May 2025 - Csdh-schn-members - lists.digitalhumanities.org

CSDH/SCHN 2025 Conference Program
by Hanieh Bakhtiari 29 May '25

29 May '25

Dear organizers of CSDH/SCHN 2025 Conference, I hope this email finds you well. I am writing regarding the 2025 Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (CSDH) conference. I am pleased that my paper was accepted for presentation; however, I have not yet received any follow-up communication with details about the date and time of my presentation. I wanted to inquire about the program of the conference. I have already paid the Congress registration and attendance fee and CSDH membership fees. As I will be traveling from out of town, I would greatly appreciate any information regarding the conference program so I can plan my trip to Toronto accordingly. Thank you very much for your assistance. Bests, Hanieh Bakhtiari

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Welcome to CSDH / SCHN
by Paul Barrett 29 May '25

29 May '25

Hi everyone, We are very excited to welcome you to CSDH / SCHN tomorrow! A few quick reminders before we kick off our conference: Our conference is being held on the 5th floor of Limberlost Place, George Brown Waterfront campus (WFL). All events, except for our panel with the Canadian Association of Postcolonial Studies (Sun 8:30am) are held at George Brown. Refreshments will served on a semi-regular basis in WFL-538. Conference Program: Our conference program is available here: https://amethyst-sidewalk-6b3.notion.site/CSDH-SCHN-Congress-2025-Reframing… Also available here as a Google sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IHee1rtSPr2oHd00f5v6H8zxI9o_peoeMZH… Congress Registration You can pick up your Congress lanyard and other registration information at the Congress Hub in the Daphne Cockwell Centre for Health Sciences, Waterfront Campus. You can see, from this map that the registration is near the entrance closest to Dockside Drive: https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/plan-your-trip/maps Registration is open today from 3 - 5pm and then 7:30am - 5:00pm, May 30 - June 5th. AGM and Plenaries We have two exciting plenaries scheduled for the conference. Our first keynote, from Dr. Cheryl Thompson, is entitled "MOBA and the Digital Archive: From Concept to Platform and the Strategies for Building a Community." Dr. Thompson will deliver her plenary tomorrow, from 3:00 - 4:00 in WFL 538. Our second plenary, from Dr. Margot Mellet, is entitled "Switchable Anatomie of Thought." Dr. Mellet will deliver her plenary on Sunday, from 3:00 - 4:00 in WFL 538. Finally, we will hold our AGM on the first day of this conference immediately after Dr. Thompson's plenary. The AGM is open to all. Please join us! The plenaries and AGM will be streamed via the following Zoom link: Join Zoom Meeting https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83153433664?pwd=EoGIqQAcrpQzGpGpaKBiNGVjnH9ZLa.1 Meeting ID: 831 5343 3664 Passcode: 869076 Please note that there is limited space available to attend remotely. Support Contact If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me directly (barrettp(a)uoguelph.ca) You can also just flag me down at the conference. I'm happy to help! Thank you! Paul Barrett & the conference team

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INKE events at Congress
by Paul Barrett 28 May '25

28 May '25

Sending on behalf of Ray Siemens: HSS Commons Drop-in Session Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Fifth Floor, Room WF 527 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 9.30 – 10.15 https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/hss-commons-drop-session Curious about the HSS Commons (https://hsscommons.ca/)? Whether you're brand new to it or already a member, drop by our informal session during the 2025 HSS Congress in Toronto! This is a chance to: Learn how the Commons supports open scholarship in the humanities and social sciences; Set up your profile and share your work; Explore tools for collaboration, teaching, and publishing; Chat with members of the team and fellow researchers; Ask questions or just have a coffee and say hello! No registration needed—just stop in when you can. We’d love to meet you and help you get the most out of the HSS Commons. Panel: Generative AI, LLMs, and Knowledge Structures Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Sixth Floor, Room WF 607 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 10.30 – Noon https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/generative-ai-llms-and-knowledge-s…; community pass registration via ow.ly/onwv50VrMNl<http://ow.ly/onwv50VrMNl> Sponsored by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership (inke.ca) This panel explores the evolving relationship between commercial platforms, generative AI, and digital public knowledge infrastructures. As community-led initiatives like Wikimedia operate alongside increasingly closed and opaque commercial systems, the need for greater transparency, data access, and research tools becomes critical. Generative AI introduces new dynamics—shaping how knowledge is accessed, interpreted, and produced—while also raising ethical concerns around automation, transparency, and positionality in research. Additionally, the use of sensitive data, such as biometrics, in AI training prompts important questions about how classification systems are formed and how they impact representation and fairness. The panel addresses these challenges and emphasizes the importance of responsible, ethical approaches to studying and shaping AI-driven knowledge ecosystems. This panel is followed by the Big Thinking panel “Technologies of togetherness: Shaping an equitable future with AI.” Some light refreshments will be available at the session and nearby. Opening Remarks Karine Morin (President, CFHSS) Panel Chair Ray Siemens (U Victoria) “Observations on Wikimedia, LLMs and Information Ecosystem Observability” Amanda Lawrence (RMIT U) Dr. Amanda Lawrence (RMIT U) is the 2024–25 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a residency co-sponsored by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, U Victoria Libraries, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership, and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Lawrence is Director of the Australian Internet Observatory and former Director of the Analysis & Policy Observatory, as well as the outgoing President of Wikimedia Australia. An Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society, her research focuses on open access, Wikipedia, public knowledge infrastructure, and digital platforms. She has led major research initiatives, developed numerous online platforms, and published widely. Although the internet is dominated by large commercial platforms increasingly operated as walled gardens, community-led initiatives like Wikimedia, open access publishing, open source software, and open source LLMs continue to carve out space in the digital public sphere. Understanding the complex, often symbiotic relationship between these domains is difficult due to limited transparency and data access from commercial platforms. Generative AI systems have been extensively trained on public resources like Wikipedia, but may now be diverting traffic from them and raising concerns about feedback loops that could affect both content quality and future training. To address these challenges, we need new ways to access and observe data from platforms like Google Search and GenAI systems. Such observability is essential for analysing the impact of digital technologies on public knowledge infrastructure. Emerging research infrastructure is beginning to support this work, using LLMs as both tools and subjects of study—an essential step toward sustaining a healthy digital information ecosystem. This paper explores how these tools can offer new insights into the evolving relationship between LLMs and Wikimedia. “Forging Interpretations with Generative AI” Geoffrey Rockwell (U Alberta, Amii) Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, appointed as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in 2024, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Media and Technology Studies at the U Alberta. His research encompasses video games, textual visualization, text analysis, and the ethics of technology and artificial intelligence. He co-authored Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (MIT P, 2016) and co-developed Voyant Tools, an award-winning suite of text analysis and visualization tools. Dr. Rockwell is currently working on a book examining dialogues with AI, particularly focusing on interactions with chatbots like ChatGPT. Using large language models we can now generate fairly sophisticated interpretations of documents using natural language prompts. We can ask for classifications, summaries, visualizations, or specific content to be extracted. In short we can automate content analysis of the sort we used to count as research. As we play with the forging of interpretations at scale we need to consider the ethics of using generative AI in our research. We need to ask how we can use these models with respect for sources, care for transparency, and attention to positionality. "Ethical Data Collection for AI: Bridging Knowledge Platforms and Biometric Datasets" Lai-Tze Fan (U Waterloo) Dr. Lai-Tze Fan is an Associate Professor at U Waterloo, holding a Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change. She also serves as an Associate Professor at U Bergen, Norway. Her research focuses on media studies, digital culture, and critical approaches to AI, including the development of tools and methods to explore storytelling, media materiality, and technological infrastructures. Dr. Fan directs the U&AI Lab, which examines inequities in AI systems. She is also involved in various academic and artistic communities, serving on advisory boards and as an editor for open-access journals. This talk will examine ethical approaches to data collection within AI knowledge ecosystems, focusing specifically on biometric data that informs AI training datasets. For example, applications could include biometric datasets that train AI facial recognition technologies. While these specialized collections differ from traditional knowledge structures like those found on scholarly platforms or educational systems, they play a crucial role in how we categorize people, which can inform these broader platforms. The presentation will explore this symbiotic relationship, demonstrating how biometric datasets can enhance or mislead knowledge structures' representational accuracy and fairness. Paul Barrett Associate Professor School of English and Theatre Studies University of Guelph MacKinnon 447

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INKE events at CFHSS Congress, Toronto [1 June]: Commons drop-in, Generative AI panel
by Ray Siemens 27 May '25

27 May '25

Hi Everyone, Just a quick note to pass along the details of two INKE sessions at Congress in the days coming up, sponsored by the Federation. HSS Commons Drop-in Session Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Fifth Floor, Room WF 527 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 9.30 – 10.15; https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/hss-commons-drop-session Panel: Generative AI, LLMs, and Knowledge Structures Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Sixth Floor, Room WF 607 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 10.30 – Noon; https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/generative-ai-llms-and-knowledge-s… * Amanda Lawrence (RMIT U), “Observations on Wikimedia, LLMs and Information Ecosystem Observability” * Geoffrey Rockwell (U Alberta, Amii), “Forging Interpretations with Generative AI” * Lai-Tze Fan (U Waterloo), "Ethical Data Collection for AI: Bridging Knowledge Platforms and Biometric Datasets" Further details below. Hope you’ll consider joining us! All best wishes, Ray HSS Commons Drop-in Session Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Fifth Floor, Room WF 527 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 9.30 – 10.15 https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/hss-commons-drop-session Curious about the HSS Commons (https://hsscommons.ca/)? Whether you're brand new to it or already a member, drop by our informal session during the 2025 HSS Congress in Toronto! This is a chance to: Learn how the Commons supports open scholarship in the humanities and social sciences; Set up your profile and share your work; Explore tools for collaboration, teaching, and publishing; Chat with members of the team and fellow researchers; Ask questions or just have a coffee and say hello! No registration needed—just stop in when you can. We’d love to meet you and help you get the most out of the HSS Commons. Panel: Generative AI, LLMs, and Knowledge Structures Location: George Brown College Waterfront Campus, Sixth Floor, Room WF 607 Date and Time: Sunday 1 June, 10.30 – Noon https://www.federationhss.ca/en/congress/generative-ai-llms-and-knowledge-s…; community pass registration via ow.ly/onwv50VrMNl<http://ow.ly/onwv50VrMNl> Sponsored by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership (inke.ca) This panel explores the evolving relationship between commercial platforms, generative AI, and digital public knowledge infrastructures. As community-led initiatives like Wikimedia operate alongside increasingly closed and opaque commercial systems, the need for greater transparency, data access, and research tools becomes critical. Generative AI introduces new dynamics—shaping how knowledge is accessed, interpreted, and produced—while also raising ethical concerns around automation, transparency, and positionality in research. Additionally, the use of sensitive data, such as biometrics, in AI training prompts important questions about how classification systems are formed and how they impact representation and fairness. The panel addresses these challenges and emphasizes the importance of responsible, ethical approaches to studying and shaping AI-driven knowledge ecosystems. This panel is followed by the Big Thinking panel “Technologies of togetherness: Shaping an equitable future with AI.” Some light refreshments will be available at the session and nearby. Opening Remarks Karine Morin (President, CFHSS) Panel Chair Ray Siemens (U Victoria) “Observations on Wikimedia, LLMs and Information Ecosystem Observability” Amanda Lawrence (RMIT U) Dr. Amanda Lawrence (RMIT U) is the 2024–25 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a residency co-sponsored by the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, U Victoria Libraries, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership, and the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Dr. Lawrence is Director of the Australian Internet Observatory and former Director of the Analysis & Policy Observatory, as well as the outgoing President of Wikimedia Australia. An Affiliate of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society, her research focuses on open access, Wikipedia, public knowledge infrastructure, and digital platforms. She has led major research initiatives, developed numerous online platforms, and published widely. Although the internet is dominated by large commercial platforms increasingly operated as walled gardens, community-led initiatives like Wikimedia, open access publishing, open source software, and open source LLMs continue to carve out space in the digital public sphere. Understanding the complex, often symbiotic relationship between these domains is difficult due to limited transparency and data access from commercial platforms. Generative AI systems have been extensively trained on public resources like Wikipedia, but may now be diverting traffic from them and raising concerns about feedback loops that could affect both content quality and future training. To address these challenges, we need new ways to access and observe data from platforms like Google Search and GenAI systems. Such observability is essential for analysing the impact of digital technologies on public knowledge infrastructure. Emerging research infrastructure is beginning to support this work, using LLMs as both tools and subjects of study—an essential step toward sustaining a healthy digital information ecosystem. This paper explores how these tools can offer new insights into the evolving relationship between LLMs and Wikimedia. “Forging Interpretations with Generative AI” Geoffrey Rockwell (U Alberta, Amii) Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, appointed as a Canada CIFAR AI Chair in 2024, is a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Media and Technology Studies at the U Alberta. His research encompasses video games, textual visualization, text analysis, and the ethics of technology and artificial intelligence. He co-authored Hermeneutica: Computer-Assisted Interpretation in the Humanities (MIT P, 2016) and co-developed Voyant Tools, an award-winning suite of text analysis and visualization tools. Dr. Rockwell is currently working on a book examining dialogues with AI, particularly focusing on interactions with chatbots like ChatGPT. Using large language models we can now generate fairly sophisticated interpretations of documents using natural language prompts. We can ask for classifications, summaries, visualizations, or specific content to be extracted. In short we can automate content analysis of the sort we used to count as research. As we play with the forging of interpretations at scale we need to consider the ethics of using generative AI in our research. We need to ask how we can use these models with respect for sources, care for transparency, and attention to positionality. "Ethical Data Collection for AI: Bridging Knowledge Platforms and Biometric Datasets" Lai-Tze Fan (U Waterloo) Dr. Lai-Tze Fan is an Associate Professor at U Waterloo, holding a Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change. She also serves as an Associate Professor at U Bergen, Norway. Her research focuses on media studies, digital culture, and critical approaches to AI, including the development of tools and methods to explore storytelling, media materiality, and technological infrastructures. Dr. Fan directs the U&AI Lab, which examines inequities in AI systems. She is also involved in various academic and artistic communities, serving on advisory boards and as an editor for open-access journals. This talk will examine ethical approaches to data collection within AI knowledge ecosystems, focusing specifically on biometric data that informs AI training datasets. For example, applications could include biometric datasets that train AI facial recognition technologies. While these specialized collections differ from traditional knowledge structures like those found on scholarly platforms or educational systems, they play a crucial role in how we categorize people, which can inform these broader platforms. The presentation will explore this symbiotic relationship, demonstrating how biometric datasets can enhance or mislead knowledge structures' representational accuracy and fairness.

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Graduate assessors for conference
by Paul Barrett 26 May '25

26 May '25

Hi everyone, I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in a few days. We are still in need of assessors to adjudicate this year’s Ian Lancashire award. This is an easy & enjoyable role that involves signing up for a slot, listening to graduate student work, and filling in a brief form. This is a great way to give back to our community so please sign up here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16UHOamVQjIW_Xf4kD5ZwiJ0tyXUBuRTxlN8… Thanks, Paul

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IDARESU 2025 (9-13 June)
by Jason Boyd 16 May '25

16 May '25

The 2025 Interactive Digital Arts, Research, and Education Summer University (IDARESU), hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), offers learning opportunities in digital making for artistic, scholarly, and educational purposes. These opportunities are open to the TMU community and to the public. This year we are offering three concurrent courses as well as a keynote address: 1. The Small Web: Making Minimal Websites and Digital Ephemera by Hand 2. Tiny Games: Handmade Playables 3. Micro-Editions: Handmade Digital Editions Keynote Address (Monday, 9 June, 4-5PM): Dr. Tyne Daile Sumner "Small Data is Beautiful: Computation, Art & Narrative" Courses are in-person. The fee for the week is $50. Please see the website for more information and to register: https://idaresu2025.neocities.org/ Jason Boyd, Ph.D. / he, him, his / https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2752-6729 Associate Professor, Department of English / Master of Digital Media / Graduate Program in Communication and Culture Graduate Program Director, MA in Literatures of Modernity Director, Centre for Digital Humanities Treasurer, Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson University) 350 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3

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Q: Registration Fees and Campus Location
by Brandon Brownlee 13 May '25

13 May '25

Hello, I am a student from Vancouver Island University applying for funding for the upcoming Canadian Society for Digital Humanities conference in Toronto. I have two questions that I've been unable to determine from looking into the conference: How much is the registration fee for this event? I'm mindful of the membership fee of 45 USD. I'm aware this is being held at George Brown College, but which campus is this on? Thank you, Brandon

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2025 Open Scholarship Award Results
by Jon Bath 13 May '25

13 May '25

The Canadian Social Knowledge Institute <http://c-ski.ca/> and its partners, including the Implementing New Knowledge Environments project, are delighted to announce the winners, and honourable mentions, for the 2025 Open Scholarship Awards. Award recipients demonstrated exemplary open scholarship via research, projects, or initiatives. Open scholarship incorporates open access, open data, open education, and other related movements that have the potential to make scholarly work more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy. By engaging with open practices for academic work, open scholarship shares that work more broadly and more publicly. Open Scholarship Award, for open scholarship carried out by scholars, librarians, citizen scholars, research professionals, and administrators. Award Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC), Nick Thieberger, University of Melbourne and the PARADISEC team Honourable Mentions "But I Live" Educators' Resource, Andrea Webb, University of British Columbia Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935, Stephen Robertson, George Mason University Emerging Researcher Open Scholarship Award, for open scholarship carried out by undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early-stage professionals Award East Bay Punk Digital Archive, Stefano Morello, CUNY Graduate Centre Honourable Mentions Ni una menos: A collective identity in Rebeca Lane's rap, Silvia Rivera Alfaro, CUNY Graduate Center Collaging the Queer: An Abstract Self-Portraiture Workshop on Gender Abolition and Identity Creation, Jazmyne Olson, Undergraduate, Weber State University We would like to thank all those who nominated a project for the awards, and our selection panel, and will be announcing the call for nominations for the 2026 Open Scholarship Awards later this year. Jon Bath University of Saskatchewan

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