As a kid growing up in Newfoundland, Kate Scarth loved Lucy Maude Montgomery’s books and now she gets to live that passion every day. The Chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and Assistant Professor in Applied Communication, Leadership and Culture at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) in Charlottetown says her position is not a traditional academic one. This is primarily because it features a significant public-engagement component, something she explored earlier when she was doing post-doctoral work at Halifax’s Dalhousie University. That project was one that made her perfectly suited to the job she has now. Supported by the Nova Scotia Museum and the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the project, which she worked on with ACENET’s Chris Geroux, features the literature of Halifax. The idea was to use her background in British literature, and her knowledge from having written her thesis on London’s suburbs, to continue that work — with a Canadian bent. “I wanted to do something local, with a public-engagement side,” she says, adding that her adviser had done a course focused on getting people to read literature and then getting them out to experience places mentioned in the books. A Compute Canada scholarship for the digital humanities helped her with the digital dimensions of her project. “They matched humanities scholars to a Compute Canada technical expert,” she says. “I was matched with Chris Geroux from Halifax and he really helped accelerate the project and possibilities.” Ultimately, the project is a soon-to-be-released map-focused website called Halifax Literary Landmarks. It features a map with popups about what literary happenings took place where. Text and audio versions of the same information are also available. “L.M. Montgomery is one of the writers we look at,” Scarth says. “She went to Dalhousie for a year and later worked as a reporter in Halifax. She also set an Anne of Green Gables novel in a fictional Halifax. Anne visits the old burial grounds, for example.” Scarth’s goal was to highlight the literary side of Halifax. “I want to show people there is rich literature about Halifax and help them learn more about where they live.” The website has been housed on a virtual machine on the Compute Canada cloud. “I can’t even begin to express how helpful it’s been to have Chris working with me,” she says of her ACENET experience. “When we were hiring computer science students, he helped draft the ad and sat in on interviews. It’s been so helpful for me not coming from that background.” Her interest in the digital humanities continues in her current position. She’ll soon launch an online journal of L.M. Montgomery studies, something she hopes will attract scholars, librarians, English academics and even independent researchers. “The journal will have a really wide audience,” she says. “I’ve also been sitting on an advisory committee with Parks Canada because they’re redeveloping the Anne of Green Gables interpretation centre and I’m developing an online course on the same subject.” At UPEI, she has taught digital humanities and digital literacy courses, and she teaches a series of courses called “putting arts to work” — the idea being to get students to think about the skills they’re building in their Arts studies. Scarth’s job seems custom-made to suit her strengths as she completes the mandate of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, which is “to forward the informed celebration of Montgomery’s work.”
Showcase Tag: Digital Humanities
New Technology For Ancient Texts
The advent of optical character recognition software has created an explosion of online texts available for readers. Witness the success of the Google Books initiative that has already scanned and digitized around 25 million books. But texts written in ancient Greek including some of the most seminal books in the human library – Plato, Galen, Aeschylus, the early founders of Christianity and others – have been largely left out of that online revolution. Bruce Robertson is working to correct that shortfall. The head of the Department of Classics at Mount Allison University has created an initiative to digitize Greek texts and make them available to scholars online. He is using the ACENET computer network to create a database featuring some of the most important writings of the Greek world. Robertson’s work will contribute to a field called corpus linguistics, the study of language based on large collections of day to day language stored in computerized databases. Developing and modifying open source optical character recognition software, Robertson has created a digital database of around 10 million raw words with about seven million edited words. “We’re working mainly on text from the period of around 700 B.C. to around 300 A.D.,” he says. It’s not a simple matter of running text through a scanner and converting it into text files. With difficult accent marks and unusual fonts, ancient Greek texts are notoriously difficult for OCR software to read. “We couldn’t apply off-the-shelf OCR software,” says Robertson. “We needed to get large-scale OCR working on these texts.” But commercial OCR engines powerful enough to do the job were too expensive. In 2011 Robertson and his team turned to the ACENET system instead. “ACENET has some really cool features,” he says. Robertson has also created a website to edit raw OCR data, generating new training data. While he admits that computers aren’t typically thought of as tools of the classicist, Robertson says that they are essential for his work. “Computers are an ideal tool for working with ancient texts.” Robertson has maintained a fascination with computers since high school when he hooked his television set up to a Commodore 64 that his parents gave him. He went on to complete his PhD dissertation at the University of Toronto on the subject of Greek names and has used computers as part of his work since the beginning. “If you can learn ancient Greek you can learn to use a high-level programming language like Python,” he says.
Mining William Blake
If he were alive today William Blake would have been a multimedia artist, says Acadia University English professor Jon Saklofske. After all, the great British poet and visual artist left a complex and vast body of work ranging from the romantic to the surreal. “Blake was an inventor,” says Saklofske. “He would have realized that computers are important tools and I think he would have made good use of them.” Saklofske certainly is making good use of the technology. He is an active participant in the emerging field of digital humanities – the practice of applying computer technology in various ways to the study of the humanities. He’s using it for his ongoing research into the works of Blake, but he’s gone much further than that, creating a digital online tool called NewRadial that helps scholars conduct and share online research. “People have been digitizing works of literature and art like crazy for the last 15 years,” says Saklofske. “Now it’s time for us to start doing something with these vast digital collections.” Saklofske’s interest in online research began when he started using the William Blake Archive, a web-based multimedia source featuring the works of Blake. “It’s a great site, but there are limitations,” he says. “The interface didn’t allow me to do everything I wanted to do.” He began working on an alternative interface, a modified way of accessing and participating in the Blake Archive – one that would allow more detailed search parameters and user participation. He dubbed the online platform “NewRadial” and immediately extended it beyond the study of Blake to work with other online multimedia collections. NewRadial has proved to be a huge boon to Saklofske’s research. For example, he’s used it to study Blake’s artistic representations of the Biblical Leviathan. “Blake drew Leviathan as a coiled serpent,” he says. “NewRadial allows me to collect other representations of Leviathan during Blake’s time and compare them with Blake’s work.” The platform also promotes open social scholarship as other researchers are able to create their own collections, leave marginal comments or start a comment stream. “By integrating diverse and often isolated online resources through something like NewRadial, we can look at 500 years of written culture and understand how the way we tell stories, use language and express our worldview has changed and evolved over the centuries. It’s a very effective tool.” By getting involved with ACENET, Saklofske was able to move NewRadial off of the small Macintosh server that it originally resided on and make it faster and more powerful. ACENET also opened his eyes to new possibilities for the technology and for the field of digital humanities. Digital humanities is a broad field and one that a lot of traditional humanities scholars still have a hard time taking to, according to Saklofske. “There is still a noticeable divide between computer science and the arts. A lot of the time the efforts of Compute Canada tend to be directed toward science, but there is really a lot that can be done in the study of the arts as well. Computers are changing the way we do research and communicate that research with each other and a broader public. William Blake was very much about thinking beyond the box, in the same way that computers are allowing us to think beyond the page.”
Freud, Joyce and the Power of Big Data
It doesn’t take long for the audience to sense that Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel isn’t a typical stage play. For one thing there are no props or scenery pieces. Instead, the backgrounds, including the elaborate artwork of the Sistine Chapel, are created using interactive projected lighting technology. A hologram of sorts. As the play unfolds, the audience realizes that this is a conversation about the power and influence of big data, using big data processes to create the action. David Clark, an Associate Professor of Media Arts at NSCAD University, is one of the creative minds behind the landmark play. “The play is an exploration of big data,” he says. “It asks the question whether we can extract physical data from artifacts in history. Clark is no stranger to this kind of production. His award-winning multimedia projects have appeared at venues including Sundance, the SIGGRAPH Computer Conference, Transmediale in Berlin, and the Museum of Moving Images in New York. But he admits that Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel is unlike anything he’s worked on before. “There are a few things we’re inventing,” he says. “We’re doing things like using interactive props. For example, when an actor picks up a pair of binoculars and starts scanning the horizon with them, the projection of what he is seeing can be seen by the audience.” At the core of the technology is the “holodeck” of the Sistine Chapel, an effect created using a networked eight projector array. The new technology also lights the actors with body position tracking technology. Daniel Oulton is the creative technologist and programmer who is designing the body position tracking technology. The play is a piece of speculative fiction about a chance encounter in 1905 between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, author James Joyce and their companions in the Sistine Chapel. The action is interspersed with scenes of two modern characters; Phoebe, an archivist with a romantic view of history, and Phil, an investor working on a project that uses virtual reality environments reconstructed by data mining to re-animate history. Through the course of the play, it becomes clear that the interaction between Freud and Joyce is a manifestation of Phil’s project. Michael MacKenzie is the author of Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel. “He’s an early innovator of virtual technology in theater,” says Clark. “My involvement began two summers ago when Michael workshopped the play. We started talking about using a large amount of technology to convey ideas about big data and history.” ACENET is providing support for the project by sponsoring Unconscious in the Sistine Chapel through its Advanced Research Computing Sponsorship Program. The organization is also providing technical consultation to the project. “We were able to connect with the ACENET Data Cave at Saint Mary’s,” says Clark. “They provided a lot of technical advice.” The play will debut at the new Halifax Central Library’s O’Regan Hall. The production has been designed specifically for the library space. “We’ve scaled O’Regan Hall to the dimensions of the Sistine Chapel,” says Clark. “The challenge will be to develop the production for other theatre companies.” Despite the technical innovations, the real purpose behind the play is to get people talking, says Clark. “We’re hoping this will stimulate conversations about the power of big data.”
Digitizing History
Josh MacFadyen is the first MacFadyen in several centuries not to farm. And that, in a sense, is what’s led to his life’s work as an associate professor in the Applied Communication, Leadership and Culture (ACLC) program at the University of Prince Edward Island and a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in geospatial humanities. MacFadyen studies the environmental history of Canada, with a focus on Atlantic Canada. He’s specifically interested in food systems and how humans, and even animals, have fed themselves over time and how they stayed warm in a world before fossil fuels. “And that could have some applications for how we might right [things] going forward,” he says, referring to perhaps novel ways to tackle climate change by learning from the past. MacFadyen was trained as an historian, but over time, because he was using a lot of technology in his work, he became a digital historian. “Digital historian is just a fancy way of saying we use spatial analysis, geographic information systems, and other digital tools related to large datasets such as historical Censuses to understand questions of how general land use and energy systems have changed, and how we’ve arrived at the modern world,” he says. He says Atlantic Canada is the right place to be for his studies as it still has large areas that are predominantly agricultural, though that is gradually changing. For example, the move away from farming isn’t limited to his family. In fact, it’s long been a trend on the island, which has seen a 20 per cent decrease in farmland in the last 20 years. It’s a fact he’s considering in his field of study. He uses Census data to get a granular look at such trends and he uses remote sensing — everything from aerial photos and satellite, to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) —to dig deeper. “The sources I’ve been able to use most consistently are aerial photos —we’ve got the whole province covered right back to 1935,” he says, and adds that he has used that data to develop products that would be useful to historians. His current is a portal for exploring maps, atlases, aerial photos and geospatial data related to the history of Prince Edward Island that resides at projects.upei.ca/geolab. To develop these tools, MacFadyen has used the services of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada through ACENET by participating in workshops and training modules for the humanities and social sciences. “They’re just tremendous,” he says of the workshops and networking. “I just thought ‘Wow, what a great way to join this regional, highly skilled and very active group of people who are trying to create resources for the humanities and social sciences in Atlantic Canadian universities.’ They’re offering these regular training modules, and some are specifically for us.”
Bringing Communities Together Through Music
Marcia Ostashewski’s ethnomusicology work brings together local communities through music and performance projects. At times, those communities stretch much further — one project connected people from Cape Breton, Alberta and Croatia. Ostashewski, an Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Tier 2 Canada Research Chair for Communities and Cultures and Director of the Centre for Sound Communities (soundcommunities.org) at Cape Breton University, brought the aforementioned group together through her work on diversitycapebreton.ca, a web portal that highlights the Eastern and Central European cultural contributions to Cape Breton. “There was a gap in the scholarship, public heritage interpretation and public school curriculum about the contributions of these Europeans,” Ostashewski says, “and to attend to this gap, we developed the portal.” She created it in partnership with the University of Prince Edward Island, along with a working group based at Cape Breton University, and received a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She interviewed experts from Eastern Europe and worked with partners at the University of Alberta and Japan’s University of Aizu. The Croatia connection came when she invited a Croatian post-doctoral student to work on the project. The site has two major components. One is an archive and the other is an interactive section with display options such as virtual tours. The latter also features curriculum specifically written for students and teachers in Nova Scotia’s school system. “You can adjust them to meet your classroom’s needs,” Ostashewski says. “Those are very well received by teachers.” The archive also includes many digitized archival documents, as well as interviews and videos of public performances. In addition to Eastern and Central Europeans, the Whitney Pier and Glace Bay areas of Cape Breton once had a large Jewish community that now only numbers about 10 families. The archive also highlights their contributions. “There used to be several synagogues, but now many members of those communities have moved off-island,” she says. “So it’s nice to have this material available to the public. As a result of the portal, the Beit Hatfutsot, a high-profile museum of the Jewish diaspora in Israel, found out about the Jewish community in Cape Breton and asked us to write some information for them. We’ve also done exhibits and presentations in Toronto, where many of these families have moved.” This project was made possible with help from ACENET, a regional partner of Compute Canada that makes high-performance computing accessible to researchers in Atlantic Canada. Once the SSHRC grant ran out, it was vital to have ACENET house the portal. “ACENET is also training students, faculty and staff to take on the responsibility of managing, maintaining and growing this and other research sites,” Ostashewski says. Ostashewski has also studied the live music and poetry of bards (singingstorytellers.ca, songsoftruth.ca) from around the world, and, through a pilot project called iCreate Cape Breton, she works with at-risk youth and elders to foster resilience among youth facing environmental changes that lead to social justice issues. Her most significant recent work may be her collaborations with Membertou First Nation and other Cape Breton Island communities. Mi’kmaq Elders have described here work as “truth and reconciliation in action.” Ostashewski said ethnomusicology research is moving toward more intensive community-engaged research, which suits her fine, and which will continue to require plenty of high-powered computing.