Past Events

Past Workshops

DHSI-East: Digital Archives & Databases (2025)

Gaelic Song and Digital Archives Workshop (2025)

DHSI-East: Understanding and Deploying the Basics of Generative A.I. (2024)

DHSI-East: GIS for Humanities (2023)

DHSI-East: Introduction to Text Encoding (2022)

DHSI-East: Databases (2021)

Past Lectures

Reflections on Ethics and Justice in Metadata in the Age of AI

Dr. Stacy Allison-Cassin, Department of Information Science, Dalhousie University

We seem to be in a new period of technological change. AI technologies are not new; the seemingly rapid expansion of generative AI and the increasing everyday use of AI-driven tools feel different and chaotic. While archives, libraries, and cultural heritage organizations continue to follow descriptive standards that have been in place for numerous decades, if not longer, increased attention on ethical practices relating to appropriate and respectful vocabulary in the representation of peoples, places, and cultures, including the appropriate naming of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples, has put pressure on organizations to make significant change to practice. The proliferation of projects focused on terminology within the library space points to a new “opening” in standard practices related to an emphasis on ethics and justice and to opportunities afforded by technologies. However, there is a tension between the increasing emphasis on ethics in metadata practice and the potential changes to metadata creation practices made possible by AI-driven tools. In this talk, I will discuss the current and future challenges and possibilities in metadata in relation to representation, justice and ethics.

Mecha is not Orga: The Fiction of AI and the AI Industry

Dr. Teresa Heffernan, English, Saint Mary's University

This talk considers the fictional roots of recent claims of AI as an existential risk that have been making headline news. Dating back to Alan Turing, literal readings of fiction, including the threat of superintelligent machines taking control of the world, have long shaped the AI industry. With no basis in science, I argue that this irrational anxiety serves not only as a distraction but as an unconscious defense as it substitutes a new object, autonomous machines, in place of one that cannot be acknowledged, the environmental and societal damage caused by a resource-intensive industry heavily invested in a mechanistic worldview that treats nature, including humans, as a lucrative commodity. The second part of the talk, traces two of Stanley Kubrick’s film projects and their shifting understanding of this technology. If 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) takes seriously intelligent enigmatic evolving machines, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) recounts a dark corporate fairy tale about the production of mechanical androids (mecha) that persists despite the climate crisis.

Keynote From Big Data to Dirt Research: Automated and Participatory Maps of Atlantic Canada's Rural Energy Transitions

Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Geospatial Humanities, Applied Communication Leadership & Culture Program, University of Prince Edward Island

The Atlantic region has deep ties to the primary sector and to what economist E. A. Wrigley called the “solar regime” of energy history. From Acadian marshland agriculture to the fishing, forestry, and upland resettlement of the British period, most economic activity harvested the biomass that plants and animals converted using solar energy. But for a region that is so dependent on these traditional energy flows, we know relatively little about the transition to industrial agriculture and external energy flows in the twentieth century. This paper presents some of the new research on agriculture conducted at the GeoREACH Lab at UPEI, which supports Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History. Using the lab’s historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS), including both QGIS and ArcGIS Pro software as well as historical data development, students have helped to digitize a number of maps and datasets that enhance this research with a focus on Prince Edward Island between 1935 and the present. The approaches range from automated polygon recognition on historical maps, to archival research, oral interviews, and an online participatory mapping project called “The Back 50 Project: Mapping Rural Land Use Change in PEI.”

A Toolkit for Humanities Research and Editing Ancient Documents

Dr. Ken Penner, Religious Studies, St. Francis Xavier University

Although many tools already exist to produce and publish digital editions of texts as well as mark them up so they can be used as the basis for further research, often the scholars seeking to produce these digital texts find the available tools difficult to use together because they were developed for a specific project and therefore lack the flexibility or generality to be used for other texts. The result is that we have been working in isolated “silos,” wastefully using our limited resources to repeat much work that has already been done. 

Our work can advance much more productively if we work together to develop and share tools that are flexible and reusable, tools that work together easily across different projects and corpora. 

Therefore I am developing a software platform called the Toolkit for Humanities Research and Editing of Ancient Documents (THREAD) for producing digital scholarly editions of ancient texts. The THREAD platform will consist of a set of independent but interoperable software modules, each of which performs a specific task. Each module can be used by itself, with the ability to import and export XML that conforms to the international TEI standard. Each module will also be accessible through a standard web services API, allowing them to work together as a single software suite. In some cases, a module will simply be a “wrapper” around existing tools, allowing them to talk to one another. 

My objective for this platform of computer software is to produce a unified toolset for a comprehensive workflow appropriate for ancient texts. The net result should be that scholars of antiquity are able to do more work more easily on the ancient texts we find so fascinating.

Women, Websites, and Wikipedia: Accessible Digital Pedagogy and the Undergraduate Classroom

Dr. Chelsea Gardner, History and Classics, Acadia University

How do you integrate meaningful DH pedagogy into a short, 13-week undergraduate semester? How can we, as educators, empower students to create and mediate digital content responsibly? What specific skills do students need, and what will they learn? In this talk, Chelsea Gardner addresses these questions through the presentation of three case studies that each introduce digital platforms into the undergraduate classroom: Wikipedia Education, Women in Antiquity, and Peopling the Past. These platforms form the basis of classroom assignments that aim to provide students with skills that impart digital literacy and contribute to impactful research through the creation and improvement of globally accessible, open-access resources.