Thanks again to UVic, Robert Baker (Blinds Veterans UK), Mara Mills (NYU), Matthew Rubery (QMUL), Bill Turkel (Western), Paul Walde (UVic), Fiona Keenan (U. of York), SSHRC, and CFI for their support. Thanks to Rah Bras for the music.

Post by Teddie Brock, attached to the Makerspace and KitsForCulture projects, with the news tag. Featured video for this post care of Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, and Victoria Murawski.

Thanks to John Carswell and Shine*Ola for recording and producing the video.

Post by Keddy Pavlik, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured video for this post care of the University of Victoria.

Makerspaces offer graduate students a chance to consider how the physical spaces in which we interact play a role in shaping the work we do and the skills we develop. While this includes tacit engagement with tools and practices (such as 3D fabrication, microcontroller programming, and photogrammetry, for example), this model can be understood as a technological function of active, engaged learning in a shared space. A good example of how the configurations of such spaces affect our work includes the opportunities afforded to graduate students through the “Hello World!” workshops in the Maker Lab (as part of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute). Participants in a given workshop were encouraged to both contextualize the material in relation to their own projects and work with others to collaboratively understand how tools and skills taught could be applied across a variety of different research topics and problems.

While those of us who participated in these workshops were fortunate enough to learn from top visiting DH scholars (such as Tanya Clement and Bethany Nowviskie) who led workshops on tools that they had helped develop at their home institutions, other workshops were led by graduate students teaching tools that they themselves had recently begun using. The involved, haptic nature of work in these workshops functioned according to a kind of “first hack, then yack” model for teaching: facilitators first hacked the tool (i.e., approach a new tool with a mind towards teaching others about it), then talked to participants about what this hands-on experience yielded in their own attempts. The workshop thus became a space where this process of hacking the tool was re-performed by participants. The result of these workshops has become a space where learning happens by interaction and collaboration—a pedagogy influenced by the maker model that can inform future teaching practices. In short, in the context of constantly evolving digital economies within humanities and social sciences programs, makerspaces offer an effective new model for graduate students to engage with their work at the level of both physical and conceptual environments.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the Makerspace and HelloWorld projects, with the physcomp and fabrication tags. Featured video for this post created by Nina Belojevic, Arthur Hain, Shaun Macpherson, Katie Tanigawa, and the Maker Lab in the Humanities. Thank you, Cathy Davidson, Derek Jacoby, Kari Kraus, Tara McPherson, and Bethany Nowviskie, for your contributions to the video.

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured video for this post, documenting a walkthrough of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit, produced by Jana Millar Usiskin.

The Lab’s winning video, “Recovering the Local: A Digital Literary Exhibit on Audrey Alexandra Brown” (above) details the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit project, which is scheduled to launch this year. About that project, Jana Millar Usiskin says the following: “Women’s voices have historically been overlooked in a national context. It’s important to use new media to recover local women’s voices in order to reshape contemporary understanding of national history and culture.”

The winning “Research for a Better Life” videos were unveiled in a cascade from coast to coast, starting April 2 in Newfoundland and ending May 21 with the four University of Victoria videos ahead of Congress 2013 next month. UVic and Ryerson were the only universities with four winners each. During Congress 2013, the UVic students will join the other winners in an exclusive research communications workshop as well as a three-minute storytellers pitch at the heart of an expo event space. They will compete for an opportunity to travel to the international social sciences forum in Montreal this October. Read more about the students and their video projects in The Ring. To view their videos, visit www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/storytellers.

From the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit: a newspaper clipping featuring a head shot of Audrey Alexandra Brown with other Canadian authors. Image care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits and news tags. Featured video for this post by Adele Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Arthur Hain, Mikka Jacobsen,  Shaun Macpherson, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa.

Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, U. of Texas at Austin) | Wednesday, March 6th | 3-4 pm | Maker Lab (TEF 243)
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This workshop will introduce ProseVis, a tool that allows readers to discover aural features across literary texts. A SEASR tool, ProseVis makes prosodic features of literary texts discoverable by overlaying data produced by OpenMary, a text-to-speech application tool for extracting aural features and instance-based predictive modeling features as color codes on the original text.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news tag. Featured video for this post produced by Arthur Hain, with signed releases from all workshop participants.

Katie Tanigawa (UVic English) | Thursday, February 7th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
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This hands-on workshop will help participants use XML and the Mandala Browser to produce meaningful data visualizations. Participants should bring their own TEI-encoded texts if they have them. Sample TEI will also be provided.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news and versioning tags. Featured video for this post produced by Arthur Hain, with signed releases from all workshop participants.

Jana Millar Usiskin (UVic English) | Thursday, January 24th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
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How are objects expressed as data? We’ll use the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) to explore how we might describe objects for discovery online. Participants are encouraged to bring a familiar, physical object they want to model.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news tag. Featured video for this post produced by Arthur Hain, with signed releases from all workshop participants.

Post by Jana Millar Usiskin, attached to the AABrown project, with the exhibits tag. Featured video for this post, documenting a walk through the use of the Scalar platform, produced by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Stephen Ross and J. Matthew Huculak (UVic English) | Friday, Nov. 23 | 12:30 – 1:30pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./ross_huculak.pdf

This workshop introduces participants to the Juxta collation tool. We will spend the first few minutes discussing genetic criticism. In the remaining time, we will walk through the process of using Juxta to ingest texts, identify variants, and visualize differences.

Post by Arthur Hain, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news and versioning tags. Featured video for this post produced by Arthur Hain, with signed releases from all workshop participants.