Humanities Project Showcase

I'll add a few more here:

• Presenters need more than 1/2 hour to set up. We should encourage at least 45-60 minutes. Set up was pretty chaotic, so clear delegation about who attends to what needs during set up (booth assignments, tech support, poster issues, flipcharts, power, etc.)
• Test power capacity if we are increasing use (monitors, extra computers, peripherals) at any given station, pod or on any given circuit.
• Video tape the presentations for podcasts downloadable from the HCMC web site. I think individual interviews at the booths would be a good idea, too.
• Expand invitation to interdisciplinary projects or projects of interest across campus. There isn't a good venue on campus for this type of display, and the more ideas people can walk away with, the better. We did some of this this year by inviting David Leach from Fine Arts, Mark Roman, and Leslie Saxson/Chris Coey from Linguistics.
• Press more individual flesh for publicity. Flyers and announcements are fine, but nothing beats an enthusiastic face2face plug and commitment to attend.
• More planning as a group and clear delegation of tasks. I have tended to view the showcase as my responsibility, and have been reluctant to involve HCMC staff because many of you are already involved in the project work. The lack of clear delegation caught up to us when I got sick.

As content has come in over the last week I've been adding it to the website, but neglecting to post on it for some reason.
The site is now up-to-date, although we're waiting for content from Stephen Culhane.
Minutes posted are for website work only (meetings/discussions regarding structure and style, as well as the actual codework).

Had a meeting with Scott and Chris to discuss the posters for the Scraps project. The poster will have at least screenshots of the viewer and administration program screens, plus some text.

Principal Researcher: Dr. Janelle Jenstad, Assistant Professor, Dept. of English, University of Victoria

Funding: SCHRC

Home: http://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/

Description: "The Map of Early Modern London" is a hyperlinked atlas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London based on the "Agas" woodcut map of the 1560s. Over 200 sites and streets are linked to pages that provide a full historical and archaeological survey, quotations from John Stow's Survey of London, and a bibliography of literary references. Over 200 additional sites and streets are identified. For example, you can click on a street and find all the literary references in our database to that street. This site began as a pedagogical tool in 1999. It is in the process of becoming a scholarly tool with fully refereed articles. Technologies used include PHP, eXist, XQuery.

Principal Researcher: Michael Best, University of Victoria

Co-investigators & Collaborators:

• Dr. Ray Siemens, Department of English, University of Victoria
• Dr. Daniel German, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria

Funding: SCHRC

Home: http://ise.uvic.ca

Project Title: The Devonshire Manuscript: an Electronic Edition

Principal Researcher (at UVic): Ray Siemens

Co-Investigators & Collaborators: Cara Leitch, Johanne Paquette

Research/Technical Assistance: Karin Armstrong, Martin Holmes

Funding: SSHRC

Description: This project will facilitate a close study of the Devonshire Manuscript's contents, which are unique in nature and operation, chiefly in the hands of Mary Shelton and Margaret Douglas (its principal compilers). Written in an epistolary manner, many of the manuscript's poems present complete exchanges in themselves between those associated with the manuscript and, at times, also represent parts of larger exchanges taking place beyond the borders of the manuscript. One of the chief challenges with this text lies in its difficult paleography, and the collation of its internal and external witnesses.

Project Title: EMLS Archive (1995-1999)

Principal Researcher (at UVic): Ray Siemens

Research/Technical Assistance: Martin Holmes & Karin Armstrong

Funding: SSHRC, Canadian Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences

Description: This publication gathers the first four years of EMLS in a TEI- compliant archival format. The EMLS Archive offered a unique opportunity to examine the use of lightly encoded text as an archival format, and to demonstrate how such a corpus might be used.

Project Title: REKn/PReE

Principal Researcher (at UVic): Ray Siemens

Research/Technical Assistance: Alastair McColl, Paul Girn

Funding: SSHRC, CFI, CRC

Description: The proof-of-concept prototype of the Professional Reading Environment (PReE) has explored means of accessing and reading large databases of professional materials, whatever they may be. Our test database was the Renaissance English Knowledgebase (REKn), which is an attempt to capture and present materials toward an understanding of those aspects of early modern life which are of interest to the literary scholar ­ via a combination of digital representations of literary and artistic works of the Renaissance plus those of our own time reflecting our understanding of earlier works.

Title: Scandanavian-Canadian Studies Journal

Principle Researcher: Dr. John Tucker

Co-investigators and Collaborators: Trish Baer, Ph.D candidate, and Martin Holmes, HCMC

Project funding:

Project home: http://www.tapor.uvic.ca/cocoon/scancan/

Project description:

Scandinavian-Canadian Studies is a journal published by the AASSC (Association for the Advancement of Scandinavian Studies in Canada). It expresses in concrete—and more recently virtual—form the Association’s conviction that there is much to be learned from peoples of Scandinavia, not least by Canadians, who share a comparable geopolitical situation, not to mention social and cultural values. Articles deal with a wide range of subjects: translation studies, mermaids, multiculturalism, Ibsen and other writers, the films of Bergman, Scandinavian immigration to Canada, Icelandic sagas, and so on.

• - Devonshire MS, using the Virtual Lightbox (presented by Cara and Johanne,
• - EMLS (presented by Martin and Karin)
• - REKn (presented by Ray and Anne; requires 2 machines, for a video demo and powerpoint)

- Karin will also put together a flyer for the institute to put out.

Principal Researcher: Claire Carlin, Professor of French, University of Victoria

Co-investigators & Collaborators: Martin Holmes, Programmer, HCMC, University of Victoria; France Langlois, Research Assistant, University of Victoria

Funding: University of Victoria

Project home: http://mariage.uvic.ca/

General Description: This anthology and critical edition contains texts and images generated by radical changes in the institution of marriage during the Counter-Reformation in France (16th and 17th centuries). Work done so far focuses on polemical texts and engravings. The images have been annotated and linked to the texts using the Image Markup Tool developed by Martin Holmes.

The prime objective of this project is to create a prototype of a searchable digital video library representing the francophone culture around the globe in order to implement it in FREN262 (Culture of the French Speaking People). The videos focus on native speakers from various ages, genders, and professions, providing their perspectives on specific cultural issues. The prime pedagogical objective is to build students' cultural awareness and provide them with a learning space where they can refine their critical, and analytical skills.

The current prototype include about 10 video clips and is used as a key resource in FREN262 as a model for students' group project. First students study key cultural issues by exploring various other media at home and in class. Secondly they have the opportunities to analyze and reflect on the point of views expressed in the videos (included in the prototype). Once students have a clear understanding of the concept developed in this digital library, they are asked to work in groups and develop their own video to be included in the libraries. These videos will be based on interviews of Francophones living in the greater Victoria community.

This is a collection of inter-linked historical websites exploring cutting-edge methodology and presentation tools, focused on the Vancouver Island, the outermost Pacific edge of North America. These sites include:

• viHistory.ca which allows the user to turn space inside out and peer into all the homes in Victoria, and most on Vancouver Island, via the data collected for censuses, directories, and tax assessments from 1871-1901. New on the site are high resolution maps of Victoria accessible by the HCMC's own nifty Mapviewer software.
• Victoria's Victoria (Victoriasvictoria.ca) a showcase fo student historical research on Victoria in the Victorian Era, which also peers into some of the seedier and boozier parts of the city.
• View from the Steeple: A panoramic exploration of Victoria from a more pious perspective: the Steeple of St Andrew's Cathedral in 1891.
• Virtual Victoria: in its beginning stages, a project to recreate part of downtown Victoria in 3-D, so that we can virtually peer and walk into Victorian homes and businesses.