PARTICIPANTS A-D

Ayesha Akram is a senior Lecturer in English at University of the Punjab, Lahore, and a doctoral candidate at University of Management and Technology, Lahore. Her areas of focus are postmodern historiography, film/adaptation studies, and digital humanities. She is the recipient of a Visiting Fellowship (Digital Humanities) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA (2019). She has also secured and completed another international Research Fellowship for University of Exeter, United Kingdom (2019-2020) as a part of her Ph.D. project.  

Paper Title: “Moving Towards Healing and Reconciliation: Mapping Partition-1947—Stories, Literature, and Film.”  Virtual Session #4, Care, Empathy, and Healing  (Friday, September 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Maira E. Álvarez is one of the 2022-2024 Early Career Provost Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining UT, she was the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at Arizona State University, School of International Letters and Cultures. Dr. Álvarez earned a Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies with certifications in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies, University Teaching, and Spanish as a Heritage Language from the University of Houston. Her research interests are U.S. Latino/a/x and Latin American Literature, Border Studies, Women’s Studies, Digital Humanities, and Public History. She is the founder of the digital humanities project Borderlands Archives Cartography, a team member of United Fronteras, Torn Apart / Separados, and a collaborator for the digital project Yo Soy Porque Tú Eres at Fort Lewis College at Durango, Colorado—one of six Native American-serving, non-tribal colleges. 

Paper Title: “Border[lands] Archives: Revising the Past, Reinscribing the Present.” Virtual Session # 14, Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, September 30, 4pm Eastern)

Samantha Arpas is a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Toronto. Samantha found a passion for placemaking in her undergraduate studies where she specialized in global studies of the built environment. In 2021, she was awarded a scholarship from the Urban Land Institute and holds the title of youngest committee member on the Women in Leadership Initiative, producing a report with international recognition. Combined with her passion for Italian Food Studies, Samantha is currently analyzing how food landscapes work as an agent for placemaking in cities. 

Paper Title: “Mapping Italian-Canadian Foodways.” In-Person Session #7, Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Jordan Arsenault is a demi-Acadian of HIV-positive extraction working in Montréal, if you can call it working. In his never-evolving drag persona, Peaches LePoz, Jordan uses live voice, cello, neuro-divergent lipsync, tragedy, and farce to address issues of social injustice, HIV, addiction, depravity, and deprivation. One of his many mottos: “If you can’t love yourself, do performance art!” He works as a translator (from le français), social practitioner (Fear Drag and, with Toronto’s Mikiki, Disclosure Cookbook, and in 2020, RéactHIVIH), and artsy beggar. On bad days, Jordan reminds himself that he was once invited to speak on a panel at the MoMa (Club 57: Film, Performance, and Art in the East Village), and has performed at La Mama Galleria (CellCOUNT by VisualAIDS) and Joe’s Pub (Weimar Cabaret by Earl Dax), in NYC. 

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Chloe Atkins is Primary Investigator for the PROUD Project and is an Associate Professor (status-only) with the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She has research interests in disability, bioethics, vulnerable minority identities, human rights, phenomenological research and narrative scholarship. She is a previous CIHR grant holder for a project which undertook a multisite, multiyear study of best practices about the management of rare and difficult-to-diagnose illness. Atkins holds a PhD in Political Science (Political Theory) and a postdoctorate from Cornell University Law School in feminist legal jurisprudence. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in law, political science, bioethics, feminist theory, communications, cultures studies and disability studies. Atkins is the author of My Imaginary Illness (Cornell 2010), awarded 3 prizes including The American Journal of Nursing’s Book of The Year (2011), and has held Killam, Clarke, Fulbright and SSHRC Fellowships. 

Paper title: “How Web of Science database and search engine excludes disability studies perspectives from research.” Virtual Session #5, Digital Infrastructure (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Claire Battershill is an Assistant Professor cross-appointed in the iSchool and the English Department at the University of Toronto. She is also a Fellow at Victoria College, where she teaches in the VicOne first-year interdisciplinary program. Her research focuses on feminist approaches to book and publishing history and digital literary archives in the twentieth century. Her most recent publication is Gendered Impressions: Women and Letterpress 1920-2020 (Cambridge 2022).

Paper title: Feminist Historiography and Digital Archive Practice.” Virtual Session #7 Digital Archives (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Joe Bauer is a Research Consultant for LSA Technology Services who specializes in humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary digital project methods and works with scholars on conceptualizing, planning, and finding resources for a digital project. Additionally, he consults on sustainability, preservation, accessibility, privacy, consent, or grant requirements. He holds a Ph.D. in Technology Studies, and teaches courses on technology and society part time at Eastern Michigan University’s College of Technology. 

Workshop Title: “DIY Anti-Racist DH Initiatives: How to Get Started at Your Institution.” In-person Session #9 (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Barend Beekhuizen is a linguist interested in the development of computational models that shed light on word meaning. His primary focus is on the manner in which languages vary in the way they categorize the world with their words, how this variation can inform us about the mental representation of categories, and how such categories are used in discourse. In his research, he uses translated and non-translated cross-linguistic corpus data, as well as spontaneously produced data, such as conversational spoken language and social media corpora. 

Panel Title: “Computing Words and Reading Between the Lines.” Virtual Session #12 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Suze Berkhout is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and an affiliate of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. She is an early career clinician-investigator and practicing psychiatrist. Her program of research in feminist philosophy of science/Science and Technology Studies (STS) utilizes ethnographic and narrative qualitative methods to explore social and cultural issues impacting access and navigation through health care systems. Within this work she focuses on the importance of lived experience in relation to knowledge in/of medicine and mental health, and is interested in innovating methodological approaches that help us tell complex, layered, non-linear stories. 

Paper Title: “Layered Temporalities: Complicating the Narratives of Liver Transplant Survivors through Critical Discourse Analysis and Digital Storytelling.” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Aparajita Bhandari is currently a fourth year PhD student in the Social Media Lab at Cornell University’s Communication department. Her research examines the intersection between physical space, digital technology and the boundaries of various forms of community. She is also very interested in understanding “everyday” peoples’ experiences of new technologies and how it relates to structures of power and inequality. 

Paper Title: “The Internet as an Archive: Critical Fabulation as a Method for Listening to Web Silences.” In-Person Session #5 Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Sayan Bhattacharyya is currently Lecturer at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where he co-directs SUTD’s undergraduate minor in Digital Humanities and teaches classes relating to Digital Humanities and Environmental Humanities. His graduate training and postdoctoral appointments have been multi-disciplinary, spanning both humanities and information sciences. Apart from his core activity in Digital Humanities, he is also adjacently activie in the areas of postcolonial theory, digital cultural studies, and science and technology studies. His most recent published scholarship has appeared in the form of articles in Global Debates in the Digital Humanities (2022) and The Digital Black Atlantic (2021), both of which are edited volumes published by University of Minnesota Press. In late 2022, he will be starting a new appointment, in the capacity of Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Research Associate in the Program in Humanities, at Yale University. 

Paper Title: “A Framework for Epistemically Induced Invisibility in Knowledge Infrastructures.” In-Person Session #12 Ethics and Social Justice (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Cameron Blevins is an Associate Professor, Clinical Teaching Track in the History Department at the University of Colorado Denver, where he teaches courses in US History and digital humanities. He is also part of the University’s Digital Studies Certificate, an initiative to help students develop computational skills while understanding the relationship between those technologies and wider society. A leader in the field of spatial history and digital history, he explores the application of computational methods such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), data visualization, and text mining to the process of researching and teaching history. His book, Paper Trails: The US Post and the Making of the American West (Oxford University Press, 2021), uses digital mapping to uncover the full reach of the nineteenth-century postal network and the ways it shaped the western United States. 

Panel Title: “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation.”  Virtual Session #16 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Juan Antonio Bobadilla Plata is a third-year international undergraduate student majoring in Economics and Political Science with a minor in Historical Studies at the University of Toronto. Juan Antonio has previously worked as a research assistant at UNAM, in Mexico City, and for a Spanish-learning test validation through the Laidlaw Scholars program. Juan Antonio is interested in Latin American politics and history, an area of focus he has pursued in his undergraduate studies but also in extracurricular endeavors such as filmmaking activism. 

Paper Title: “Visualizing the Americas: What Five Decades of United Fruit Company Records Have Told Us” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Nadav Borenstein is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen. He has experience in both the practical and theoretical aspects of Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision using Deep Learning. Nadav’s research interests include improving the trustworthiness and usefulness of deep models in the NLP domain by making them more transparent and interpretable. 

Paper Title: “Presenting Privacy Black and White: Examining racialized language in historical newspapers through semi-supervised multi-lingual transfer learning.” In-Person Session #5  Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Katherine Bowers is Associate Professor at Slavic Studies at the University of British Columbia, where she directs the Centre for European Studies. She is the author of Writing Fear: Russian Realism and the Gothic (2022) and co-editor of several edited volumes, most recently Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (2021) with Dr Kate Holland (U of T), as well as numerous articles and chapters related to Dostoevsky, genre studies, media studies, and imagined geographies. Current projects include a book on science fiction, Arctic space, and climate change in the Russian context, co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Global Realisms (expected 2025), and several DH collaborations. Dr Bowers is a member of the Data-Sitters Club, a group of feminist scholars engaged in creating a comprehensive, colloquial guide to computational text analysis. She is also co-PI on the Digital Dostoevsky project at U of T and a member of the Russian team in the New Languages for NLP NEH Institute at Princeton. Dr Bowers serves as Vice-President of the North American Dostoevsky Society and sits on the board of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. In 2021-22 she is a Public Humanities Fellow in the UBC Public Humanities Hub. 

Roundtable title: “Digital Dostoevsky or the Challenges of Doing Multilingual DH.”  In-Person Session #6 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am)

Braxton Boyer is a PhD student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. Braxton’s main interests lie at the intersection of religion and literature, primarily how religious belief and thought influence literary form, but also how literature influences religious belief. His dissertation focuses on Leo Tolstoy’s late period (1880-1910), and analyzes how Tolstoy conceptualized his Christian anarcho-pacifism in his fiction. Braxton is also interested in the relationships between religion, literature, ethics, and social criticism. Braxton is new to the Digital Humanities but is excited to be working with the team at Digital Dostoevsky and learning what computational text analysis brings to the study of literature. He is particularly interested in understanding and exploring the ways DH can be used to engage with the public. 

Roundtable title: “Digital Dostoevsky or the Challenges of Doing Multilingual DH.”  In-Person Session #6 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Melissa Brown is a scholar of Black feminist thought, digital sociology, social movements, and sexual politics. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. Her most recent publications include a chapter titled “For a Black feminist digital sociology” in the edited volume Black Feminist Sociology published by Routledge. She also serves as the digital editor of the volume’s companion site and lead principal investigator for its digital pedagogy initiative. Prior to arriving at SCU, Melissa was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University. Previously, she has published her research on antiracist and Black feminist social media activism in the journals Ethnic and Racial Studies and Sociology Compass. She currently maintains Blackfeminisms.com as a public scholarly project that disseminates academic research and theory by and about Black women across the African Diaspora. 

Paper Title: “The Strip Club Segregation Index: A Digital Sociology of the Contemporary Sexual Commerce Landscape” Virtual Session #15 Text and Culture, Digitally (Friday, Sept 30, 4:00pm Eastern)

Antje Budde is the artist research director of the Digital Dramaturgy LabSquared. She is a queerfeminist experimental scholar-artist who has explored many intersections between participatory experimental performing arts, human-machine co-performance and interactive technologies (digital and analogue), the sciences, experiential learning praxis, cross-cultural performance and multi-linguality. As part of her lab explorations and digital dramaturgy research she has developed the concept of artistic intelligence A/I in critical conversation with artificial intelligence or AI developments. She has published widely across different modes of media. Currently she works on the collaborative theatre and engineering project PLAYStrong, investigating the potential of psycho-physical and playful forms of mental health support for our university students by using interactive performative interfaces for self-learning inspired by Brechtian theatre dialectics of learning. 

Paper Title: “PLAYStrong–Mental Health and Interactive Prototypes for Embodied Self-Learning” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Kenzie Burchell is a media sociologist that works across the fields of media, surveillance, and journalism studies. He is the Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Toronto, having joined the Department of Arts, Culture and Media (UTSC) and the Faculty of Information (iSchool) in 2014, and more recently the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (CERES) as associate graduate faculty member. He is the principal investigator of “Making Responsible Reporting Practice Visible: Humanitarian Crisis, Global Media, and the War in Syria”, a SSHRC funded project (2017-2019) supported by the JHI-UTSC Early Career Digital Humanities Fellowship (2019-2020).

Paper Title: “Mapping the War of Russia’s Hybrid Empire & Anglo-America Media Hegemony” In-Person Session #8 Critical Mapping (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Jessica Caporusso is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at York University. Her research interests meet at the intersection of political ecology, bioenergy, and discard studies. Her current dissertation project examines how “waste” — as an externality and as resource — is defined through neocolonial logics, by investigating the transformation of crop residues into biofuel feedstock in the small-island developing state of Mauritius. Jessica’s work explores the multiple and contested meanings of waste and value while also tracking the development of bioenergy as a source of energetic, political, and economic power. She is an active contributor of the Plant Studies Collaboratory and the Energy Working Group at York.

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Matt Carruthers is the Metadata Engagement Librarian at University of Michigan Library where he provides metadata consultation services to the University of Michigan research community. He also provides support for data management. He received a Master’s degree in Library Science (with a specialization in Digital Libraries) from Indiana University. Prior to that, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from the University of Wisconsin. He was previously the Metadata Librarian at the University of Miami. 

Workshop Title: “DIY Anti-Racist DH Initiatives: How to Get Started at Your Institution.” In-person Session #9 (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Michelle Caswell, PhD, (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Archival Studies in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Caswell directs a team of students at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab (https://communityarchiveslab.ucla.edu/), which explores the ways that independent, identity-based memory organizations document, shape, and provide access to the histories of minoritized communities, with a particular emphasis on understanding their affective, political, and artistic impact. In 2008, together with Samip Mallick, Caswell co-founded the South Asian American Digital Archive (http://www.saada.org). She is the author of two books: Urgent Archives: Enacting Liberatory Memory Work (Routledge, 2021) and Archiving the Unspeakable: Silence, Memory and the Photographic Record in Cambodia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2014). Her work has defined and refined core concepts in critical archival studies, including archival imaginaries, community archives, imagined records, radical empathy, survivor-centered archives, and most recently, feminist standpoint appraisal. 

Paper Title: “How Does it Feel to be Digitally Archived?” Virtual Session #7 Digital Archives (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Daniele Cavalli is doctoral researcher in Artificial intelligence, Human and Social Sciences at the École Normale Supérieure – PSL University, within the European project “AI4Sciences”. He conducts research on AI-related technologies and data coding processes. He holds a BA in philosophy from the Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna. Besides, he gets a two-years MA in international sciences, with a thesis in behavioral economics and social theory on the relationships between techno-economic complexification and social entropy. He was trained at the University of Turin, Sciences Po, and the ENS de Lyon, also getting a French master’s diploma in political studies. Furthermore, he has obtained a M.Sc in advanced data science in Milan. He has teach critical data studies at University of Turin and worked at the European Parliament in Bruxelles and ESMA in Paris. Alongside academic research, he combines interest in the world of publishing and political activism. 

Paper Title: “Reframing Data Assemblage: Apparatuses, Diffraction and Methodological Challenges.” In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Dinalo Chakma is a PhD student in the Department of English at the University of Florida. He has been working as a Faculty in English at Jashore University of Science and Technology, Bangladesh since 2017 and is currently on study leave. He worked as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at the University of Notre Dame in the 2018-2019 session. His areas of interest include Indigenous Literature and Culture, Digital Humanities, Cultural Studies, and Ethnicity Studies. As the first English faculty from an Indigenous community in Bangladesh called Chakma, Dinalo intends to work on a long-cherished project where he will document the Indigenous Oral Literature of Bangladesh that is still unexplored. It is his firm belief that his doctoral research, the first of its kind in his country, will help familiarize the Indigenous voices of Bangladesh to the international academia and will surface the long history of erasure and silencing. 

Panel Title: “DH Tools for Decolonial Engagements: Recovery, Multilingualism, and Archival Activism.” Virtual Session #18 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Ashley Champagne, Head of Digital Scholarship Planning at Brown University Library, leads project planning for 20+ faculty-lead digital scholarship projects. She also leads workshops, courses, and projects related to the broader digital humanities for the Brown University community. Ashley earned her Ph.D. in English from University of California, Santa Barbara in 2018. 

Paper Title: “Stolen Relations: Recovering stories of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas.” Virtual Session #2 Digital Ethics (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Aarjav Chauhan is a PhD student at the University of Toronto, studying Computer Science through the lenses of critical computing and human computer interaction. His higher education trajectory started off through a technical understanding of computer science in his bachelor’s and progressively moved towards a focus on the intersection of technology and society within his master’s in human computer interaction (HCI). Now within his PhD, he finds himself at the question of understanding how technology, society and the environment shape each other by analyzing broader socio-political root causes of technology backed interventions that have attempted to (re)shape communities globally. His research uses qualitative methodologies and spans the domains of peer production communities, crisis informatics, and sustainable HCI. His interests have steadily shifted from a technocentric view to the critical and complex borders of technology, society, and marginalized populations. 

Poster title: “Digital Libraries of the Himalayas: Forms and Politics of Knowledge Production” 

Mark Chignell has been a member of the Mechanical & Industrial Engineering faculty since 1990. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Southern California from 1984 to 1990. Professor Chignell taught in the Psychology Department at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia from 1980 to 1982. He has a PhD in Psychology (University of Canterbury, New Zealand, 1981), and an MS in Industrial and Systems Engineering (Ohio State, 1984). He was formerly (2013-2017) the Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto, and the BUL Chair in Human Computer Interaction. He has been a visiting scientist at the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies in Toronto since 2002 and he was a visiting scientist at Keio University from 2005 to 2010. Professor Chignell has co-authored books on expert systems and intelligent databases (published by John Wiley & Sons) and he has co-edited three books. He has many journal and conference papers on topics such as hypertext and information retrieval, user interface design and healthcare applications. His research has been funded by the Bell University Laboratories, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), IBM, the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, TELUS, Oki Corporation, Ricoh Corporation, and Apple Computer. He has founded two start-up companies, both of which received funding. His latest startup is Centivizer Inc. which is a University of Toronto startup that has been funded by the AGEWELL National Centre of Excellence. Centivizer creates exergaming and cognitive assessment products to support healthy aging. 

Paper Title: “PLAYStrong–Mental Health and Interactive Prototypes for Embodied Self-Learning” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am)

Marika Cifor is Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, where she is also adjunct faculty in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies. She is a feminist scholar of archival and digital studies. Her book, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (University of Minnesota Press, May 2022), is an archival ethnography that examines the archives that keep the history and work of AIDS activism alive. Cifor is the author of numerous articles on archives, data, and digital cultures in critical information studies, the digital humanities, American Studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She can be found at marikacifor.com or @marika_louise. 

Panel Title: “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation.”  Virtual Session #16 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Elizabeth Coggeshall is Assistant Professor of Italian in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University. She specializes in the literature of the Due- and Trecento, with a particular focus on Dante, and has recently completed a book manuscript on friendship and social networks in Dante’s Italy. She is the co-editor (with Arielle Saiber) of the site Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture, a digital archive cataloguing Dante’s sustained presence in the 20th and 21st-century culture. She is the current Vice President of the Dante Society of America, where she also serves on the Education and Outreach Committee and on the Dante Speakers Bureau. 

Paper Title: “Transcultural Heritage and the Crowd: Dante Today.” Virtual Session #15 Text and Culture, Digitally (Friday, Sept 30, Eastern)

Elio Colavito is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Toronto, specializing in Sexual Diversity Studies. As a trans non-binary researcher, Elio’s passion lies in archiving and re-telling queer histories in Canada. Their research interests include mutual aid, sex culture, and the intersections of lesbian and trans identities. In 2021, Elio supported the LGBTQ Oral History Digital Collaboratory as a co-oral historian and research assistant for the Pussy Palace Oral History Project; they also launched the Traversing Temporalities blog series in 2022. Their research is supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and a Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Partner Grant. 

Paper Title: “Traversing Temporalities: Queer and Trans* Oral History, Meaning Making, and Public History.” In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Anne Cong-Huyen is a senior associate librarian and Digital Scholarship Strategist at the University of Michigan Library, and is affiliate faculty in the Digital Studies Institute and Asian Pacific Islander American Studies. She was previously the digital scholar and coordinator of the Digital Liberal Arts Program at Whittier College, and a Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is co-founder of #transformDH and the Situated Critical Race and Media (SCRAM) collective, and is currently the vice chair of the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association. Her work has been published in American Quarterly, The Global South, The Journal of e-Media Studies, and in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series. 

Workshop Title: “DIY Anti-Racist DH Initiatives: How to Get Started at Your Institution.” In-person Session #9 (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Chadwick Cowie is Michi-Saagig Nishnaabeg from Hiawatha First Nation. He is currently employed to review and compile contemporary and historic existence of Michi-Saagiig Nishnaabeg Nation. This research includes examining archival documents, academic sources, government research, and interviews with Knowledge Keepers from the six communities of Michi-Saagiig Nishnaabeg nation. Chadwick Cowie is a PhD candidate at University of Alberta completing his dissertation on Canadian/Indigenous relationships with a focus on electoral participation, where he examines Indigenous views and understandings on participation in the Canadian state, and instructs a third-year undergraduate course on Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State at Mcgill University. He will be joining the Department of Political Science at UTSC in July 2022, with a research focus on Indigenous politics, and teaching a course on the Michi-Saagiig Nishnaabeg Nation and Politics. Mr. Cowie’s expertise includes Canadian politics, Indigenous politics, Indigenous/Canadian relations, election and voting, settler colonialism, and the Michi-Saagiig Nishnaabeg.  

Paper Title: “Protecting Data Sovereignty in Indigenous Pedagogy and Community-led Research.” In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Heidi Craig is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M and editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography. Her book, Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  

Paper Title: “A Manifesto for Trans-Inclusive Bibliography.” Virtual Session #3 Asserting and Resisting Power in the Digital and Technology (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Lydia Curliss is a current PhD student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool. She is a member of the Nipmuc Nation, and has a BA from Oberlin College, as well as an MIS and MLS dual degree from Indiana University. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics and issues around ethical care and stewardship of Indigenous archival collections, access for Indigenous communities, and knowledge reclamation. She is interested in centering Indigenous community views and decolonizing approaches to archival work. She is also interested in how legal frameworks can be used to create infrastructure for approaching rematriative practices in archival spaces. 

Paper Title: “Stolen Relations: Recovering stories of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas.” Virtual Session #2 Digital Ethics (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Natália da Silva Perez is a cultural and social historian of the early modern period. Her research focuses on comparatively examining the lives of women of low and high social standing. She works with comparative, transnational, and intersectional methodologies to study women’s interactions with their families, communities, authorities, and society in general. For that, she combines microhistorical with trans-imperial approaches to the early modern period, aided by computational and data-driven approaches to textual analysis.

Paper Title: “Presenting Privacy Black and White: Examining racialized language in historical newspapers through semi-supervised multi-lingual transfer learning.” In-Person Session #5 Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Negin Dahya’s research explores the social and cultural context of digital media production and use with a focus on learning contexts and non-dominant communities. One of her current research projects involves the study of virtual reality concept art creation with young people in a juvenile rehabilitation center. She is a co-convener for the Inter-Agency for Education and Emergencies (INEE) Technology and Education Task Team and an Advisory Board member for the feminist media education non-profit, Reel Grrls. 

Paper Title: “Community-Engaged Research from Afar: (Dis)Junctures in Participatory Digital Methods in a Refugee Camp.” In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Michael Demone studies political science and history at the University of Toronto. His research work includes projects with Munk School of Global Affairs, the Centre for Human Resources and Industrial Relations, the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the G7/G8 Research Group, and the Global Summitry Journal. Michael is a public affairs professional who has worked alongside the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC), Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), and the National Research Council of Canada. He is also a community advocate and defender of vulnerable and marginalized communities, including Hamilton’s 2SLGBTQ+ communities and has appeared before the Hamilton Police Services Board, the Independent Review into the Events Surrounding Hamilton Pride 2019, and the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. In 2019 he contributed to Documenting Hate, a documentary series produced by the CBC’s The National. 

Poster Title: “Canadian Curriculum History Project”

Maria DiBenigno received her PhD from the American Studies Program at William & Mary and serves as Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at William & Mary’s Highland. After several years as a public school teacher, she completed her MA in English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where her graduate thesis focused on folklore, geography and tourism in the coastal Carolinas. Before joining Highland’s staff, she was a staff member at William & Mary Libraries Special Collections Research Center where she designed exhibits and worked with new collections. Dr. DiBenigno has presented her research for the American Studies Association, National Council on Public History, National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Virginia Consortium of Early Americanists. 

Roundtable title: “Reading Digital Humanities Projects.” Virtual Session #13 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm)

James E. Dobson is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing and Director of the Institute for Writing and Rhetoric at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019), Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave, 2017), and the forthcoming The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). He is also co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019). He conducts research on the theoretical and historical dimensions of technology, American culture, machine learning, and autobiographical writing. 

Paper Title: “Neo-Structuralism and Subjectivity in Sentiment Analysis.” In-Person Session #1 Digital Literary Analysis (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has been involved in digital humanities work since 2004. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, started a Textile Makerspace, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English. 

Roundtable title: “Digital Dostoevsky or the Challenges of Doing Multilingual DH.”  In-Person Session #6 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am)

Hayri Dortdivanlioglu is currently pursuing his Ph.D. degree in architecture as a Fulbright Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His ongoing research concentrates on intertwined relationships among seminal principles of the Roman architect, Vitruvius. He studies the relationship between craft, design, and technology. In a broader sense, his research interest includes the interaction between technology and design, architectural theories, mapping, and data visualization. Besides his concentration in architecture, Dortdivanlioglu is pursuing the Science, Technology, and Society certificate program. Dortdivanlioglu has been teaching architectural design studios at Georgia Tech since 2017. He is the co-founder and coordinator of the ConCave Ph.D. Student group in the College of Design at Georgia Tech, and the academic coordinator of the International Ph.D. Symposium 2022. 

Paper Title: “Neo-Structuralism and Subjectivity in Sentiment Analysis.” Virtual Session #8 Digital Art and Architecture (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Max Johnson Dugan (he/him) lives and works in the Indigenous territory of Lenapehoking, currently known as Philadelphia. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in Islam. His research focuses on contemporary Islamic materiality. Max’s dissertation project examines halal consumption using a combination of ethnographic methods and digital humanities. The project will speak to issues of class, gender, ethnicity, and communal authority, while offering insight into non-elite, lived Islam in the United States. 

Paper Title: “Digital Secularism: Postcoloniality and Technological Transformation in Urdu Social Media.” Virtual Session #1 Engaging, Shaping and Transforming the Digital Commons (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern) 

Jamie Duncan is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and a researcher at the Centre for Access to Information and Justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is also a Junior Fellow of Massey College. His work has appeared in outlets such as The British Journal of Criminology and The Globe and Mail. Jamie’s doctoral research focuses on technology adoption and use in border security.

Paper Title: “Mapping the War of Russia’s Hybrid Empire & Anglo-America Media Hegemony” In-Person Session #8 Critical Mapping (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm)

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PARTICIPANTS E-J

Cansu Ekmekcioglu (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information. Her research draws on critical data studies, human-computer interaction, and public policy to explore accountability practices in migration and humanitarian contexts. Cansu has been awarded the 2021-2022 Mary H. Beatty Fellowship. 

Paper Title: “Community-Engaged Research from Afar: (Dis)Junctures in Participatory Digital Methods in a Refugee Camp.” In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm)

Ariana Ellis is a current doctoral candidate in the University of Toronto’s Department of History. Her dissertation explores the sensory, social, and emotional dimensions of the relationship between civic ritual and public execution in fifteenth and sixteenth century Venice and London. Her other research examines the relationship between video games and history, and she has developed and taught at course on video games and medieval history at the University of Toronto. She has also guest lectured at the University of Tennessee, is a recipient of the University of Toronto’s Teaching Assistant Teaching Excellence Award, and was selected as one of the 2022 winners of Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Council Storyteller’s Competition. Ariana is a research assistant for the University of Toronto’s digital DECIMA Project and interned with the University of St. Andrews’ Open Virtual Worlds group, where she performed research and facilitated audience engagement with digital heritage technologies across Scotland. Her work has appeared in venues such as History Workshop Online, and her chapter ‘Feeling Medieval: Immersive Pedagogy’ will appear in the volume What is Medieval. Decoding Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism in the 21^st Century in Fall 2022. 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Maureen Engel is a lecturer in Digital Culture at the University of Queensland. Prior to moving to Australia, she was Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, Director of Digital Humanities, and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (CIRCA) all at the University of Alberta. Formally trained as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. Her principal research area is the digital spatiality, and the intricate relationships that inhere in and develop from the concepts of space, place, history, and narrative. This is augmented by an interest in digital storytelling and gaming as new expressive media. She is the author of Go Queer, a locative media game based on the queer history of Edmonton, and is currently working on a set of interconnected projects investigating the intersections of queerness and the digital with collaborator Caitlin Fisher. 

Poster Title: “Queer Ghosts: An XR Arcade.”

Laura Estill is a Canada Research Chair of Digital Humanities and associate professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University and a former editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography. Her work has appeared in venues such as Digital Humanities Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Humanities, and others. 

Paper Title: “A Manifesto for Trans-Inclusive Bibliography.” Virtual Session #3 Asserting and Resisting Power in the Digital and Technology (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Lawrence Evalyn is a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of Toronto, affiliated with the Data Sciences Institute. His doctoral research examines the material histories of digital archives, measuring uneven digitization as it impacts eighteenth-century studies. He is currently writing a critical history of mass digitization. Other projects have involved social network mapping and corpus-based distant reading, as well as an article on Slack emoji and affect in Digital Humanities Quarterly. 

Paper Title: “Commercial pragmatism in mass digitization: The death and afterlives of Microsoft Live Search Books.” In-Person Session #1 Digital Literary Analysis (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Sylvia Feghali is a master’s student in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She works at the intersection of feminist geographies and digital humanities, focusing on community praxis as a means of transcending boundaries in material and imaginative space. Their work engages feminist and postcolonial critiques of narrative power and modes of enacting care ethics in data collection and (re)presentation. Sylvia’s current research looks toward the global Lebanese community’s convergence via Instagram, asking what kinds of connective spaces are being enacted on this platform? Do they present possibilities for imagining hopeful futures? And in what ways do power structures upholding the technical function of digitality challenge these spatial interventions? 

Paper Title: “Being Affected via Lebanese Instagram: Digital Gatherings and their Encounters.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Nick Field is a doctoral candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion and is enrolled in the Collaborative Specialization in Book History and Print Culture, both at the University of Toronto. They are also the Reference Specialist at the Map & Data Library, of the University of Toronto Libraries, where they provide research support for GIS, maps, text analysis, and general data wrangling. Their current research focuses on the maps of northwestern China produced by Sir Aurel Stein in the early twentieth century, and on the roles of intermediaries, such as guides and technicians, in creating knowledge in imperial contexts. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Zoe Findlay is a registered nurse with five years of psychiatric nursing experience. Recently, Zoe graduated from a Masters of Health Science in Translational Research from the University of Toronto. In this program, Zoe completed a yearlong thesis project combining design thinking and quality improvement methods to improve the client waiting experience at the Bridging Clinic at CAMH. Currently, she works as a research nurse on a project exploring the role of machine learning in psychiatric risk assessments at CAMH’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics.  

Poster Title: “Measures become Targets: Unintended Consequences of Psychiatric AI”

Caitlin Fisher directs the Immersive Storytelling Lab @AMPD Cinespace Studios and the Augmented Reality Lab at York University in Toronto where she is also a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts. A former Fulbright and Canada Research Chair, Fisher is the recipient of many international awards for digital storytelling. She also serves on the international Board of Directors for HASTAC and is President-elect of the Electronic Literature Organization. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded AI Storytelling project and is Co-PI on a New Frontiers grant investigating “Immersive digital environments and indigenous knowledges: co-creation in virtual reality environments to advance artmaking, digital poetics and reconciliation.” She recently directed Fiery Sparks of Light, a volumetric XR project featuring iconic Canadian women poets (Atwood, Brossard, Tolmie, Lubrin). Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada, ‘Fiery Sparks of Light’ is a CFC Media Lab and York University Immersive Storytelling Lab Co-Production in Partnership with Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. 

Poster Title: “Queer Ghosts: An XR Arcade.”

Aidan Flynn is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Architecture at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he teaches graduate seminars on Queer Space, Architectural Design, and Advanced Writing Workshops for studies in Urbanism, History, Computation, and Building Technology. He holds an Honors B.A. with High Distinction in Art History and Renaissance Studies from the University of Toronto, and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program from MIT. Aidan is interested in utilizing DH technologies, specifically mapping and GIS, towards new ends that uncover early modern histories in conjunction with queer studies. 

Paper Title: “Searching for Sex: GIS Methods for Mapping Queer Histories in Early Modern Florence.” In-Person Session #8 Critical Mapping (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Sherry Fukuzawa is an Assistant Professor Teaching Stream in the Anthropology Department at University of Toronto Mississauga. She is a founding member of the Indigenous Action Group (IAG) to foster and facilitate community-engaged learning (CEL) and community-led research in partnership with Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. The IAG is currently implementing a CEL course entitled “Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples in Turtle Island” (ANT241H) funded by a Connaught Community Partnerships Grant, and will create educational materials for Michi-Saagiig Nishinaabeg Nations on a SSHRC grant over three years. The IAG is running a mixed methods longitudinal study on community-engaged learning with a local Indigenous community on students’ academic learning, personal growth and civic activism. Sherry is also involved in research utilizing technology to implement problem-based learning experiences. Her Virtual Mystery webtool is funded by the Learning, Education and Assessment Fund (LEAF) at University of Toronto. 

Paper Title: “Protecting Data Sovereignty in Indigenous Pedagogy and Community-led Research.” In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Michael Gervers is a professor of Medieval History with particular interest in applying statistical methods to determine the chronology of undated English property-transfer documents during the period 1066 to 1307, when 97% of the extant millions that have survived were issued without dates. Once the temporal problems have been resolved, he and his team at the DEEDS Project analyze the content using techniques applied to Big Data to extract previously hidden evidence of social, economic and linguistic change during the 11th through early 14th centuries. His current objective is to work with European colleagues to develop an infrastructure through which a wide range of charter databases can be queried as one. 

Panel Title: “Computing Words and Reading Between the Lines.” Virtual Session #12 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Jen Jack Gieseking (he/they) is a cultural geographer and Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Kentucky. His book, A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers (NYU Press, 2022), is a examination of the contemporary role of lesbians and queers in New York City gentrification from 1983 to 2008. The interactive maps of An Everyday Queer New York complement the book. Jack’s next book project is a critical geographical study of the role of dyke bars in the US historical geographical imagination. They can be found at jgieseking.org or @jgieseking. 

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Panel Title: “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation.”  Virtual Session #16 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Miriam Ginestier 

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Kenzie Gordon (she/her) is a social worker and a PhD candidate in Digital Humanities and Modern Languages & Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. She is a board member with Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton and the project lead on the YEG Police Violence Archive. Her academic work primarily examines intersections of gender-based violence with technology and equity issues in the video game industry. 

Paper Title: “Documenting Harms through the YEG Police Violence Archive Project.” Virtual Session #14 Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Rebecca Grose is a Master of Arts’ student at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where she is studying in the Digital Humanities program. Her thesis work is studying virtue systems in role-playing video games over the last 35 years, though her interests seem to take her all over the video-game world(s). She’s presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association’s conferences, as well as other small conferences. A new academic, you can find Rebecca nose-deep in books about video games and their culture or playing through the newest Pokémon game (her favourite Pokémon is Pumpkaboo). 

Paper Title: “The Renegades and the Righteous: A Survey of Virtue Systems in Role Playing Video Games.” Virtual Session #15 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Dan Guadagnolo is a historian of twentieth century U.S. business and culture. My research examines the contemporary and historical political economy of marketing, PR, branding, and management strategy since the 1960s. My current book project, Segmenting America, charts social and technological changes in consumer market segmentation and their effect on North American society since the Second World War. 

Poster: “Dark Patterns: Deception & Manipulation in User Experience Design.”

Itza Gutiérrez 

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Carina Guzman (she/they), also known as Islandia, is a Doctoral Candidate at the Faculty of Information and the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. They have an Undergraduate degree in History and Master’s in Geography from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). Supervised by Dr. T.L. Cowan and Dr. Jas Rault, in their dissertation, “Stor(y)ing Mi Desmadre: Trans-Feminist and Queer Community Archival Digital Custodial Praxes in Latin America,” they develop a speculative-pragmatic framework to study how lesbian and trans communities use histories of performance art and nightlife, improvised territories and the Latin American concept of memoria (counter-hegemonic historiographic text that emerges from resistance movements) to activate archival and story-telling digital initiatives. This work emerges from her own participation in lesbian nightlife community-building and archive-making in Mexico, as well as her work as co-editor at the Cabaret Commons (carbaretcommons.org). Guzmán is furthermore a Connaught International Fellow, an Inaugural Dissertation Fellow at the Queer and Trans Research Lab and an Inaugural Doctoral Fellow at the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.

Roundtable Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Sophie Hallée co-founded ANSWERS (Advocacy Normalizing Sex Work through Education and Resources Society) in 2020 after working as a stripper in Montréal in the 1990’s. This organization was Alberta’s first incorporated grasswork sex work organization and was recently nominated for a provincial Community Justice award. Sophie is also the co-founder of Sevihcra – an archival collection to preserve and make accessible the documentary heritage of a mother and grand-mother. Sophie has always had a passion for history and women, especially for those underrepresented in archives. Her most recent project marries these disciplines by researching the history of Canadian strippers with the intention of archiving their stories to help provide more context in terms of the paths taken by Canadian erotic labourers. 

Paper Title: “Je fonds avec toi (I Melt/Archive with You).” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm) 

Matthew N. Hannah is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the School of Information Studies at Purdue University and a Fulbright Specialist to Morocco. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in digital scholarship and media studies, administers the graduate certificate in Digital Humanities, and oversees the DH Studio space at Purdue. His research focuses on text and network analysis and media studies, and his work has most recently appeared in First Monday, The Journal of Magazine Media, and Collection Management, and he has a chapter forthcoming in Debates in the Digital Humanities (2022). Before Purdue, he was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in Public and Digital Humanities at University of Iowa’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies where he collaborated on the Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry project. 

Paper Title: “QAnon: A Crisis of Information.” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Annelise Heinz is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Oregon. Her work focuses on the histories of gender, race, and sexuality; transpacific history; and cultural history. Her first book project, published May 2021 with Oxford University Press, is a history of the Chinese game mahjong and the making of modern American culture. She has published in the American Historical Review (2019) and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies (2016) and served as Associate Producer for a digital version of the late historian Allan Bérubé’s “talking picture show” about a forgotten multi-racial and gay-friendly militant labor union. She has presented her work to both scholarly and public audiences, including at the American Historical Association, the Association of Asian Studies, and the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians, as well as the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco. 

Panel Title: “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation.”  Virtual Session #16 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Natasha Henry-Dixon is the president of the Ontario Black History Society, a Vanier Scholar and incoming Assistant Professor of African Canadian History at York University. Her current research examines the lives of African people enslaved in colonial Ontario. 

Paper Title: “Expanding the Canadian Slavery Archive: Black Digital Humanities as Method.” Virtual Session #7 Digital Archives (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Kate Holland is Associate Professor of Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Novel in the Age of Disintegration: Dostoevsky and Genre in the 1870s (2013) and co-editor of Dostoevsky at 200: The Novel in Modernity (2021) with Dr. Katherine Bowers, and of A Dostoevskii Companion with Dr. Bowers and Dr. Connor Doak, as well as articles and chapters on Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin, and Historical Poetics. She is currently working on an introduction to a volume of Gogol short stories as well as a book on the nineteenth century Russian novel and time. Dr. Holland is PI on the Digital Dostoevsky project at U of T and a member of the Russian team in the New Languages for NLP NEH Institute at Princeton. She has also co-organized a couple of SSHRC-funded international outreach projects related to Dostoevsky. She serves as Vice-President of the North American Dostoevsky Society. She is also a member of the Historical Poetics Reading Group. 

Roundtable title: “Digital Dostoevsky or the Challenges of Doing Multilingual DH.”  In-Person Session #6 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Robert Houghton is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Winchester and has taught previously at the University of St Andrews and University of Edinburgh. He works as a researcher for Mouseion Ltd and with Paradox Interactive and as an editor for The Public Medievalist. He also organizes the annual Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference and associated events and proceedings. His publications include The Middle Ages in Computer Games: Ludic Approaches to the Medieval and Medievalism (in Preparation); Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games (DeGruyter, Under Review). Conflict and Violence in Medieval Italy 568-1154, ed. with C. Heath (AUP, 2021); The Middle Ages in Modern Culture: History and Authenticity in Contemporary Medievalism, ed. with K. Halveston (IBTauris, 2021); and he is the editor of Playing The Crusades (Routledge, 2021). 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Stefka Hristova is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Michigan Technological University. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies with emphasis on Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. Her research analyzes digital and algorithmic visual culture. Hristova’s work has been published in journals such as Transnational Subjects Journal, Visual Anthropology, Radical History Review, TripleC, Surveillance and Security, Interstitial, Cultural Studies, Transformations. She was a NEH Summer Scholar for “Material Maps In the Digital Age” seminar in 2019. Hristova is the lead editor for Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life, Lexington Books, 2021. She is a PI for the Michigan Humanities Grant “Bad Info: Fake News, Manipulated Photographs, and Social Influencers” (2021-2). 

Paper Title: “Emptied Faces: In Search of an Algorithmic Punctum.” Virtual Session #14 Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Mathew Iantorno (he/him) is a PhD student at the Faculty of Information in the Media, Technology, and Culture stream. His research focuses on conceptualizing accessible and just human-robot interactions, specifically regarding automata deployed in caregiving and other day-to-day scenarios. 

Poster Title: “Dark Patterns: Deception & Manipulation in User Experience Design.”

Erdem Idil is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Toronto. Before coming to Toronto, he completed a BA in Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul University and an MA in History at Boğaziçi University. Since joining the Trans-Imperial Archives project team in 2020, Erdem has been contributing to the transcription, editing, and digital remediation of archival materials in Ottoman Turkish and Italian. He is currently working on his dissertation, tentatively titled “Trans-imperial Alterities, Intimate Relations, and Sexual Encounters in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul and Venice.” 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Nazua Idris is a PhD student in Literary Studies in the Department of English, Washington State University. She obtained BA (Hons) in English and MA in English Literature from the Department of English, University of Dhaka and a second MA in Literary Studies from the Department of English, WSU. Before coming to WSU, she worked as a full-time faculty in the Department of English, East West University Bangladesh. Her research interest involves the exploration of the intersections of 19th and early 20th century transatlantic literature, postcolonial and decolonial digital humanities, and digital pedagogy. 

Panel Title: “DH Tools for Decolonial Engagements: Recovery, Multilingualism, and Archival Activism.” Virtual Session #18 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Arun Jacob is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. His research interests include examining the media history of educational technologies. His educational pursuits have included electronics engineering technology, professional communication, and labour studies. Arun’s most recent publication, “Follow The Ho Chi Minh Trail: Analyzing the Media History of the Electronic Battlefield” is available on the Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) Vol. 2, Issue 1.

Roundtable Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Paper title: “Geofencing and Infrastructures of Trespassing.” In-Person Session #12: Ethics and Social Justice (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in New York City. She is the author of Staten Island Stories (Johns Hopkins University Press), which received a NYC Book Award from the New York Society Library. In 2020, Jiménez, Raquel Salas Rivera and Ricardo Maldonado were awarded a seed grant from the U.S Latino Digital Humanities Program at the University of Houston to develop The Puerto Rican Literature Project. With the help of USLDH, this digital archive later received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Presidential Initiatives Grant. Currently, Jiménez is a PhD student in English with a concentration in Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she is also an assistant fiction editor for Prairie Schooner. She received her MFA from Vanderbilt University. She is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Diaspora Team of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project. 

Panel Title: “Future Memory and the Construction of a Decolonial Digital Archive.” Virtual Session #6 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Jon Johnson is an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) at Woodsworth College, University of Toronto. His research focuses on urban land-based Indigenous Knowledge in Toronto and its representation through oral and digital forms of storytelling. He is also interested in the ways increased awareness of Indigenous presence in Toronto has informed Indigenous placemaking initiatives across the city. He works actively within Toronto’s Indigenous community in his capacity as a lead organizer for First Story Toronto, an Indigenous-led community-based organization that researches and shares Toronto’s Indigenous presence through storytelling walks and digital initiative such as websites, smartphone applications, and virtual tours. 

Paper Title: “Digital Representations of Indigenous Knowledges and Cultures: Lessons Learned with First Story Toronto.” Virtual Session #2 Digital Ethics (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Sydney Jordan is Collections Coordinator: LGBTQ+ Studies for USF Libraries – Tampa Special Collections. She has an undergraduate background in English Literature, History, and German language and holds an M.A. in Library and Information Science. In her current role, she works in archival processing, cataloging, patron services, instruction, and programming. 

Paper Title: “Queering the Map of Florida: Historical Presence and Contemporary Assertion.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Shamanth Joshi (he/they; joshishamanth@gmail.com) is currently pursuing his M.Des. in Human-Centered Design at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, MAHE, in Bangalore, India. His research interests include examining and building relationships with discourses on queerness in technologically mediated spaces that extend to theorising one’s position and accountability as a design researcher and practitioner in communities he calls his own. His current work focuses on one such space of video games, where he draws with and from sensed archives of queer resistance to reimagine the genre of Role-Playing Games.

Paper Title: “Care Matters and Justice Dreams: Design Studio Framework, Works, and Insights for Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Praxis.” Virtual Session #4 Care, Empathy, and Healing (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

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PARTICIPANTS K-P

Kavitha K’s research examines translated transgender novels by applying computational digital humanities methods. She attempts to explore the representation, structure and experience of oppression and marginalisation of the transwomen community in the Indian digital economy and social media platforms. 

Paper Title: “A critical analysis of digital storytelling on/of South Indian transgender community on YouTube.” Virtual Session #1 Engaging, Shaping and Transforming the Digital Commons (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Qaasim Karim studies law, history and international relations. He is interested in the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period, especially that of the Venetian Republic. A member of the Trans-Imperial Archives project team since 2021, Qaasim has been primarily responsible for data entry, data cleaning, and visualizations. The project aims to explore the role of dragomans (diplomatic interpreter-translators) in mediating relations between the Ottoman Empire and its European neighbors. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Zaid Khan is a strategist, specializing in the effective communication of complex topics. He works at the Institute of Islamic Studies as a Research Communications Officer helping the unit develop, translate, and deliver academic projects that are calibrated to conversations about Islam and Muslims in Canada. Zaid has a background in the advertising industry where he developed creative concepts for a range of clients. Zaid also completed a Masters in Design (MDes) in the Strategic Foresight & Innovation Program from OCAD University. His thesis project evolved the practise of strategic communications by integrating it with the field of “systemic design”, termed “systems communications”. This evolved practice is geared towards helping inviting audiences to develop a shared and more systemic understanding of a complex issue. Zaid is also a participant in local learning groups related to “systems thinking” such as Systems Thinking Ontario, Design with Dialogue, and Systems Changes Learning Circle. 

Paper Title: “Design-led Approach to Knowledge Translation & Mobilization: Learnings from “Under Layered Suspicion.”” Virtual Session #3 Asserting and Resisting Power in the Digital and Technology (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Veronica King-Jamieson is Councilor for Mississaugas of Credit First Nation (MCFN) in Education, including over 30 years with MCFN Social Services and skills and literacy liaison programs. Veronica was program coordinator for Pan/Para pan AM Toronto (2015) where she established protocols for Elder Groups for the Mississauga Nation. She volunteers for MCFN community youth and culture, recently receiving “The Credits Heritage Mississauga Award”. Veronica has organized and moderated TRC Calls to Action sessions with Senator Sinclair and Justice LaForme. She is completing a Master’s of Education at Western University, has a B.Ed degree from Brock University in Aboriginal Adult Education, and from Queen’s University in the Aboriginal Teacher Education Program. She graduated from Mohawk College in Native Community Care, with an honors diploma in Counselling & Development, Mental Health Stream. Councilor King-Jamieson is an IAG founding member. She advocates for MCFN with several MOU post-secondary agreements across MCFN territory.  

Paper Title: “Protecting Data Sovereignty in Indigenous Pedagogy and Community-led Research.” In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Natacha Klein Käfer is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Privacy Studies – University of Copenhagen. She is currently also the organizer of the Latin American Privacy Studies research group and a researcher in the project Privacy Black and White. Her main research focus is on early modern privacy and healing, dealing with the intersection of confidentiality, networks of healing knowledge, and popular healing traditions from a transcontinental perspective. She has published in the fields of medical history, history of alchemy and early modern privacy.

Paper Title: “Presenting Privacy Black and White: Examining racialized language in historical newspapers through semi-supervised multi-lingual transfer learning.” In-Person Session #5 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Margaret Konkol is Assistant Professor of American Literature and Digital Humanities at Old Dominion University. Her work addresses questions about the role of nature and technology in shaping material life and changing ideas about poetry’s role in society. Published work can be found in Modernism/modernity, Paideuma, Feminist Modernist Studies, Hybrid Pedagogy, Textus, and elsewhere. Her co-edited collection Modernism in the Green: Public Greens in Modern Literature and Culture was recently published by Routledge (2020). She curates the Future Pasts forum on Print+. She has served as a review panelist for the Digital Humanities Advancement Grants Competition for the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been an invited speaker for the Plenary Panel on Perspectives on DH at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, June 4, 2018.

Paper Title: The DIY wearable and the Reimagined Body.”  Virtual Session #4 Care, Empathy, and Healing (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Shelley Kopp is in the final year of the Ph.D. program in Art and Visual Culture at the University of Western Ontario (UWO) in London, Canada, under the supervision of Prof. John G. Hatch. Her area of research focuses on the movement of traditional artwork to digital media and the concerns and advantages of these forms of representation. She is the past editor of the Visual Arts graduate students’ journal, tba: journal of art, media, & visual culture, as well as the founding associate editor. Shelley joined the editorial team of the Embassy Cultural House arts collective in fall 2020 and designed and edited the exhibition catalogue for Hiding in Plain Sight. In December, 2021, she was part of the editorial team for the Embassy Cultural House tabloid re-issue. In April 2022 she joined Museum London as a member of the board. 

Paper Title: “Mediating Powers in the Digitization of Traditional Artwork.” In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Maria Laitan is a user experience specialist at the University of Michigan who is interested in goal-oriented design and leveraging user research to improve usability and accessibility. She believes that the user experience is involved in all parts of the iterative design and development process. She designs for inclusivity to benefit all and strives to create empathetic design solutions through cross-team collaboration and data driven decisions. She received her Masters in Information and Design Strategy from Northwestern University. 

Workshop Title: “DIY Anti-Racist DH Initiatives: How to Get Started at Your Institution.” In-person Session #9 (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Nicole Laliberté is an Associate Professor Teaching Stream in the Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment at the University of Toronto Mississauga. She has been building relationships with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) since 2018 when she became a member of the Indigenous Action Group (IAG). She is currently leading the IAG research initiative associated with their community-engaged learning course. She has extensive experience doing collaborative research and writing on a range of EDI related topics focused on institutions of higher education through her focus on feminist research and anti-oppressive pedagogical practice. She is an expert in qualitative research methods, and beyond instructing an undergraduate qualitative methods course, Dr. Laliberté has trained dozens of undergraduate and graduate students in feminist qualitative research methods during her time at UTM. 

Paper Title: “Protecting Data Sovereignty in Indigenous Pedagogy and Community-led Research.” In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern) 

Sybille Lammes is full professor New Media and Digital Culture at Leiden University. She has been a visiting Senior Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, and has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick, as well as the media-studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam. Her background is in media-studies and game-studies, which she has always approached from an interdisciplinary angle, including cultural studies, science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and critical geography. She is co-editor of Playful Identities (2015), Mapping Time (2017 fc.) and The Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods (2018 fc.). and The Playful Citizen (2017 fc.). She is an ERC laureate and has been the PI of numerous research projects. She is a member of the Playful Mapping Collective.  

Paper Title: “The Fun and the Formal: Ludo-methods in Digital Humanities Scholarship.” Virtual Session #15 Text and Culture, Digitally (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Stephen Lawson a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies of York University in Toronto where he is pursuing his research project on critical drag practices throughout the hemispheric Americas: TRANS/FORMING AUTHENTICITY: Stigmatized Bodies, Creative Perversions and the Performative Power of Shame. Stephen was a Collaborator Member of the Canadian Consortium on Performance and Politics in the Americas, is currently a Collaborator Member on the SSHRC funded partnership project Hemispheric Encounters, and Part-Time Faculty in the Theatre Department of Concordia University.

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Kanika Lawton is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute and the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. Their research focuses on surveillant technologies, subjectivity, new media, and queer, trans, and racialized modes of refusal. They have presented their research across Canada and the United States, most notably at Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA), Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, Association for Philosophy and Literature, Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Southern California. Their article on utopian (re)imagining and the Afrofuturistic production of countermemories in Dirty Computer (2018) is published in Spectator. The recipient of the 2021 Atom Egoyan Cinema Studies Scholarship, they have received fellowships from Pink Door, BOAAT Writer’s Retreat, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.

Paper Title: “Dis(closing) the Closet: Performing Queer Authenticities in Digital Spaces” In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Natalie Leduc is a second year PhD student in the Department of English and a member of the Book History & Print Culture collaborative program at the University of Toronto. Their SSHRC-funded dissertation investigates how cyborg writing—a term they (re)developed to describe a type of digital writing that challenges intersecting bigotries—is a form of literary activism that problematizes exclusionary notions of the human. Prior to her studies, she spent time working in Los Angeles as a pop and locker. They are an original member of the poetry performance ensemble Rhombus 19 and the creator of the Zine Apocalips. 

Paper Title: “UbuWeb As (Activist) Digital Archive: Reigning In the Avant-Garde with Feminist Ethics of Care.” In-Person Session #5 Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Kristina R. Llewellyn is Full Professor of Social Development Studies at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. She is an associate faculty and incoming Associate Director of the Games Institute at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Llewellyn’s primary research area is oral history and education, which extends to the role of games and virtual reality in teaching and learning history. She is the Director (PI) of the SSHRC-funded Partnership Development Grant project Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation: The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children History Education Initiative (www.dohr.ca), a co-investigator with the NFRF funded Exploration project Incorporating Social Justice into Haptic VR Storytelling (PI Dr. O. Schneider, University of Waterloo), and a co-investigator with the SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant Thinking Historically for Canada’s Future (PI Dr. C. Peck, University of Alberta) (www.thinking-historically.ca/). 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Teresa Lobalsamo is an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream, and the Undergraduate Coordinator of Italian Studies in the Department of Language Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Professor Lobalsamo teaches Italian Language, Cinema, Food Studies, and always aims to create meaningful academic experiences for students. She is proudly affiliated with the Culinaria Research Institute (University of Toronto Scarborough), the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy (UTM), and serves as AATI Regional Representative (Canada) and member of Quaderni d’Italianistica’s editorial board. In 2018, she was recognized as the recipient of UTM’s Teaching Excellence Award for Junior Faculty. 

Paper Title: “Mapping Italian-Canadian Foodways.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Paper Title: “Early Internet Memories and the Co-Construction of Digital Pasts.” Virtual Session #6 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico and  is a poet, translator, editor and cultural programmer who lives in Brooklyn. Maldonado is the author of the poetry collection The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020). The recepient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, and Queer|Arts Mentorship, he serves as the 92Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center Managing Director. He also serves as a Co-Principal Investigator for the Diaspora Team of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project. 

Panel Title: “Future Memory and the Construction of a Decolonial Digital Archive.” Virtual Session #6 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Arnon Manhães Ceolin holds a Master in Social Policy and graduated in Social Sciences from Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES), Brazil. He is a member of the research group Trabalho e Práxis (UFES), as well as tutors in the area of Social Sciences in the Universidade Vila Velha (UVV).  

Poster Title: “Burning Man: art, politics and economics in a matrix of contemporary corporate and cybernetic relations”

Marta Maslej is a CIHR-funded postdoctoral trainee at CAMH’s Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics. Her research involves using methods from natural language understanding and machine learning to predict mental health outcomes, with a focus on psychosocial and cognitive factors. She is also interested in the impact of predictive modelling on clinical decision-making and patient care.

Poster Title: “Measures become Targets: Unintended Consequences of Psychiatric AI”

Monica Mastrantonio is a visiting Professor at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York – UK. She holds her Ph.D. in Critical Social Psychology; she has been studying time narratives in her research projects. Lately, she has been involved with epistolary studies and digital humanities, mainly focusing in renaissance women’s letters. Now, she is researching fiction narrative about the future and relating to mental health and cognition. 

Paper Title: “LAURA BASSI: Women in STEM – In Times They were Taught to be Housewives” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Kris L. May is associate editor of the World Shakespeare Bibliography at Texas A&M University. He is co-director of The Coming Out Monologues, and has taught courses in LGBTQ literatures, histories, and cultures.  

Paper Title: “A Manifesto for Trans-Inclusive Bibliography.” Virtual Session #3 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Vanessa McCarthy is an historian and a Fellow at the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, University of Toronto, and has taught at the University of Toronto and Queen’s University, Kingston. Her current research explores the flexibility and negotiations of masculinity via the study of middling-sort and working-poor male clients of female sex workers in early modern Bologna. A member of the Trans-Imperial Archives project team since 2018, Dr. McCarthy has been primarily responsible for data entry, data cleaning, and transcribing Italian translations of Ottoman official records collated by the Venetian bailate chancery in Istanbul, now held in the Venetian State Archive. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Lauren McLean (she/her/they) is a PhD candidate in the Literary Studies and Theatre Studies program. She completed her M.A at McMaster University in Gender Studies and Feminist Research. Her current work focuses on algorithmic and content based representations of queer identities within popular sitcoms on Netflix. Beyond her current work, Lauren’s research interests include homonormativity, trauma and experiential education. Lauren is a self-declared feminist killjoy hoping for change. 

Paper Title: “The Algorithmic Face of Instagram: Brainstorming Digital Change.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Avis Wanda McClinton is a Quaker preservationist and the community liaison for Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers. She feels a calling to find the burial sites of those enslaved by Quakers. Moreover, she has performed ceremonies honoring enslaved people and has been influential in creating monuments to these people. Additionally she is the founder of the Friends Victory Garden. She is a resident of Upper Dublin Township, Pennsylvania. 

Paper Title: “Centering Community in Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers.” Virtual Session #2 Digital Ethics (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Jenna McKellips (BA, English, St. Olaf College; MA, English, University of Toronto) is an asexual-identifying scholar writing a thesis on queer asexuality and gender fluidity in 15th century theatrical representations of virginity. She is a digital indexer at the Records of Early English Drama, and she is one of this year’s CDHI Partner Grant recipients (alongside project co-lead, U of T’s Professor Liza Blake), working on a searchable bibliographic database of scholarly sources on asexuality and aromanticism. Moreover, as a result of her ongoing research on asexuality for her thesis, she has spoken on asexuality at various conferences (IMC Leeds 2020, RSA Dublin 2021) and is writing a chapter for an in-progress collection entitled Early Modern Asexualities. 

Paper Title: “Building a DatabAce: The Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography.”  Virtual Session #5 Digital Infrastructure (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Cassandra McKenney is completing an MA in Public History with a Specialization in Digital Humanities at Carleton University. Her research is situated at the intersection of Public History and twentieth century transgender history, specifically the areas of community histories, media and online representations, and how technologies have been developed and adapted. Cassandra is currently collaborating with the Ottawa Trans Library on a digital exhibition about local trans community history and working with Ingenium as part of the Garth Wilson Fellowship.

Paper Title: “First Impressions: Searching and Learning “Transgender” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Carolina Melis is a graduate student of the Art History master’s program at the University of Toronto, pursuing a second career in academe. After approximately 15 years of working in marketing, sales, and information systems at Procter & Gamble in various countries, Carolina decided to update her education to pursue her personal growth goals. One of her research interests is ancient and archaeological textiles (including those from pre-Columbian Andean South America), which led her to engage in the present project on pastedowns in Ethiopian manuscripts. Carolina has a long-standing interest in weaving and is now creating her own woven pieces. Carolina is conducting research on the imported textiles found inside the covers of Christian Ethiopian manuscripts from the 15th to the 19th centuries. She welcomes any information on textiles found in Ethiopian manuscripts in England, Ethiopia, or the rest of the world, particularly if they are available in digital form. 

Nirmala Menon is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), Discipline of English, IIT Indore. She leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India. Menon is the author of Migrant Identities of Creole Cosmopolitans: Transcultural Narratives of Contemporary Post coloniality (Peter Lang Publishing, Germany, 2014) and Remapping the Postcolonial Canon (Palgrave Macmillan, UK 2017). She is the Co-Editor of the first multilingual Volume of E-literature to be published from India. Her research group works on Digital Projects relating to Cultural Heritage through both creation and curation of Archives and Databases. She is the Project Director for KSHIP (Knowledge Sharing in Publishing), an Open Access Publishing platform. While her primary area of research is Postcolonial studies and Digital Humanities, Globalization and Translation studies are additional areas of research. 

Paper Title: “Towards Decolonizing Data Driven Biometric Technologies in India: Examining Aadhar and its Colonial Lineage.” Virtual Session #3 Asserting and Resisting Power in the Digital and Technology (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Alan Miller has been involved in the use of Virtual World technologies for Cultural Heritage for over 10 years. He is a member of the Open Virtual Worlds (OVW) research group at the University of St. Andrews and co-CEO of Smart History, a spin-out company specialising in the application of emergent technologies to the promotion, interpretation and preservation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Current projects include “Virtual Binoculars” which support virtual tours of locations remote in time or space and as part of the EU-LAC Museums project the Open Virtual Worlds Group are working with Museums in Latin America and Europe to develop a virtual museum, which integrates the use of 3D environments, spherical and established media. The Digi-tourist project of Northern Peripheries and Arctic Programme, OVW are working with museums in Norway, Iceland and Scotland to enable live, remote and interactive virtual reality tours. 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Naveen Minai 

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Angus Mol combines the study of history using a digital approach with the study of how today’s digital cultures are entwined with history. In particular, he looks at how contemporary play functions as a mirror of the past as well as how games can be used to democratize access to the past. He has authored several papers on the topic and crowd-funded an Open Access edited volume with chapters from scholars and professionals from the creative industry. Angus is cofounder of VALUE, a foundation that develops and supports initiatives at the interface of academia and video games. Recently, he has worked as the Digital Strategy Coordinator for the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. Before that, he was an NWO-Rubicon, Postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Anthropology. He also undertook post-doctoral research at Leiden University and was a visiting researcher at Konstanz University as part of the NEXUS1492 project. 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Elliot Montpellier (he/him) lives and works on the unceded traditional and ancestral lands of the Coast Salish peoples, currently known as Surrey, Canada. He is a dual-degree doctoral candidate in the Departments of Anthropology and South Asia Studies and Instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. He is interested in the study of mediatized discourse about Islam, piety, and morality in Pakistani television drama serials. He connects these overlapping virtual and physical worlds in Pakistan and Canada by examining the interplay of media production and reception and the impact of the Internet on shaping pious publics in South Asia. 

Paper Title: “Digital Secularism: Postcoloniality and Technological Transformation in Urdu Social Media.” Virtual Session #1 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern) 

Nanditha Narayanamoorthy is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Information, technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina. She studies the construction of feminist and queer digital counterpublics through digital protest in the Global South, and also investigates polarization, hate speech, and radicalization in digital activism. Nanditha graduated from York University in 2022. She is currently a member of the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR), Canadian Sociological Association (CSA), Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), and the International Association of Media and Communication (IAMCR). She is published in Digital Studies/Le champ Numérique, and Feminist Media Studies.

Paper Title: “Queer Hashtag Activism in India: Digital Storytelling and Networked Empathy on Social Media.” Virtual Session #14 Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm)

Christina Dinh Nguyen is from Toronto, Canada. She is currently a Master of Information student at the University of Toronto. Her research interests are in natural language processing, science fiction and fantasy studies, and text encoding. Outside of the university, you can often find her trying out new hiking spots. 

Paper Title: “Towards Tolkien Studies with Computational Literary Analysis.” In-Person Session #1 Digital Literary Analysis (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am)

Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is a design scholar, architect, artist, and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. Currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Interactive Computing, she investigates traditional and digital practices, human-computer interaction, interdisciplinary creativity, and their intersections with society. She builds new expressions, tools, and methodologies to explore social, cultural, and political aspects of computational design and emerging technologies for new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy, and publics. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and ideas2innovation, among others. She is a recipient of the DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design. Dr. Noel has been faculty at the University of Stuttgart, the University of Florida, Penn State, MIT, the Singapore University of Technology & Design, and has practiced as an architect in the US, India, and Trinidad & Tobago. 

Paper Title: “Neo-Structuralism and Subjectivity in Sentiment Analysis.” Virtual Session #8 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Rebecca Noone is an artist and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, University College London and 2021 Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information (2021). Situated in the areas of critical information studies and feminist media studies, Rebecca’s research focuses on the politics, discourses, and practices of locative media. She is the author of the forthcoming book Location Awareness in the Age of Google Maps (Routledge). 

Paper title: “Geofencing and Infrastructures of Trespassing.” In-Person Session #12: Ethics and Social Justice (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Océane Nyela is a PhD student in the Joint Program in Communication & Culture at York and Toronto Metropolitan University. She graduated from the University of Ottawa with an Honours Bachelor of Social Sciences (BSocSc) in Criminology and Sociology. Her doctoral research investigates the proliferation of braided hairstyles in several West African countries and their diasporas. The practice is situated within a larger media ecology consisting of social, spiritual, and communicative practices that act as embodied mathematical practice which mobilize the unconscious for moments of diasporic transindividuation. She is a recipient of the of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarships (CGS-D) Doctoral Scholarship. 

Paper Title: “Braids All the Way Down: Black Hair and the Diasporic Unconscious.” Virtual Session #3 Asserting and Resisting Power in the Digital and Technology (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern) 

Kiera Obbard is a poet and PhD candidate in The School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her SSHRC-funded project, The Instagram Effect: Contemporary Canadian Poetry Online, examines the complex social, cultural, technological and economic conditions that have enabled the success of social media poetry in Canadian publishing. Kiera’s poetry has been featured in Petal Journal, as part of Chayn’s Creative Hope virtual exhibition and the Future Horizons project, and in Sad Girls Club Lit.

Paper Title: “The Algorithmic Face of Instagram: Brainstorming Digital Change.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern) 

Enrique Olivares Pesante is a writer and educator from Puerto Rico. He has taught literature and ESL courses at the Universidad del Turabo Gurabo, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Bayamon and Universidad de Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras. He published his first book FREE-TERRORISM in 2019 through La Impresora thanks to El Resuelve grant from arts lab Beta-Local. He is currently a PhD student at the English Department of University of California, Los Angeles with a focus on digital archives, poetry, and Caribbean literature. He is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Archipelago Team of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/ The Puerto Rican Literature Project. 

Panel Title: “Future Memory and the Construction of a Decolonial Digital Archive.” Virtual Session #6 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Julia Park/Parke (she/they) is a PhD student in Media, Technology, and Culture at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Her research focuses on social media platforms, race, and identities. Julia holds a B.A. from the University of British Columbia and an M.Sc. from the University of Oxford. Her previous work has discussed religion in Asian immigrant communities; feminist foreign policy and temporality in war crimes; post-colonial and transcultural critiques of social justice; the social and educational trajectory of North Korean refugees; and South Korean media and pop culture.

Paper Title: “The Uncanny Asian: Neoliberal exhaustion and oppression as binary code.”  In-Person Session #10 Digital Methods (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Anne Pasek is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersections of climate communication, media studies, the environmental humanities, and science and technology studies. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and the School of the Environment at Trent University, Director of the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group, and the Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment. She broadly studies how carbon becomes communicable within different communities and media forms, to different political and material effects. Her work focuses on digital network infrastructures, corporate sustainability practices, and social and aesthetic experiments in low-carbon knowledge-creation. She is a Co-PI on the Sustainable Subsea Networks project funded by the Internet Society Foundation. 

Paper Title: “What’s the Carbon Footprint of the Internet? Methodological Tensions and Alternative Approaches to the Climate Impacts of ICT.” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Kush Patel (they/he; kush.patel@manipal.edu), Ph.D., is a Savarna queer feminist educator, writer, and public scholar, working at the intersections of architecture and the digital public humanities. Their “alt-ac” and academic career paths in the United States and India have constantly asked: what pedagogical and archival forms might campus-community projects in and with the digital take to engage specific infrastructural struggles against heteronormative and casteist patriarchy. Currently, they serve as Head of Studies for the Postgraduate Arts Program in Technology and Change at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, MAHE, in Bangalore, India. 

Paper Title: “Care Matters and Justice Dreams: Design Studio Framework, Works, and Insights for Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Praxis.” Virtual Session #4 Care, Empathy, and Healing (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Alejandro Paz is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and he has written about the politics of migration, language and citizenship in Israel/Palestine, as well as settlement in occupied East Jerusalem. His book Latinos in Israel: Language and Unexpected Citizenship (Indiana UP) was published in 2018. His current research is about English online journalism from Israel, and its impact on North Atlantic public opinion. 

Panel Title: “Citationality and Journalism: Investigating Sourcing with MediaCAT and Other Online Datasets.” Virtual Session #17 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern) 

Michaela Pňačekova is an award-winning XR artist, PhD candidate and ELIA scholar at Cinema and Media Arts at York University, Toronto. As Graduate Assistant at the Immersive Storytelling Lab headed by Dr. Caitlin Fisher, she’s worked on multiple prototypes focusing on human-machine co-creation in emerging media (using Unreal Engine, GANs, and NLP). Research Assistant at the Peripheral Visions Lab at York University headed by Dr. Mary Bunch. Author and produces of Symphony of Noise VR (2019). Selections: IDFA Doc Lab Competition, ISEA Montreal, LEV Madrid, IFF Geneva, Reeperbahn Festival Hamburg, One World Bratislava, and more. Awards: FIVARS Award for Excellence in Sound Design 2020, VRNow 2021 Best VR Entertainment Nominee, IDFA and MIT  R&D Program Selection, 2019 Best XR Installations List by Forbes Magazine. Co-producer of Chomsky vs. Chomsky: First Encounter VR (Sundance Film Festival 2020), co-creator of Pre-Crime Calculator App and producer of three feature length documentaries (Border Cut 2018, Waterproof 2019, Scars 2020).  

Workshop Title: “Thinking is Feeling is Making – An Imitation Game Workshop.” In-Person Session #3 (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Aris Politopoulos is a lecturer in both the bachelor’s and the master’s programme in Archaeology at Leiden University. In the second year of the bachelor’s he teaches two general subjects on the development of (early) cities and the archaeology of ancient empires, and in the research master’s he lectures on the archaeology of Assyria.  He also teaches in the Science Communication course at the Faculty of Archaeology, and in a quite unusual way: together with several other colleagues, he provides archaeological commentary during livestreams of video games. This is something he does not only for students but for other interested parties via the VALUE Foundation, of which he is co-founder. 

Paper Title: “The Fun and the Formal: Ludo-methods in Digital Humanities Scholarship.” Virtual Session #15 Text and Culture, Digitally (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

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PARTICPANTS Q-S

Gianluca Raccagni graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in medieval history and moved for his postgraduate studies to the University of Cambridge, where he subsequently held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Teaching Associateship at Gonville and Caius College. He was then appointed Teaching Fellow in Medieval and Renaissance History and then Chancellor’s Fellow in History at Edinburgh. He is a Co-Coordinator of the History and Games Lab at the University of Edinburgh. His publications include The Lombard League 1167-1225 from Oxford University Press (2010) and he is completing a monograph on the second Lombard League. 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Mohammad Kasifur Rahman is a second-year Ph.D. student at the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication (ATEC) at The University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include Digital Humanities, Critical Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and Surveillance Studies. Kasif’s current research work explores how online activism can work as a decolonial method in shaping the new form of protest in the field of Critical Race Studies by engaging the crossroads of Media Studies, Surveillance Studies, and Digital Humanities. He has published five papers in various journals. He has presented papers at eight national and international conferences in Bangladesh, the United States, and India. 

Panel Title: “DH Tools for Decolonial Engagements: Recovery, Multilingualism, and Archival Activism.” Virtual Session #18 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Qazi Arka Rahman is interested in the nexus of postcolonial literature, south Asian studies, and digital humanities. He is curious about the role of fiction in shaping the concepts of nation and nationality in modern South Asia and seeks to understand the multidimensional identity politics operating in that region. As a scholar, he aims to bring in Bangladeshi literature in English and Bangla to expand conceptions of South Asian literary and postcolonial studies and broaden existing notions of South Asian identity while incorporating DH tools and methods. Through his work as a writing studio consultant, sub-editor, and communication advisor, Arka has also developed expertise in grant and proposal writing. Arka has recently been nominated as the 2022-23 David G. Allen Dissertation Fellow at WVU. He also enjoys critical studies of science fiction, films, popular culture, and loves anything related to hard rock and cyberpunk! Learn more at https://qazirahman.academia.edu/. 

Panel Title: “DH Tools for Decolonial Engagements: Recovery, Multilingualism, and Archival Activism.” Virtual Session #18 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Patrick Rashleigh is the Data Visualization Coordinator at the Center for Digital Scholarship in Brown University Library, where he engages in the production and dissemination of visual modes of scholarly communication and analysis. In practice, this means partnering with faculty on projects (with a focus on UX and front-end development) and providing instruction on digital scholarship methodologies. Prior to Brown, Patrick was Technology Liaison for the Humanities at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and the Senior Media Specialist at the Ministry of the Attorney General of Ontario. He has an MA in Ethnomusicology from York University and a BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia.

Paper Title: “Stolen Relations: Recovering stories of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas.” Virtual Session #2 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Sabrina Razack is a PhD candidate completing her doctorate at the University of Toronto in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education with a collaborative specialization in Women and Gender Studies. The focus of her research involves the analysis of media, race, sport, gender and social movements. Her doctoral research, Joy as a mode of resistance: An examination of Black Girl Hockey Club’s ongoing quest for racial social justice. movements, examines the impact of social networking sites intended to progress social justice work. 

Paper Title: “Joy as a mode of resistance: An examination of Black Girl Hockey Club’s ongoing quest for racial social justice.” In-Person Session #12 Ethics and Social Justice (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Amanda Regan is an Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University. She specializes in digital history as well as late-nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. history with a focus on women and gender. She’s the co-director and digital historian on Mapping the Gay Guides, an NEH funded digital mapping project that draws on Bob Damron’s Address Books, a prolific set of travel guides that became almost survival guides to gay and queer travelers across the United  States in the last three decades of the twentieth century. She is currently revising a book manuscript tentatively titled Shaping Up: Physical Fitness for Women 1880-1965, which examines why the fitness of female bodies was a matter of national concern and interest throughout the twentieth century. 

Panel Title: “Geography, Media, and Queer Community Formation.”  Virtual Session #16 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Darla Reslan is an undergraduate student studying Cognitive Science and Medical Anthropology at the University of Toronto. With support from the Temerty Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research and Education in Medicine and the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative she is currently researching machine learning in health settings, specifically the development of predictive technology for psychiatric care. With a team of data scientists, bioethicists, clinicians, anthropologists, and nurses, she is investigating the theory, ethics, design and implications of “Predictive Care” as an emerging sociotechnical system. 

Poster Title: “Measures become Targets: Unintended Consequences of Psychiatric AI”

Lorna-Jane Richardson is Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Heritage in the School of Art, Media & American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her interests are in the fields of digital cultural heritage, digital ethics and sustainability, and digital research methods, especially those using social media. Lorna is currently Co-I on the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities project The Invisible Women – Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing, led by UEA and the Irish Film Institute. She has a PhD in Information Studies, funded by the AHRC, from the Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL, titled ‘Public Archaeology in a Digital Age.’

Paper Title: “The Dark Side of Digital Heritage: Ethics, Carbon Literacy and Sustainability in Digital Practice.”  In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Jennifer Roberts-Smith is an artist-researcher, whose transdisciplinary work in performance, digital media, design, education, and social justice has appeared in theatres, exhibitions, and scholarly publications internationally. She is interested in the ways that theatre offers people with differing perspectives, expertise, and lived experience opportunities to work together toward better futures. She is the founder and co-convenor of the qCollaborative (qcollaborative.com), an international, intersectional feminist design research lab focused on performance and technology. Her recent projects have supported community-driven interventions into cycles of harm perpetuated by systemic racism in Nova Scotia (in the Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation project); reconciliation in post-conflict zones in Colombia (in Design for Peace); women’s prison reform (in Theatre for Relationality); and disability rights (in Aesthetics for Accessibility and Remote Embodied Synchronous Teaching and Learning for Accessibility). She is a recipient of the Ontario Early Researcher Award. 

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Anna Robinson-Sweet is a doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles and a graduate student researcher at UCLA’s Community Archives Lab. Her research focuses on if and how archives and records can be used by communities in achieving accountability for state violence. Previously, Robinson-Sweet was an archivist at The New School Archives and Special Collections in New York. She holds an MLIS from Simmons University. 

Paper Title: “How Does it Feel to be Digitally Archived?” Virtual Session #7 Digital Archives (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Sebastian Rodriguez is an undergraduate student studying data science and user experience design at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. His academic and research interests focus on the confluence of technology, society, and power. He was an undergraduate research fellow with the University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) in 2022, where he researched deception and manipulation in user experience design. While working with the CDHI, he served as a member of the Surveillance, Race, and Empire Learning Community, facilitating four public lectures on how the digital humanities inform surveillance studies. He has also conducted research on programmatic surveillance in the United States, which he presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI)’s Conference and Colloquium in 2021. 

Poster Title: “Dark Patterns: Deception & Manipulation in User Experience Design.”

Moska Rokay is the archivist of the Muslims in Canada Archives (MiCA) at the University of Toronto (UofT) Institute of Islamic Studies. As a settler on Turtle Island and former refugee, she is actively involved in her Afghan-Canadian diaspora community. She completed her Master of Information (UofT) in 2019. Moska’s research interests lie in the interdisciplinary crossroads of archives, critical refugee studies, and identity formation in diaspora communities of war and trauma. She is an advocate for community-centered, activist archives and archives of diaspora/migrant communities. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Association of Canadian Archivists New Professional Award as well as Archivaria’s Gordon Dodds Student Paper Prize for her paper “Critical Ethnography as an Archival Tool: A Case Study of the Afghan Diaspora in Canada.” Starting Fall 2022, she will be joining the Faculty of Information (UofT) as a PhD student focused on refugee and diasporic archives. 

Paper Title: “Considerations in Community-Centered Digital Archives: Case Studies with Afghan-Canadians and Muslims in Canada” In-Person Session #12 Ethics and Social Justice (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Giovanna Rosal (she/her) holds a BA in Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Alberta and is a future SSHRC funded graduate student in Sociology at Carleton University. She is a board member with the Alberta Public Interest Research Group and a research volunteer on the YEG Police Violence Archive. Her academic work examines the reproduction and naturalization of carceral violence from a feminist abolitionist perspective. 

Paper Title: “Documenting Harms through the YEG Police Violence Archive Project.” Virtual Session #14 Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Mary Rose is the Anti-Racism Collaborative program manager at the National Center for Institutional Diversity (NCID) where she manages the infrastructure and a set of coordinated activities for U-M community engagement around research and action focused on anti-racism and racial justice. Prior to joining the NCID, Mary worked in U-M’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (Office of the Provost), supporting the implementation of the University’s five-year strategic plan on diversity, equity, and inclusion involving 51 campus units. Her professional experience includes community collaborations, academic support programs for underrepresented groups, research and evaluation, and higher education administration. Mary has published in peer-reviewed journals on the topics of Asian American and Pacific Islander youth violence, community collaborations, multiculturalism, and adolescent substance use and delinquency. She holds a PhD in Human Development and Family Studies from Pennsylvania State University. 

Workshop Title: “DIY Anti-Racist DH Initiatives: How to Get Started at Your Institution.” In-person Session #9 (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Natalie Rothman is a Professor of History at the University of Toronto and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC. She is interested in the history of Venetian-Ottoman cultural mediation in the early modern period, diplomatic translation and translators, the genealogies of Orientalism, the history of archives, and digital scholarship. Trained as an historical anthropologist, Rothman is the author of numerous articles and two monographs, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Cornell University Press, 2011) and The Dragoman Renaissance: Diplomatic Interpreters and the Routes of Orientalism (Cornell University Press, 2021). Since 2014 she has collaborated with Kirsta Stapelfeldt and the Digital Scholarship Unit at UTSC on a digital companion project, The Dragoman Renaissance Research Platform. Rothman is also the co-editor (with A. Zimmerman) of a special issue of Radical History Review on the Politics of Boycotts (2019).

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Tia Sager is a PhD candidate and CDHI graduate fellow (2021-22) in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. Her research explores architectural change through recycling, adaptation, and modification practices during the Late Bronze Age. Her dissertation project, titled “The Poetics and Politics of Space: a regional analysis of the Cretan Postpalatial built environment,” employs spatial analysis to address questions of cultural exchange, continuity, innovation, and modification at the scale of the Late Bronze Age built environment and town on the island of Crete. She is interested in the application of critical digital methodologies as heuristic models for the exploration of ancient architecture. Over the past seven years she has participated in excavation projects at the sites of Palaikastro and Sissi on Crete. 

Paper Title: “Exploring Cultural Constructions: Three multi-phase three-dimensional models of Late Bronze Age architecture on Crete.” Virtual Session #8 Digital Art and Architecture

Raquel Salas Rivera is a Puerto Rican poet, translator, and editor currently living in Santurce, Puerto Rico. His honors include being named the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia and a 2019-2021 Writer for the Art for Justice Fund at the University of Arizona Poetry Center. He is the recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry, the 2018 Ambroggio Prize, a 2019 Laureate Fellowship, the 2019 New Voices Award from Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra, and a 2021 NEA Translation Fellowship. The author of six full-length poetry books, he has co-edited two anthologies of Puerto Rican poetry, including La piel del arrecife (La Impresora, 2021) the first anthology of Puerto Rican trans poetry. He is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Archipelago Team and the head of the Translation Team of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña/The Puerto Rican Literature Project.

Panel Title: “Future Memory and the Construction of a Decolonial Digital Archive.” Virtual Session #6 (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Davíd Satten-López is a 2021 Spectrum Scholar and the former Morris Evans Post-Baccalaureate Fellow at Haverford College where he led this first iteration of the website Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers. He was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona and now resides in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 

Paper Title: “Centering Community in Manumitted: The People Enslaved by Quakers.” Virtual Session #2 Digital Ethics (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Shehroze Saharan is a Master of Information Candidate at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He is focusing his academics on Information System Design (ISD) and Knowledge Management & Information Management (KMIM). Previously, Shehroze completed a bachelor’s at the University of Guelph in Bio-Medical Science with a Minor in Media Studies & Cinema. He hopes to combine his passion and love for health science and communication with information to carve out a distinct career for himself. Shehroze has also volunteered his time to numerous different organizations such as the Canadian Association for Research in Regenerative Medicine, the Experiential Learning Hub and co-founded and co-chaired a new organization called Students Supporting Seniors. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies, reading books, and eating chocolate. 

Paper Title: “The Matilda Project: An Initiative to Raise Awareness of Inequality and Gender Bias towards Women in Science”  In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Shehryar (Shay) Saharan is a scientific communicator and designer based in Toronto, Ontario. He uses visual media and design to communicate complex scientific concepts and build interactive, educational and memorable experiences. He is currently in the Master of Science in Biomedical Communications at the University of Toronto. Here, he focuses on the creation & evaluation of visual media including scientific illustration, UI/UX design, 2D/3D animation, and virtual simulations. His undergraduate degree was in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Guelph. During this time, he focused on the development of medical technologies for the improvement of human health. 

Paper Title: “The Matilda Project: An Initiative to Raise Awareness of Inequality and Gender Bias towards Women in Science”  In-Person Session #4 Digital Pedagogies (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Dellannia Segreti is an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Dellannia is in her graduating year and is interested in pursuing an MA thanks to work she has undertaken over the last few years. Most recently, she was selected as research assistant and virtual intern for an Italian American food history project (Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Pollenzo); she is a lead research supervisor on Italian-Canadian Foodways (UTM), a digital collection dedicated to preserving the contributions of Italian-Canadian diaspora. 

Paper Title: “Mapping Italian-Canadian Foodways” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern

Sara Shroff is an Assistant Professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences, where she holds a joint appointment in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science. From 2019-2021, Sara was the inaugural postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Sara’s work has appeared in top academic journals such as Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Kohl, and Third World Thematics as well as several anthologies in peace studies, feminist economics, south asian studies and international relations. Sara received her PhD in Urban and Public Policy from The New School and has taught at The New School, New York University, and PACE University. Sara currently serves as a Conversation Co-Editor for the International Feminist Journal of Politics, a Fellow at the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto and a Committee Member for Saida Waheed Gender Institute. 

Paper Title: “Digital Feminist Classrooms: Critical Pedagogy, Infrastructure, and Post/Coloniality.” Virtual Session #5 Digital Infrastructure (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Nabeel Siddiqui is a scholar of digital humanities, the history of information science, new media rhetoric, and science and technology studies. He holds a PhD in American Studies from William and Mary and is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Susquehanna University. In the past, he has held fellowships from the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory and Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. Currently, he is completing a manuscript entitled The Computer Comes Home: A Failed Revolution, which analyzes the personal computer’s domestication in America during the 1970s and 1980. In addition to his more “traditional” scholarly pursuits, he has worked on numerous digital humanities projects centered on large scale text analysis, data visualization, virtual reality, GIS, and alternative publishing paradigms. 

Paper Title: “Moving Through the Field: Envisioning and Contesting Travel in the Digital Humanities.” In-Person Session #8 Critical Mapping (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Laura Sikstrom is a medical anthropologist who uses anthropological theories and methods to study biomedicine in Malawi and Canada. Most of her ongoing research examines new healthcare opportunities and risks that emerge alongside innovations in Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning. Concerns about AI applications systematically discriminating against specific populations have spearheaded an urgent conversation about notions of fairness. Namely, who will/should benefit the most from these techniques and why? Her ongoing CIHR-funded institutional ethnography at CAMH explores how human actors (computational scientists, clinicians and patients) engage with competing claims to fairness. For example, what makes training datasets “fair” (or unbiased and representative) and how is an ethos of fair treatment incorporated into decision-making by human (patients, clinicians, data scientists) and non-human (AI) care teams? This project aims to foster the responsible interpretation of knowledge derived from AI/ML and is essential to ensure that policy uptake is relevant and beneficial for all.

Poster Title: “Measures become Targets: Unintended Consequences of Psychiatric AI.”

Puthiya Purayil Sneha is a Senior Researcher with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS),Bengaluru, India. Her areas of interest and work include methodological concerns in arts and humanities, digital media and cultures, higher education and pedagogy, and access to knowledge. She worked on a report on mapping digital humanities in India in 2016. Her recent work includes writing on the digital turn in archival practices in India, and exploratory research and collaborative work on mapping digital language practices and efforts to create a multilingual internet. 

Paper Title: “Thinking/Doing DH in India: Notes on Infrastructure and Multilinguality” Virtual Session #5 Digital Infrastructure (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens, MISt., MA, Ph.D., L.M.S., is a medievalist and academic librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga and associated scholar with the Centre for Medieval Studies. She is co-Director with Miguel A. Torrens of the digital humanities project Baptisteria Sacra Index at the University of Toronto. Areas of research include liturgical objects, altars, baptismal fonts and medieval iconography. harriet.sonne@utoronto.ca . For a recent list of publications see, https://utoronto.academia.edu/HarrietSonnedeTorrens.

Paper Title: Digital Humanities, Iconography and Visual Culture.” Virtual Session #8 Digital Art and Architecture (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern

Kirsta Stapelfeldt is a Librarian and the Head of the UTSC Library Digital Scholarship Unit. Her work focuses on the creation of sustainable, open systems for digital scholarship work and OER (open educational resources) for digital scholarship skills. She also works to foster interdisciplinary research practice, particularly for emerging professionals in information/computer science. She has been working with the Dragomans project, including the Trans-Imperial Archives project, since 2014. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Panel Title: “Citationality and Journalism: Investigating Sourcing with MediaCAT and Other Online Datasets.” Virtual Session #17 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern) 

Nicole Starosielski, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, is author or co-editor of over thirty articles and five books media, infrastructure, and environments: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” series at Duke University Press. Starosielski’s most recent project involves working with the subsea cable industry–which lays the transnational links of the internet–to make digital infrastructures more sustainable. She is a Co-PI on the Sustainable Subsea Networks project funded by the Internet Society Foundation. 

Paper Title: “What’s the Carbon Footprint of the Internet? Methodological Tensions and Alternative Approaches to the Climate Impacts of ICT.” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Larry Switzky, Associate Professor, Department of English and Drama, University of Toronto Mississauga

Roundtable title:  “Organizing a Game Studies Research Network.” Virtual Session #9 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Lloyd Sy is a PhD Candidate at the University of Virginia, where he is completing a dissertation on deforestation in American literature from the long 19th century. At UVA, he serves as Project Manager for the Collective Biographies of Women project, run by PI Alison Booth. His work has appeared in Early American Literature. 

Paper Title: “Race and Collective Biography: Annotative Data and Empire in Late Victorian England.” Virtual Session #15 Text and Culture, Digitally (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

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PARTICPANTS T-Z

Shanmugapriya T’s research and teaching interests include an interdisciplinary focus in the areas of digital humanities, digital environmental humanities and digital literature. She is particularly interested in building and applying digital tools and technologies for Humanities research. She completed her Ph.D. at Indian Institute of Technology Indore, India. She was an AHRC Postdoctoral Research Associate at Lancaster University, UK. She is currently working as a postdoctoral scholar at University of Toronto, Canada. She has published papers in national and international journals such as DSH, DHQ and EBR etc. She is one of interim executive committee members of DHARTI. 

Paper Title: “Digital Interactive Game: Stories of Four Historical Water Tanks of Karur, South India.” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am)

Jamie Takaoka (they/he/she) is a second-year Master’s candidate in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Carleton University, on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishnaabeg people (also known as Ottawa, Canada). Jamie is also a part of the Carleton Digital Humanities specialty program, as well as an inaugural board member of its graduate student society. Their research interests are primarily in critical discourse studies, language and gender identity, and social media as an educational tool. They hope to begin research on discursive constructions of gender diversity in Canadian healthcare this fall, under the supervision of Dr. Rachelle Vessey. When they are not learning about language, they are learning about food science and folklore on Youtube, experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen, or exploring the Ottawa area for good food, music and picnic spots. 

Poster Title: “The Authority of the Influencer: A Case Study of Language, Power, and Communication Strategies in an Instagram Post.”

Cassie Tanks is an archivist, and aspiring historian. Cassie earned a BA in History at San Diego State University, where she gained research interest in the digital humanities, Cold War, and liberation. She expanded upon her interests at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a MS in Library Science and was selected as a Carolina Academic Library Association associate. At UNC, Cassie developed the UNC Story Archive, published as “‘Can You Hear Me OK?’ Launching a Story Based Archive During COVID-19” in the Visual Resources Association Bulletin, and developed an exhibit, Queerolina: A Spatial Exploration of LGBTQiA+ Experiences Through Oral History. She also is a research assistant for Dr. Angel David Nieves and his 3D spatial history publication, Apartheid Heritage(s). Cassie will begin pursuing a PhD in World History at Northeastern University where she hopes to deepen her engagement with public facing work.

Paper Title: “The Case for Place and Space: Critical Mapping as Reparative Work in Archives and Public Digital Humanities.” In-Person Session #8 Critical Mapping (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Merve Tekgürler is the co-founder of Cistern and a PhD student in History at Stanford University. They have a BA degree in History and Social and Cultural Anthropology from Freie University, Berlin. In their dissertation research, Merve is working on Ottoman-Polish borderlands in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a focus on changes and continuities north of the Danubian River in relation to Russian and Austrian imperial policy. Merve’s interest in spatial analysis and digital humanities is related to understanding human geography as an integral part of history. Aside from the Cistern project, Merve is working on training a handwritten text recognition model for eighteenth century Ottoman Turkish and is working as graduate mentor at Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) at Stanford. Outside the academia, Merve enjoys scuba diving, playing Animal Crossing, and traveling. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Alex Tigchelaar is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, PhD student and researcher. Since 2000, she has created plays, burlesque, film, street performance and conceptual art that have centred both the histories and presence of sex workers. Her interdisciplinary activist performance partnership The Viminal Space was featured at the AGO in 2016 and Toronto’s Nuit Blanche in Since 2014, Tigchelaar has co-created performance and oral history presentations with the survivors of The Huronia Regional Centre. As the research and development coordinator for Concordia’s Institute for Urban Futures, Tigchelaar developed and hosted workshops and panels with safe drug consumption site advocates and sex worker rights activists around Covid-19 response. She is currently working on a project called La Ville Extraordinaire in collaboration with Concordia’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and Stella, l’amie de Maimie, where she is recording the oral histories of sex workers who worked in Montreal from the 1970s to the early 2000s. 

Paper Title: “Je fonds avec toi (I Melt/Archive with You).” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern) 

Gelila Tilahun is a research fellow at the DEEDS Project and the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC/UofT. Her research interest lies in computational methods for textual analysis. She is currently working on understanding how language changes in response to large-scale historical events. Previously, Gelila has worked as a research fellow in the field of bioinformatics, primarily investigating the application of text mining and language model techniques to identify regulatory elements in the non-coding regions of the DNA. Gelila holds a PhD in statistical sciences from the University of Toronto. 

Panel Title: “Computing Words and Reading Between the Lines.” Virtual Session #12 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Prateeksha Tiwari is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Education, University of Vienna. Her current specialisation is comparative and international education. She has previous work experience with developing critical, contextual educational technology regimes in rural Indian and rural Chinese schools. Her major in Masters was China Studies and she has taught Chinese language at University of Delhi for five years. Her research interests include educational technology for sustainable development in the Global South, rural education, decolonial approach to social use of technology, and philosophy of technology. 

Paper Title: “Radical Digital Pedagogies in Rural Indian Education: Exploring Alternative Regimes of Educational Technology Use in Rural Schools.” Virtual Session #3 Digital Pedagogies (Friday, September 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Miguel A. Torrens, MA, MLS, is a bibliographer for Italian Studies, Latin American Studies, Philosophy  and Spanish at the Collection Development Department, University of Toronto Libraries. He has worked for the Oxford University Library System, Oxford, UK, as a subject consultant in 2007-2008. He is co-Director of the digital humanities project, Baptisteria Sacra Index at the University of Toronto and co-editor of the book The Visual Culture of Baptism (Ashgate, 2013) with H. Sonne de Torrens. For current publications see, https://utoronto.academia.edu/MiguelTorren.

Paper Title: “Digital Humanities, Iconography and Visual Culture.” Virtual Session #8 Digital Art and Architecture (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Vanessa Nicole Torres (She/Her/Ella) is a first-year World History Ph.D. student and 2021-2023 HASTAC Scholar at Northeastern University. Her research works to further develop skills in the digital humanities emphasizing the importance of generational and emotional approaches in documenting Queer Latina/o/x oral and visual histories. Prior to pursuing her doctorate, she graduated from the University of California, Irvine with a Bachelor of Arts in Chicana/o/x-Latina/o/x Studies and a double minor in Latin American Studies and Literary Journalism. At UC Irvine she was recognized with the Order of Merit Award, the Caesar D. Sereseres Outstanding Service Award, and the Outstanding Chicano/Latino Community Engagement Award for her academic excellence, leadership activities, service contributions, and original research. She graduated among the approximate top 2% in the Social Sciences in her class. 

Paper Title: “Reimagining Latiné Undocu/Queer Digital Archive Practices.” In-Person Session #7 Lightning Round (Saturday, Oct 1, 1:30pm Eastern)

Christine Tran is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Their research explores the relationship between digital labour & domestic space in Canadian women’s livestreaming. Christine is a Research Assistant for Cultural Workers Organize and a Junior Fellow at Massey College.

Panel Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Aaron Tucker is currently a PhD candidate in the Cinema and Media Studies Department at York University where he is an Elia Scholar, a VISTA Doctoral Scholar and a 2020 Joseph Armand Bombardier Doctoral Fellow. He is currently studying the cinema of facial recognition technologies and its impacts on citizenship, mobility and crisis; his publications include “The Citizen Question: Making Identities Visible Via Facial Recognition Software at the Border ” in IEEE Technology and Society, and “Solving the Conflict Between Breathability and Masked Faces within Facial Recognition Technologies” in Afterimage. He recently completed work as a Visiting Doctoral Scholar at the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University, as a Doctoral Scholar in Residence at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London UK, and is a participant in the forthcoming Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy Summer 2022 in Berlin, Germany. 

Paper Title: “Working or Not Working with Problematic Data: The Right to Look and the Forming of Political Subjects within Facial Databases.” In-Person Session #5 Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Daniel Ungureanu is a graduate teaching assistant and PhD candidate in Visual Arts at the George Enescu National University of the Arts (Romania). He has studied Epidemic Theories and Epistemic Practices at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design (UGOT Gothenburg, 2021-2022), Theory and Practice in the Visual Arts at the Faculty of Visual Arts and Design (UNAGE Iasi, 2018-2020), audiovisual production at the Escola das Artes (UCP Porto, 2016-2017). His areas of interest include digital culture, social media ideologies and power relations. 

Paper Title: “The Pandemic Imaginary and the Climate of Fear: Digital Portraits of the New Coronavirus Fostered by the News Media in Romania.” Virtual Session #1 Engaging, Shaping and Transforming the Digital Commons (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Elena Vasileva is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. Elena’s research deals with the relations of art and life in various contexts, with a focus on literary modernism. Her dissertation studies the memory of Russian modernism and looks at how this memory was formed in memoirs and literary fiction that were created after modernism ceased to exist as a cultural institution. Elena is interested in how a self, both individual and cultural, is constructed through literary means, performative practices, and mnemonic techniques. Her engagement with the Digital Humanities and such coding languages as TEI is inspired by the same interest in the process of how a narrative is built. 

Roundtable title: “Digital Dostoevsky or the Challenges of Doing Multilingual DH.” In-Person Session #6 (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Hunter Vaughan is Senior Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge. Dr. Vaughan is the author of Where Film Meets Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2013) and co-editor (with Tom Conley) of the Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (Anthem Books: London 2018/2020). His most recent book, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: the Hidden Environmental Costs of the Movies (Columbia University Press, 2019) offers an environmental counter-narrative to the history of mainstream film culture and explores the environmental ramifications of the recent transition to digital technologies and practices. He was a 2017 Rachel Carson Center Fellow and is a founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Press). He is Co-Principal Investigator, with Pietari Kaapa, on the AHRC-funded Global Green Media Network, and is also a Co-PI on the Sustainable Subsea Networks project funded by the Internet Society Foundation. 

Paper Title: “What’s the Carbon Footprint of the Internet? Methodological Tensions and Alternative Approaches to the Climate Impacts of ICT.” In-Person Session #2 Critical Making and Practice in/with Body and Environment (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Bruno R. Véras is a historian and cultural producer native of Recife, Brazil. His research interests include the African Diasporas, West African history, the transnational history of slavery, and the memory of slavery and reparations. His work also focuses and engages with public history, digital humanities art education, and creative scholarship. He was the UNESCO consultant for African-Brazilian studies and museum exhibitions at FUNDAJ, Brazil (2014) and directed the awarded anti-racism art-educational projects in the Global South (2015). He produced and directed several documentaries, video series and podcasts in Egypt, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, and Canada. He is currently a sessional lecturer for the M.A. program in Museum Studies at the University of Toronto and Ph.D. candidate in History at York University and the director for the art-based public history UNESCO project Fragments of Memory: Artistic Representations of Diaspora Lives (Slave Route Project, UNESCO). 

Paper Title: “Pages of Resistance: A DH Exhibition on Black Literacy and slavery in the African Diasporas, 1835.” In-Person Session #5 Digital Archives (Saturday, Oct 1, 10:45am Eastern)

Sai Vidyasri Giridharan (she/her; vidya1997@gmail.com) is pursuing her M.Des in Human-Centered Design at Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design, and Technology, MAHE, in Bangalore, India. She is interested in understanding and analyzing the intersections of oppression experienced by marginalized populations in the context of wearable technologies and technological mediated spaces. Her current work focuses on critiquing techno-solutionist and techno-surveilled futures that fitness trackers paint, as well as the ableist, classist, and gendered notions of self and the body that such trackers reinforce through the metric of “steps” to health. 

Paper Title: “Care Matters and Justice Dreams: Design Studio Framework, Works, and Insights for Anti-colonial Digital Humanities Praxis.” Virtual Session #4 Care, Empathy, and Healing (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Khanh Vo received her PhD from the American Studies Program at William & Mary and is currently the postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute. Her academic background is in education and public history, having taught secondary school in both the U.S. and Japan, and instructed courses for the American Studies program, National Institute of American History and Democracy, and Keio Program. Her dissertation used the robotic figure to trace the historical relationship between mechanization and human labor in concert with questions of race, gender, design, and labor. Dr. Vo has worked with museums and history organizations such as the Mariner’s Museum, W&M Libraries Special Collections Research Center, and LancasterHistory. Dr. Vo’s research has been presented at the American Studies Association, International Committee for the History of Technology, and National Council on Public History, and National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

Roundtable title: “Reading Digital Humanities Projects.” Virtual Session #13 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm)

Camila Walls Castillo is a Master’s candidate with the Department of History at the University of Toronto. A Latinx historian of the late medieval and early modern world, her research centers on popular piety and the tensions between religion and society across the post-Tridentine transatlantic. More specifically, she is interested in eschatology and cosmology in the Christian imagination, and the cult of saints as a focal point for Catholic cultural diffusion in colonial Latin America. Additionally, Camila is interested in digital mapping as a tool for uncovering gendered social realities within the early modern urban landscape. She hopes to continue her work in the Digital Humanities through the completion of a Master of Information with University of Toronto’s iSchool. 

Paper Title: “Working Women: Tracing Patterns in Textile and Sex Work in Sixteenth Century Florence.” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Amanda Wasielewski is a researcher and lecturer in Art History at Stockholm University. She is currently part of the Metadata Culture project Sharing the Visual Heritage, focusing on the impact of digital tools in art historical scholarship and collections. She is the author of Made in Brooklyn: Artists, Hipsters, Makers, Gentrifiers (Zero, 2018) and From City Space to Cyberspace: Art, Squatting, and Internet Culture in the Netherlands (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), and Computational Formalism: Art History and Machine Learning (MIT Press, forthcoming). Wasielewski has taught social media and internet studies at the University of Amsterdam, architectural history at the Spitzer School of Architecture, and modern art history at Lehman College in New York. 

Paper Title: “Decolonizing WikiArt: A Critical Analysis of Art Datasets in the Digital Humanities.” Virtual Session #8 Digital Art and Architecture (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Andrea Whiteley received her PhD from the University of Calgary in Communication Studies. As a caregiver of a person with a disability, she is passionate about improving the quality of life for people living in a disabling context. Dr. Whiteley’s extensive research expertise focuses on open access to social sciences research and the public good, knowledge mobilization and research impacts. Her dissertation focused on understanding access to the latest social sciences and humanities research for people outside of academia who stand to benefit from it. She has also written about climate change fiction and has participated in many qualitative research projects in the fields of communication, health, and the environment. She has worked previously as a research coordinator for the University of Calgary Faculty of Communication and Culture (currently the Department of Communication, Media, and Film) and has many years of research grant writing experience. Andrea has completed a post-doctoral project at Simon Fraser University evaluating the Community Scholars Program that allows community-based and non-profit organizations to access academic research. 

Paper title: “How Web of Science database and search engine excludes disability studies perspectives from research.” Virtual Session #5, Digital Infrastructure (Friday, Sept 30, 10:40am Eastern)

Jermaine Williams is a graduate of the Master of Information in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His undergraduate study in digital humanities and new media theory focused on Black voices in digital spaces, consumer culture, and affective design in web platforms. Following his study of digital media, specifically web and its effects on emotion, Jermaine’s research at the Faculty of Information explored the fields of user experience design and game user research and design. He also works as a web and UX designer with Interactive Ontario, an industry trade association promoting the growth and diversity of the interactive media industry in Ontario. He also serves as a member of the Centennial College Interactive Media Management Program Principal Advisory Council.

Roundtable Title: “Notes from the Trans- Feminist Queer Digital Praxis Workshop: Heavy Processing at the Digital Research Ethics Collaboratory & the Cabaret Commons.” Virtual Session #10 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm)

Jereme Wilson (he/him) holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in history and minoring in English from Grant MacEwan University and is currently getting his Master’s in Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. He is now an executive member of the Greater Edmonton Library Association and volunteers for the YEG Police Violence Archive.

Paper Title: “Documenting Harms through the YEG Police Violence Archive Project.” Virtual Session #14 Critical Digital Resistance (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern)

Caroline Winter (she/her) is an INKE Partnership postdoctoral fellow in open social scholarship in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) at the University of Victoria. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Victoria, and her dissertation examines intersections between Romantic Gothic literature and the rise of commercial society. Caroline is currently pursuing an MLIS at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies. Her research interests include Romantic literature, women’s writing, digital humanities, digital libraries, and open scholarship. 

Paper Title: “Recovering Susan Ferrier and Other Forgotten Writers with Wikidata.” In-Person Session #1 Digital Literary Analysis (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern) 

Jessica Duffin Wolfe is a Professor of Media and Creative Arts at Humber College in Toronto, where her teaching focuses on immersive narrative, digital journalism, code for storytellers, and interactive design. She has worked previously as a web developer, a design history instructor at the Ontario College of Art and Design University, and as the founding editor-in-chief of The Toronto Review of Books, an online magazine that published from 2011 to 2018. She holds a PhD in English and Book History from the University of Toronto, where she taught courses on the novel and the history of reading. Her recent work explores connections between genres and eras and includes the experimental immersive media project The Thomas Booker Rare Fish Library and essays on literature and on digital culture for The Literary Review of Canada and The Walrus. 

Paper Title: “The Social Fantasy of VR: Empathy, the Metaverse, and the Technology of Fiction.” In-Person Session #1 Digital Literary Analysis (Saturday, Oct 1, 9am Eastern)

Chloe Wong-Mersereau is a Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Fellow completing her master’s in social cultural anthropology at the University of Toronto with Dr. Holly Wardlow and Dr. Janelle Taylor. Her research interests include aging diasporas; immigrant health, dementia, and disabilities; medical institutions; sensory ethnography. She completed her undergraduate degree in anthropology and Indigenous studies at McGill University in 2021. Wong-Mersereau became a frontline worker with the Canadian Red Cross during the first wave of COVID-19 in long term care homes, testing clinics, homeless shelters, and the housing crisis project in Montreal. This involvement has developed her interests in institutional ethnographies, storytelling, and community-based methodologies. As a Chinese Canadian, Wong-Mersereau is particularly interested in the experience of racialized people and their experiences in the medical system. This informs the critical work she does as a research assistant on the Frictions of Futurity team. 

Paper Title: “Layered Temporalities: Complicating the Narratives of Liver Transplant Survivors through Critical Discourse Analysis and Digital Storytelling.” In-Person Session #11 Cultural Studies (Saturday, Oct 1, 3:15pm Eastern)

Shengsong Xu is a junior year undergraduate student at University of Toronto Scarborough, he is a computer science co-op specialist in software engineering. He is currently working as a software developer at UTSC Library Digital Scholarship Unit. The work is to develop a web crawler and visualization tools to help Dr Alejandro Paz on his research. He is enthusiastic about computer science and planning to pursue a graduate degree in computer science after graduation. 

Panel Title: “Citationality and Journalism: Investigating Sourcing with MediaCAT and Other Online Datasets.” Virtual Session #17 (Friday, Sept 30, 4pm Eastern) 

Adrien Zakar is a historian of science and technology with expertise in maps, visual practices, and spatial history. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Previously, he received a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University in 2018 and then worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center and a lecturer in the Department of History at the same institution. Using a new range of archival sources in Ottoman, Turkish, Arabic, and French, Adrien’s work joins historical research with an interdisciplinary approach to science and technology studies, critical geography, and war studies. 

Panel Title: “Towards Non-Imperial Historical Ontologies” Virtual Session #11 (Friday, Sept 30, 2:20pm Eastern)

Yuxing Zhang is s PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, where she is also a Graduate Fellow at the Critical Digital Humanities Institute (2021-2022) and the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (2022-2023). Her research interests include critical data studies, media theory, agroecology and biotechnology, ethics of AI, media infrastructure, space media, and more-than-human ethnography. Her works are published in Media, Culture & Society, Roadsides, and Canadian Journal of Communication. Yuxing teaches courses on the ethics of AI/human values in data sciences (graduate-level), and information and power (undergraduate-level) at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. 

Paper Title: “Conceiving Sound: Emotional AI in China.” Virtual Session #4 Care, Empathy, and Healing (Friday, Oct 1, 10:40am)

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