Jason Boyd at Ryerson's first annual THATcamp
Photo caption: Tim Alamenciak, Ryersonian Staff
Academics and students from across Canada met at Ryerson to
hash out the future of humanities research last weekend.
Ryerson hosted its first THATCamp, a session devoted to the
role of technology in the study of the arts. More than 90 people were
registered to attend THATCamp, The Humanities and Technology Camp, with attendees
from as far as the University of Victoria.
Co-ordinated by the fledgling Centre for Digital Humanities
at Ryerson, the conference brought together academics and students from
Canadian and U.S. universities to discuss this digital revolution in academics.
Ryerson’s marquee digital humanities production was on
display – the Yellow Nineties Online, a website archive of specific periodicals
from the 1890s. The texts themselves are falling apart; intact enough to have
survived the scanning process but less durable than their online counterparts.
A digital approach to humanities isn’t just about display
and preservation–it’s a new way to study.
“How can this stuff make us ask questions that, before, it
was impossible to ask?” said Dennis Denisoff, one of the Centre’s directors.
Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra started the Yellow
Nineties Online project together in 2005, but soon found themselves amid a
shift in humanities academia. The Centre was established to accommodate all
aspects of digital humanities research and is expected to be fully sanctioned
by Ryerson in 2012.
THATCamp took place over two days, the first a bootcamp
discussing the basics of digital humanities research and the second devoted to
an “un-conference,” where participants were responsible for selecting topics
and running seminars.
The digital humanities movement is nascent and its adherents
are still feeling out best practices. “The way we learned was by doing, and we
didn’t always do it right,” said Kooistra.
Timothy Bristow came to the conference from York University
where he recently started as their digital humanities librarian. He said
digital humanities are quickly gaining momentum.
“It’s part of trying to ensure the library stays relevant,”
he said.
Bristow stressed the collaborative nature of the practice,
borrowing from the open source software movement.
“That’s an ethos that’s share shared by a lot of people in the field,” he said, explaining that open source software stresses collaboration and less restrictive copyright regulations.
The conference comes after a milestone for Ryerson and its Centre for Digital Humanities: the recent hire of Jason Boyd, who will assist in operations.
Formerly on staff at the University of Toronto, Boyd’s area of research is theatre. He worked on a project to map out the movements of theatre troupes in the 16th century and display them online.
The map was part of the Records of Early English Drama project, an effort to digitize and code information about English theatre. More than just publishing texts online, Boyd’s project also incorporates database functions.
“Being able to have those as digital editions is very important, but PDF scans don’t cut it,” said Boyd.
The publicly accessible website allows users to look up specific venues, historical drawings, records and other information.
“It’s a new paradigm and also a new methodology,” said Kooistra.