DHSI is held annually at the University of Victoria and consists of a week of intensive coursework, lectures, and seminars. This year EMiC UA members Harvey Quamen and Matt Bouchard, along with Jon Bath, are offering the course “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. Joining Harvey and Matt at DHSI from the EMiC UA group are Paul Hjartarson, Andrea Hassenbank, Hannah McGregor, Nick van Orden, Rebecca Blakey and Vanessa Lent.
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.”
“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 “Walking with the Watsons,” 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.”
