preservation already undergoing at the UAL.

Exile’s Return is co-hosted by EMiC and the Sorbonne Nouvelle and will feature keynote speakers Mavis Gallant and Alberto Manguel. In addressing the phenomenal influence of Paris as a location for Canadian expatriate writers and an inspiration for the development of Canadian modernist literature, this conference brings together a collection of international scholars. “Exile’s Return” will feature presentations by the EMiC UA group as well as the exciting unveiling of WatsonWalk, an interactive Smartphone App being developed by the EMiC UA group. Presentations include Matt Bouchard, Harvey Quamen, and EMiC UA’s “Bringing the Archive to the Streets: the WatsonAR Smartphone Application”; Paul Hjartarson and EMiC UA’s “The Other Watson: Wilfred in (Another?) Paris”; Kristin Fast, Nick van Orden, Rebecca Blakey, and EMiC UA’s “Mapping Sheila’s Paris: just what did this exile return home with, anyway?”; Vanessa Lent and EMiC UA’s “Paris and Wilfred Watson’s Cockrow and the Gulls” and Hannah MacGregor’s “Writing the “Foreign”: Narratives of Travel in the Writing Careers of Margaret Laurence and P.K. Page.”

DHSI is held annually at the University of Victoria and consists of a week of intensive coursework, lectures, and seminars. EMiC UA member Harvey Quamen teaches a course on “Digital Humanities Databases.” As the foundation for many digital humanities projects and applications, databases allow developers to perform tasks such as working with enormous GIS maps, aggregating the social media of wikis and blogs, building large archival repositories and even generating the semantic web. The course introduces the form and functions of databases and then demonstrates these functions using the students’ own data sets. EMiC UA member Matt Bouchard offers a course on “Games for Digital Humanists,” which combines treatments of game criticism, game theory and game development to develop an understanding of how to approach this medium as an object of research.

Joining Harvey and Matt at DHSI from the EMiC UA group are Paul Hjartarson, Andrea Hassenbank, Hannah McGregor, Nick van Orden, and Andrea Johnston.

Held directly after DHSI, the “Beyond Accessibility” Conference will pick up on many of the issues addressed during the week. Led by the Textual Studies group of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE), the conference will address the changing face of textual studies in the digital age. The EMiC UA group will be well-represented at the conference with Hannah McGregor presenting “(Re)Writing the ‘Foreign’: P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal and the Digital Turn” as part of the PK Page node of the EMiC project. Alongside her Zailig Pollock and Christopher Doody will present “”I Have Changed”: Textual Transformations in P.K. Page’s Brazilian Journal.” The Watsons Project is represented by Harvey Quamen, Matt Bouchard, Paul Hjartarson and EMiC UA’s paper “A Public Interface for the Archive: Scholarship and Smartphones” and Vanessa Lent and EMiC UA’s paper “Paris and Wilfred Watson’s Cockcrow and the Gulls.”