Gergal, Jacqueline. “The Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age: An East Sussex Perspective.” YouTube, 6:03. 2021. https://youtu.be/dZY1rJGJLxc.

Abstract

"An overview of the Medieval Climate Optimum and the Little Ice Age from the perspective of East Sussex."

Bednarski, Steven, Andrew Moore, and Timothy P. Newfield. “New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life, Land, and Environment at Herstmonceux.” In The Routledge Handbook of Medieval Rural Life, ca. 1100-1550, edited by Miriam Müller, 303–319. Routledge, 2021. doi.org/10.4324/9781003194866-23.

Abstract

"In the second half of the fifteenth century, a new castle loomed large over the Sussex countryside, surrounded by a recently expanded and enclosed deer park. Herstmonceux Castle, constructed by Sir Roger Fiennes, combined medieval strength and symbols with early modern sensibilities. Human habitation of the medieval site of Herstmonceux extends back more or less continuously to Roman Britain, and possibly as early as the late European Bronze Age. In ancient, as in modern, times geography and topography drew animal, including human, occupants. The Norman property was typical in composition and agrarian diversity. In addition to fields for farming, it contained seven acres of meadowlands, woods, pannage for two swine, and the old Anglo-Saxon church, likely located on the site of the current All Saints parish church. By the mid-fifteenth century, Herstmonceux had passed from the de Monceux family to that of the well-connected Fiennes."

Bednarski, Steven, T. C. Nicholas Graham, Robin Harrap, Zack MacDonald, and Andrew Moore. “Northeye (Re)Constructed: Augmented Reality of an Abandoned Medieval Village.” NTRS-DH@RSA Virtual Conference volume, New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies series. Iter Press (forthcoming, 2022).

Abstract

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

This note explores the subject of religion in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury, including its importance in relation to Quentin and several clues that make an interpretation of his motives for suicide possible. Two subtexts, which are both alluded to in Quentin’s section, are central to the formation of my interpretation here: the biblical story of the demon-possessed man from the region of the Gerasenes1 and, to a lesser extent, the roughly analogous story of Eubuleus found in Greek mythology. In combination with Faulkner’s “Compson Appendix,” these subtexts emphasize key themes in the novel—including sexuality, death, and the self. I argue that although Quentin’s suicide is not easily interpreted as a symbolic Christian act per se, from an intertextual perspective it can at least be read as an act of self-sacrifice or purgation, an attempt to relinquish his demons and reunite with his sister Caddy in the afterlife.

The introduction to a special issue of Pop! Public. Open. Participatory, comprised of papers from Engaging Open Social Scholarship, a Canadian-Australian event held in December 2020.

Original publication information:

Alyssa Arbuckle, Graham Jensen, Tully Barnett, Ray Siemens, 2021. "Introduction: Engaging Open Scholarship." Pop! Public. Open. Participatory. no. 3 (2021-11-09). https://popjournal.ca/issue03/intro.

An annotated bibliography assignment for a 300-level English course. Includes adding the resource to a shared class Zotero library.

A link to posts I've authored for the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, an initiative of the INKE Partnership.

A talk given at the University of Victoria's 3MT Finals in March 2016

Abstract

Speakers: Eleanor Stribling, Caroline Winter

Do you love literature and programming? Have you ever been curious about what the heck “Digital Humanities” are? Join us for a quick survey of what’s going on in this growing field and learn about a specific project, “Gothic Colors” where we set out to enumerate and analyze color references and mood in 19th century Gothic novels, using Python and a couple of popular libraries.

Slides can be found at: https://speakerdeck.com/pycon2017 and https://github.com/PyCon/2017-slides

Abstract

The Women's Research Centre (WRC) was an Alberta-based organization that promoted Women's and Feminist research, writing, education, and advocacy. The Centre's main goals were to provide a home for the growing field of interdisciplinary feminist research, as well as to serve as a gathering point and source of support for women’s groups in the community. It existed through a partnership between Athabasca University and the University of Alberta, and officially ran from 1988 to 1993. Read more about the history of the WRC here.

This records repository holds the story of the WRC and the contributions it made towards Women's Studies. The documents contained here were donated to the Thomas A. Edge Archives & Special Collections at Athabasca University by Marilyn Assheton-Smith, who was a long-standing member of the Women’s Research Centre and other academic organizations in the 1980s and 1990s. A fonds description is available here.

This repository website has been created and maintained by graduate students at the University of Alberta, whose goal it has been to make these records findable and discoverable by researchers.

This digital edition presents six Gothic tales written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, all of which were published in the literary annual The Keepsake in the 1820s and 1830s. One goal of this digital edition is to make these tales available to readers in a form that mimics–as closely as the digital platform will allow–how the tales would have appeared to their first readers. To this end, the edition includes scanned digital facsimiles of each tale, scans of the frontmatter for each volume, and images of what each volume looks like.

Currently in beta!

This project uses natural language processing to explore the use of colour words in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature in English.

Currently in beta!

This digital library of works by and about Susan Ferrier is intended for literary scholars, students, and other readers interested in Romantic-era British literature, women’s writing, and Scottish literature and literary history.

Part of the essay cluster "Digital Doctorates"

Abstract

This essay cluster addresses the curriculum design of graduate programs, asking how Digital Humanities projects might be integrated into them. From the perspectives of M.A. and PhD students, these essays explore the risks and rewards of integrating digital research into a traditional degree program or reshaping the degree requirements altogether. Randa El Khatib opens the cluster with an argument in favour of a digital dissertation, wherein the digital component comprises a significant part of the intellectual work of the dissertation by informing its argument either through the theoretical framework, methodology, or some other significant aspect integral to the original contribution that it makes. Reese Alexandra Irwin considers the institutional and administrative complications of integrating digital research into graduate programs, contending that that the library is the most advantageous place from which to draw support for graduate student digital projects, but that in order for the library to adequately support student projects it must be treated as a pedagogical partner by the student’s home department. Caroline Winter uses her experience digitizing Mary Shelley’s Gothic tales to explore how developing satellite digital projects that complement monograph-style doctoral dissertations is an opportunity for graduate students to develop digital skills, explore different modes of research, and experience being part of a strong community of practice. In her response, Michelle Levy weighs the risks of the various approaches to digital projects outlined in the previous essays and concludes that the institutions that house these students must offer greater support by adapting to the changing and increasingly digital landscape of humanities disciplines.

Abstract

This paper introduces the Canadian Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Commons, an open online space where Canadian HSS researchers and stakeholders can gather to share information and resources, make connections, and build community. Situated at the intersection of the fields of digital scholarship, open access, digital humanities, and social knowledge creation, the Canadian HSS Commons is being developed as part of a research program investigating how a not-for-profit, community-partnership research commons could benefit the HSS community in Canada. This paper considers an intellectual foundation for conceptualizing the commons, its potential benefits, and its role in the Canadian scholarly publishing ecosystem; it explores how the Canadian HSS Commons’ open, community-based platform complements existing research infrastructure serving the Canadian HSS research community.

Abstract

As the scholarly landscape evolves into a more “open” plain, so do the shapes of institutions, labs, centres, and other places and spaces of research, including those of the digital humanities (DH). The continuing success of such research largely depends on a commitment to open access and open source philosophies that broaden opportunities for a more efficient, productive, and universal design and use of knowledge. The Electronic Textual Cultures Laboratory (ETCL; etcl.uvic.ca) is a collaborative centre for digital and open scholarly practices at the University of Victoria, Canada, that engages with these transformations in knowledge creation through its umbrella organization, the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI), that coordinates and supports open social scholarship activities across three major initiatives: the ETCL itself, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org), and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE; inke.ca) Partnership, including sub-projects associated with each. Open social scholarship is the practice of creating and disseminating public-facing scholarship through accessible means. Working through C-SKI, we seek ways to engage communities more widely with publicly funded humanities scholarship, such as through research creation and dissemination, mentorship, and skills training.

Abstract

Open social scholarship highlights outreach and partnerships by emphasizing community-driven initiatives in an attempt to bridge the gap between the practices of the university and the goals of the community. Over the last few years, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria has introduced a number of initiatives to this end, including the Open Knowledge Program and Open Scholarship Awards. In describing these initiatives, the article engages the larger framework of community engagement and public-facing scholarship. The guiding questions for this article and our work more broadly are: How can we productively put open social scholarship into practice? What type of scholarship is considered public facing? What is best practice around co-creating knowledge in the humanities with communities that are academic-aligned or non-academic?

Abstract

Ontology development is an emerging method in the humanities for representing research in a format that is readable and queryable by both machines and humans. Recognizing the importance of ontologies to the Semantic Web, this chapter describes how to evaluate and link to existing web vocabularies and apply them to humanities research. Events like the could potentially be added to a future iteration of the ontology as new modes of digital scholarship emerge. Literature contains the subclass Poetry, which in turn contains the subclasses Poem and Poetry Collection. The class Poem contains additional subclasses of forms. Nested hierarchical structure of classes and properties in an ontology is complemented by a collection of logical axioms that articulate relationships among properties, classes, and the things within them. Class expressions use computational primitives combined with our ontology’s defined classes and properties to create complex definitions that refine the relationships between the parts of our ontology.

Abstract

This annotated bibliography responds to and contextualizes the growing “Open” movements and recent institutional reorientation towards social, public-facing scholarship. The aim of this document is to present a working definition of open social scholarship through the aggregation and summation of critical resources in the field. Our work surveys foundational publications, innovative research projects, and global organizations that enact the theories and practices of open social scholarship. The bibliography builds on the knowledge creation principles outlined in previous research by broadening the focus beyond traditional academic spaces and reinvigorating central, defining themes with recently published research.

The journey of our relationship with the Digital Commons has fundamentally changed and continues to shape the way we consider support and partnership for national cloud-based research projects in the Compute Canada Federation. Whether they be in or outside Humanities and Social Sciences. We will share these changes and the way that we are committing to support the Digital Commons and its launch. We will also discuss the context of a substantial transition period and time of change at the Compute Canada Federation, and how through that, we intend to support the Digital Commons and other projects like it in the future.

As we work to transform higher education, making our institutions more inclusive, more just, and more generous in their relationships with constituencies both on- and off-campus, we must also consider the roles that our ways of working with our communities of practice play in such transformation. This talk will explore the need for a scholarly communications infrastructure that is open-source, open-access, not-for-profit, and radically interoperable in order to facilitate the kinds of collaboration that can allow research and publishing to serve our highest goals and to function in accordance with our highest values.

Neil Gaiman test test

With Bahador Alast from now to ancient languages: are linguistic groups and families true?

It's been some years since the first videos in which the youtuber Bahador Alast, an Iranian youngman who lives and works in Toronto, shows two, sometimes four young men & women from different ethnos speaking two different languages among them, that with a little effort understand words similar, with some different sounds, the ones the words of the others, and so thanks to English language they are able to reveal the right comprehension of the meanings for every word.

Sometimes, people talking belong to ethnos that live near one to one, and use language of the same "linguistic families", but it may happen that the "players" belong to different linguistic families and distant places in the world; in that second case the languages may be as in well known contact through themselves, or in not so obvious historic contacts in the past centuries or millenniums.

The "game" is very nice and the young men & women show true happiness and fun to participate; the results are very useful for an idea of possible friendly relations, based on knowledge and comprehension.

But, if some listener knows & practices any ancient language too -like the scholars of ancient Greek, or Latin, or semitic languages, he/she may discover some points for reflection in that "game".

Let's make some examples!

In the video -on 3 october 2021- between two girls speaking the ones Somali and Oromo, languages spoken respectively in Somali and Ethiopian lands, we have a lot of difficulties finding any word similar to words belonging to European or Semitic languages; on the contrary, the two performers understand all the words very fast , although the sounds are similar but not too similar. We may say "the Bible was right!", when it is watching to Sem and Japhet as very different "chief-people", but not strongly distinguished at all, instead Noé curses Cam (because he saw his father naked ): we want to say -obviously- that Semitic and European people were watching to African languages and Africans' kind of life as more different than Europeans' in front of Semitic people, and vcv.

Let's go on!

For the video - on 16 September 2021 - "Similarities Between Spanish and Arabic", we know how Arabic and Spanish people were in close contact in different times...; starting, the two participating compare the Spanish word hasta with Arabic hata, this is "until" ; but "until" in biblical hebrew language is 'd, ad and ad in Latin language it is a word that has a lot to do with the idea of "until"!

So, at minute 5:40, more or less, we may hear the comparisons about the same word jarra (but Spanish pronounce sounds harra, see also Italian giara) : "pitcher"... Well: in biblical Hebrew ancient language (and in Israel now) "pitcher" sounds kad: it may be not-absurdity that jar and cad come from the same basis, but it's not the main thing: we know that in ancient Greek also, "pitcher" was kados: so we have two semitic languages and two "indoeuropean", as languages crossing themselves with the same meaning, in different people and in different times!

For a second example: at minute more or less 17:20, the Spanish word aceitunas ("olives", but this word remembers italian "aceto"= "vinegar") may have a right comparison with Arabic word zeitun; well; but in ancient biblical Hebrew language zait means "olive" too. Come on! In the last minutes of the video, the Arabic word arz ("rice") is immediately recognized by a Spanish girl who plays, as arroz (Spanish "rice" too); but this variation of -rz- is similar with ancient Greek oryza ...

A very interesting video is Similarities Between Hindi and Burmese on 29 August 2021: we are copying here the minutes -more or less- of the words compared, and we are writing a third word every time from different ancient language that permits comparison:

10:32 Burmese yupa - Hindi rupa = "form, appearance", see Hebrew rpim, biblical rapahim=ghost

13:15 Burmese vizza Hindi vidya = wizard

see ancient Greek (v)eid- Hebrew iada like biblical Hebrew yd "wise knowledge", Latin video, from wich Italian veggente

14:27 Burmese marana Hindi marar = death

see Latin mors , Hebrew and biblical Hebrew mawet (for r/w see above rupa/yupa)


Some interesting comparisons between words are in a more recent video which shows two girls speaking Arabic and Chechen languages: through the dialogue we may find kis ("pouch") that maybe recalls the Italian cassa, miskin/misk = "poor", without any doubt like the Italian meschino, ghalta/kalta ="mistake", see Latin culpa (normal p/t in linguistics).

The first notation that a non-scholar in linguistics may think is: "these examples are a few!" Yes, but Bahador also proposes a few words (from 15 to 30 minutes) what might happen if a team of scholars in the world would work in this line?

Let's imagine that: in the very ancient world, when men were very much fewer than now, all in the languages was "linguistic loan", and with these words chiefs, priests, poets, scribas or teachers made that canonic language for that people. The idea is very far from every phylogenetic picture of "groups' ', for me an unconscious imitation of classic darwinism and of stemmatic philology of Lachmann...