DH Toolbox: Fall 2023

3 October: DH Show-and-Tell

Want to see what our colleagues have been up to over the last year? Join us for the first DH Toolbox session of the year: DH Show-and-Tell. Professors from the Faculty of Arts will share their research and teaching projects-in-progress! There will be plenty of time for discussion and networking!

17 October: The Library and DH

The Library is the heart of DH at the University of Ottawa. Our colleagues in the Library have supported DH research and teaching since the very beginning. Come to the second session to meet the librarians that support and engage in DH research and teaching. They will highlight services, tools, and resources available through the Library and the Archives and Special Collections, showcasing projects on which our university Librarians and Archivists have collaborated.

Unable to join us in person? Join us virtually via Zoom! If you have troubles logging in email dhnarts@uOttawa.ca.

31 October: ‘Ghosts in the Machine: Large Language Models Are Mostly Full of Crap But Still Surprisingly Useful If You Dare’

Alternative title: ‘There is No Artificial Intelligence, Only Zuul; or, now that this thing is here, what can/should we do with it?’

We are so pleased to host again our colleague from Carleton University: Dr. Shawn Graham! Dr. Graham been playing with models of language since the days of Markov chains and Recurrent Neural Networks. In this talk, he’ll explain poorly how they work, why they work, and why you might want to just think of them as ‘calculators for words’. Alternatively, we can think of them as ghostly echoes of our web culture back to itself. In which case, he’ll walk us through some of the ways he’s found listening to these echoes to be useful in his research, in his teaching, but will also share some of the dead ends too. This isn’t a boosterism talk but rather an attempt to dispel hype. He didn’t write this abstract with the help of an LLM.

14 November: Introducing the “Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex“

Started by professors Jinny Yu and Celina Jeffery (from uOttawa) and Ming Tiampo (from Carleton U), the project is a searchable database of Canadian BIPOC artists aimed to facilitate and encourage research, teaching, and exhibitions on BIPOC artists, who as you might know, continue to be underrepresented in publications, exhibitions, and curricula. Research assistants Tia Carey and Candide Mawoko will introduce the database, which has been named the Canadian BIPOC Artists Rolodex, references the ways in which BIPOC artists have been historically known through personal and artistic networks rather than through institutions. It seeks to increase accessibility to BIPOC artists during first-phase research and subsequently increase their representation in curriculum, publications, and art institutions. It is conceived of in equal measures as a curated platform, digital humanities project, and advocacy work.

28 November: Wiki-A-Thons as Community Builders

The Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC) project set up a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to increase the visibility and representativeness of the French-speaking Canadian LGBTQ2IA+ movement on this platform. The LGLC project recognized the need to fill the gap in content on the LGBTQ2IA+ movement in French-speaking Canada compared to English-speaking Canada and wanted to call on the community to rectify the situation via this event, which took place in the fall of 2023. In our final session of the Fall semester, Humanities Data Lab research assistants Pascale Dangoisse and Farinaz Basmechi will present on the results of this activity, and the avenues for the future. 

Special Open House!

5 December: Brecht in/au Canada

Participants in the current theatre and world languages seminar “Brecht in Canada and the World” at the University of Ottawa are researching productions of works by Bertolt Brecht at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, and they are working with NAC archivists to document artefacts in the institution’s archive related to these productions. Join us for the students’ group presentations of the exhibits they are designing, which will be considered for publication on the “Brecht in/au Canada” Omeka.