The Maker Lab in the Humanities (MLab) at the University of Victoria (UVic) opened our doors in September 2012 under the direction of Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor, English; Faculty Member, CSPT). With research priority areas in physical computing, digital fabrication, and exhibits, the MLab intersects cultural criticism with experimental prototyping and electronics. As the Lab’s name suggests, our design is anchored in blending a humanities research lab with a collaborative makerspace—a design that affords our team of students and faculty opportunities to build projects through various modes of knowing by doing.

About “Maker” and “Making” in the Humanities

The MLab’s use of “maker” and “making” understands both words on a broad spectrum, to include writing and composition in addition to tinkering, coding, crafting, bending, sketching, prototyping, and fabricating (among many others). The Lab resists impulses to reduce technical work and tacit knowledge to practices in “service” of scholarship. Invested in the entanglements of media with matter, all of our projects engage the material relations between the past and present, the digital and analog, the persistent and ephemeral.

Territory, Acknowledgements, and Support

The MLab has received support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, the University of Victoria’s Faculty of the Humanities, the University of Victoria’s Department of English, the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Fine Arts, the University of Victoria’s Department of Visual Arts, University of Victoria Work Study, the Modernist Versions Project, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Implementing New Knowledge Environments, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

We acknowledge and respect the Songhees, Esquimalt and WSÁNEĆ peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day. UVic is situated on the territory of the Coast and Straits Salish people. The university sits on the site of an old Lekwungen village.

Website Maintenance, License, Copy, and Sitemap

This website is maintained by Jentery Sayers, who is the lab’s principal investigator. For the site, his responsibilities include writing, media production, markup, copy editing, and occasional programming. Thanks especially to Nina Belojevic, Teddy Brock, Katherine Goertz, Arthur Hain, Mikka Jacobsen, Shaun Macpherson, Emily Smith, Karly Wilson, Grace Yang, and the Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC) at UVic for their contributions to the site’s structure, design, and maintenance. All content on this site is covered by a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (international / unported) and is pushed to GitHub. Should you find a bug, please do not hesitate to email maker@uvic.ca with a report.

If you wish to see all URLs for maker.uvic.ca in addition to change frequencies and timestamps for most recent updates, then please visit our XML sitemap. This sitemap is automatically generated whenever a change is made, the publication of new content included. Expect changes often, and thank you for visiting.

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