By Dr. Laura Estill, St. Francis Xavier University
You’ve been taking notes. Gathering data for an article or book. You know that someone else might find this useful—but don’t have a way to share your work or work-in-progress.
Or maybe you turn to a major reference text in your field that is in a non-circulating library book that really should be an online database.
“This should be a website” reflects the desire to share information (or, as the TriCouncil might put it, to mobilize knowledge)—and can be both an exciting and a daunting prospect to consider. But, if you do not have the technical chops, how can you gain the skills you need?
In Canada, we are fortunate to have a well-established digital humanities training network, which can help people gain digital skills. These workshops often welcome people from all disciplines (including beyond humanities) from varied career stages and positions (faculty, librarians, staff, students). The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) in Victoria, BC, is one of the longest-running and most-respected digital humanities training events in the world. It is part of the global DH Training Network, which offers different lengths of workshops on wide-ranging topics from digital editions to virtual reality.
DHSI-East, based at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, is the latest member of the global DH Training network. It serves the Maple League by making training more accessible to Atlantic Canadians. Maple league student, faculty, and staff receive reduced registration rates.
Our inaugural DHSI-East session will be databases, taught by Dr. Harvey Quamen (University of Alberta). The course will run from 26-29 April 2021. Details at dhsi-east.stfx.ca; register here.
At the end of the course, you will be able to laugh at this joke:
An SQL query walks into a bar and sees two tables.
It saunters over to them and asks, “May I join you?”
Our keynote speaker will be Dr. Chelsea Gardner (Acadia University), whose talk, “Women, Websites, and Wikipedia: Accessible Digital Pedagogy and the Undergraduate Classroom,” will take place on Monday, April 26, 2021, 4-5pm Atlantic, Schwartz Auditorium (Schwartz 110) at StFX. More details at the talk can be found at bit.ly/WomenWikipediaTalk21.
DHSI-East is supported by funding from the Harrison McCain Foundation Awards (Acadia University) and the Canada Research Chairs program. The DHSI-East organizing team is Laura Estill (English, StFX), Richard Cunningham (English, Acadia University), Meghan Landry (StFX Library), Margaret Vail (StFX Library), and Lydia Vermeyden (ACENET).
All COVID protocols will be followed for this in-person event.
If you have questions about this event, please contact Dr. Laura Estill at digitalhumanities@stfx.ca. We hope to see you there!