Events

Linking cultures

DHSITE aims to create a space in which the week’s participants can engage in dialogue surrounding critical issues to Digital Humanities scholarship and teaching through a variety of formats including keynote presentations, round tables and community-engagement panels.

The conceptual theme of “Linking Culture(s)” is at the heart of this year’s programming with workshops on social network analysis, linked open data, data visualisation and text analysis, and speakers and discussion panels engaging with challenges surrounding determining, visualising, and understanding networks and connections in and between cultural spaces. We aim to expand our discussions to how tools allow us to understand connections between individuals within regional, national, international and indeed virtual contexts.

All of these events will take place in the CreatorSpace (room 302 of Pérez Hall) from 13:00 to 14:20.

Round Table on the role of the library in DH communities

Monday, May 11, 2020

Researchers planning digital projects often turn to their institution’s library to leverage existing local technical expertise. The role of the library often reaches beyond application knowledge and hosting capabilities as it is ideally positioned as a community hub on campus. As such it can facilitate the development of thriving DH communities by offering a space to facilitate collaborations and partnerships. Moderated by DH Coordinator Jada Watson, panelists will discuss how the library can not only create bridges between researchers and technology,  but also provide important project management support and foster an environment where researcher can exchange ideas and collaborate on projects.

Keynote presentation: “Co-design of digital health technologies: Addressing the challenge of social acceptability”

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Sylvie Grosjean, Department of Communication (University of Ottawa)

Many digital health technologies (e.g., mobile applications, sensor devices, connected objects) are unable to achieve their objectives because the design process does not take into account the complex relationship between the technology, the users and their social environment. A digital health technology that is rejected by one part of the population, abandoned by another, or that generates social inequalities in health points to a common reality in the field of technological innovations, that of their social acceptability. Acceptability problems are linked to the logic of technology design, which we have described as technocentric (Grosjean and Bonneville, 2012). However, little attention is paid to the social norms and cultural values underlying the development of these technologies (Gras, 2013; Vial, 2014; Tello-Rozas, 2016; Silva et al., 2018). Moreover, as Lupton (2014) points out, the dominant techno-deterministic enthusiasm for digital health technologies is so high that it relegates social and cultural dimensions of the design in these technologies to the background. In this keynote presentation, Dr. Grosjean will demonstrate how a co-design approach allows us to bring issues of social acceptability to the fore. She will present a co-design approach implemented within the framework of an international project aiming at developing digital health technologies for people living with Parkinson’s disease (http://icare-pd.ca). Through the study of a specific case – the design of the eCARE-PD platform – and demonstrate how the co-design approach allows the conditions for the social acceptability of this technology to be negotiated and progressively defined.

Community Panel on Linked Open Data

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Dr. Susan Brown (English from Guelph University) and Dr. Kimberly Martin (History from Guelph University) will introduce the Linked Infrastructure of Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) initiative, a CFI-funded research project that will created a national linked data triple store to create a sea change in availability of humanities data.

Keynote presentation: “Trans-Hispanic Networks of Feminist Solidarity”

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Vanessa Ceia, Hispanic Studies (McGill University)

On March 8, 2019, Spanish-speaking Twitter communities erupted with a polyvocal outcry against gender violence, while simultaneous offline protests took place in cities across the globe. Although anglophone hashtags such as #MeToo and #WhyIStayed have drawn substantial attention from digital media scholars, there is a scarcity of scholarship on feminist hashtags generated by Hispanophone Twitter communities in Spain, the Caribbean and the Americas. In this keynote presentation, Dr. Ceia will present the results of a multi-modal spatial and thematic analysis of regional appropriations of feminist hashtags such as #8M, #YoTambien and #NiUnaMenos. Through spatial, network, and word frequency analyses of key hashtags, she will map the rise and spread of trans-Hispanic networks of feminist solidarity online from the local to transnational levels. 

Round Table on postcolonial methods in DH scholarship

Friday, May 15, 2020

Dr. Vanessa Ceia will lead the closing roundtable discussion with researchers on Postcolonial Methods in DH Scholarship. Participants will be announced soon.