The following excerpt is from the article “A New Start” by History Professor Shawn Graham. We encourage you to check out the full article online to learn more about this exciting collaboration.
I am pleased to say that we applied to Carleton University’s internal Multidisciplinary Research Catalyst Fund for funding to lay the groundwork to transfrom the X-Lab from ‘virtual’ into something much more real – and we got it!!
Who are the ‘we’ in this?
There’s myself and Jen Evans from History; Laura Banducci from Greek and Roman Studies; Stephen Fai, Mario Santana-Quintero, Johan Voordouw from Architecture; Monica Patterson from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies; Alan Tsang, Ahmed El-Roby from Computer Science; Carmen Robertson from Indigenous and Canadian Studies; Tracey Lauriault and Sandra Robinson from Journalism and Communications; and Erik Anonby from Linguistics and Language Studies.
External to Carleton, we have partnered with Sarah Kansa, Executive Director of Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context (San Francisco, California); Sean Tudor, Head, Collections Services and Information Management at Canadian Museum of Nature; Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University; Trina Cooper-Bolam, CI, ICSLAC, Independent Exhibition Curator/Designer/Artist; Monique Manatch, Founder and Executive Director / Senior Researcher, at Indigital Cultures / Archipel Research and Consulting; Ryan Dodge, Chief Digital Officer Ingenium Corporation; Ethan Watrall, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Director, Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University; Sara Perry, Director of Research and Engagement, Museum of London Archaeology (UK); Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage University of Edinburgh; Katherine Cook, Professeure adjointe, Département d’anthropologie, Université de Montréal; Rachel Optiz, Senior Lecturer in Spatial Archaeometry (Archaeology), University of Glasgow; Colleen Morgan, Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage, University of York / Archaeology Data Service.
I am humbled by the trust all of these people have put in this experiment.
Below are excerpts from our application and our plan for the coming year.
Multidisciplinary Research Cluster Overview
We propose to create a Cultural Heritage Informatics Collaboratory (the Greek letter CHI, or X, gives us the ‘X-Lab’). The goal is to foster CHI as an interdisciplinary field studying and pursuing the effective use of cultural heritage data, information, and knowledge for humanistic or scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human well-being.
Project Description
Cultural Heritage Informatics deals with managing the problems and potentials that the material past represents, and eliciting new insights. In some cases, there are ethical dilemmas surrounding the question of ‘what to do with’ materials that were collected in an era of colonialism and cultural genocide. In other cases, new cultural heritage materials are being generated faster than we know how to deal with them. Cultural heritage materials are used to remember (or mis-remember) dark episodes in our past. How we choose to approach these materials signals how we will honor and do justice to the various peoples who live on this land now called ‘Canada’. This is the task before us.
At CU there is a nexus of compelling research, skills, and interests that could be united under the ‘Cultural Heritage Informatics’ rubric, but are spread across multiple departments and faculties. This work has brought us individually into collaboration with colleagues at other universities, in museums, and in cultural heritage data repositories. All of this work employs techniques and approaches currently at the forefront of CHI. Similarly, we have students across faculties and programs pursuing theses and major research projects (in our main course streams, as well as the Specializations in Digital Humanities, and in Data Science) largely in isolation from one another and who would benefit from a central ‘home’ where they could obtain support and aid. Our goal is to thread these strands together to create a centre of gravity at Carleton located around our research and expertise. As Kinàmàgawin, Learning Together, Carleton’s Indigenous Strategy guides us, we propose that research in CHI has to provide meaningful partnerships with, and opportunities for, Indigenous students, faculty, and communities. We intend to provide an opportunity for an Indigenous PhD research assistant on this project to meaningfully shape the direction of our work from the outset. We explicitly commit, in the projects that we will generate from the present proposal, to develop ways of integrating student training for Indigenous students to explore/use/develop CHI towards understanding and representing their own history and culture, with us, and with our external partners.
For the present proposal, we will 1) survey, bring together, and identify opportunities in the intersections of the various strands of CHI research at Carleton and with our partners, through a series of workshops; 2) use this information to develop a pilot for a Cultural Heritage Informatics Field School. Digital humanities pedagogy embraces ‘building as a way of knowing’, and so designing and running the Fieldschool becomes a catalyst towards applying for two major transdisciplinary grant opportunities. The fieldschool model gives participants the opportunity for intensive collaborative projects in conjunction with professionals from both CU and our external partners. Our model is the successful Fieldschool run in the US by Michigan State University and directed by our partner Ethan Watrall. The Canada Science and Technology Museum (Ingenium Corporation) has a digital lab and research facility in its new conservation building that will house the Fieldschool.
Having done that, we can then generate at least two interdisciplinary grant proposals; appropriate programs might be the SSHRC Partnership, the New Frontiers in Research Fund, or NSERC Create. The process of putting such grants together can be used to spin out open access publications that will increase our impact, like position papers or white papers (perhaps for the International Journal of Heritage Studies).