Educational Developer, Centre for Excellence in Learning & Teaching, Toronto Metropolitan University
“Representing Canadian Queer Authorship: Making the Internet a Women’s Place,” an essay Constance Crompton and I wrote about the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project, will be published in May in Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere: Place and Space from the University of Alberta Press.
Accelerate Okanagan published an excellent profile of Constance Crompton and the LGLC project. The article does a great job of providing clear explanations of our project and the digital humanities!
“With a small crew of curious students and research assistants, Connie’s academic passion is truly interdisciplinary. Attracting students from the likes of creative writing, social and computer sciences, she’s able to create data visualizations (like the one pictured below) that provide greater meaning about a subject in a way that the text would not be able to offer on its own.”
“The project she’s most ‘jazzed’ about, is the creation of a digital chronology of the Gay Liberation Movement in Canada. Rather than just reading historical documents on the screen, Connie and the project’s co-director Michelle Schwartz (Ryerson University) are able to insert tiny bits of code — right into the text — and teach the computer that this is a person or this is an event. From that, she’s able to develop visual maps to see when and where these different events happened and who is showing up with whom.”
The University of British Columbia has posted a lovely story on “Coding Character,” the SSHRC Insight grant-funded research project that will support Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada for the next five years.
Results for the 2013 Insight Grant program have been posted on the SSHRC website. We couldn’t be prouder to have received this grant, and to be listed amongst so many inspiring research projects taking place across Canada.
There were two workshops on prosopography at this year’s DH conference in Lausanne. The first one, spearheaded by Harvey Quamen, with assistance from Constance Crompton and myself, covered database options available for working with prosopographical data, specifically MySQL and Neo4j. Harvey was nice enough to set up a website for our workshop, and the slides and resources that were discussed have been posted.
Harvey in action at DH2014:
Prosopography by @hquamen #dh2014 pic.twitter.com/L2QmWUSrho
— Mikal Eckstrom (@historyequals) July 7, 2014
The second workshop was on Ontologies for Prosopography. More details about the workshop are available on stoa.org.
Exciting international projects about reconstructing social networks of the past at #dh2014 prosopography workshop pic.twitter.com/o9A1u0inKk — Frederic Kaplan (@frederickaplan) July 8, 2014
John Bradley at #dh2014 prosopography workshop: good ontology design practice is a kind of “Occam’s razor”. pic.twitter.com/45LIbY643A
— Frederic Kaplan (@frederickaplan) July 8, 2014
If you’re interested in continuing a discussion of methodology and possible collaborations in the area of historical, ancient historical and modern prosopography and person database projects. If you are interested in joining, please send a message to the Google Group for iPRG, the International Prosopography Research Group.
I was lucky enough to attend Digital Humanities 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland this summer. One of the topics I was most interested in learning about was web archiving and scraping. I took a workshop led by Scott Reed from the Internet Archive on their Archive-It web-archiving service. At the workshop I ran into Ian Milligan, professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo, who suggested I check out the web scraping tutorials on the Programming Historian website.
The most rewarding part of this workshop was being able to create my very own web archive of the websites for Rick Bébout and the CLGA. Getting full-text access to searchable archives of these sites will hopefully be of great use when doing research for the LGLC project.
For more on web archiving, check out Ian Milligan and Nick Ruest’s presentation The Great WARC Adventure: WARCs from creation to use: “This presentation will cover a historical overview of web archiving, how best to both capture and preserve websites, and make them discoverable and usable using open source tools that can be easily replicated by other organizations, the interplay of the archivist and historian with respect to web archives, and finally ways to access web archives”
The International Internet Preservation Consortium has also provided a small directory of open source web archiving tools.
Search the web-archive for the CLGA and Rick Bébout
I will be at DH2014 next week, assisting with a workshop on prosopography alongside Harvey Quamen and Constance Crompton. Hope to see you there!
Presented as part of the CSDH/ACCUTE joint session on “Difference, Identity, Diversity” at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on May 26th, 2014.
Some great Tweets from the session:
@MichelinaNeri: evolving standards like MARC gender & contributor characteristics have real potential for representing shifting identities
— Susan Brown (@susanirenebrown) May 26, 2014
.@MichelinaNeri shows striking archival image from 1977 @globeandmail story, “Gay in the Seventies” #LGBTQ #congreSSH pic.twitter.com/EDgtcTShoF
— Mark A. McCutcheon (@sonicfiction) May 26, 2014
@MichelinaNeri discusses TEI encoding, geotagging and Gephi visualizations of gay liberation sites and networks in Canada #csdh14 #congreSSH
— Brian Greenspan (@theHyperlab) May 26, 2014
I will be presenting as part of the CSDH/ACCUTE joint session on “Difference, Identity, Diversity” at Congress 2014 on May 26th. I will be giving a short talk on “Visualizing Gay Liberation in Canada: Using Digital Tools to Represent Identity.” 
From the call for proposals: “The humanities have long worked to specify, recover, contextualize, and understand difference and diversity. We are now seeing increasing emphasis on difference–race, gender, ability, postcoloniality, alternative academic status, and global economic disparity being the most prominent–within digital humanities debates and practices. This panel asks how difference, diversity, marginalization, and power register within digital research and culture.”
Some great Tweets from the presentation, courtesy of the amazing keynote speaker, Shawn Micallef.
Also @MichelinaNeri talks about “dirty data” problems. Librarians must dream of metadata & dirty data & HTML markups. The new nightmares.
— Shawn Micallef (@shawnmicallef) April 25, 2014
I will be presenting at the Centre for Digital Humanities Symposium “Mediating Lives & Stories: Mining / Making / Meaning” on Friday, April 25th. I will be giving a short talk entitled “Visualizing Gay Liberation in Canada: Using Digital Tools to Represent People and Places.”
