I am pleased to say that we applied to Carleton University’s internal Multidisciplinary Research Catalyst Fund for funding to lay the groundwork to transfrom the X-Lab from ‘virtual’ into something much more real - and we got it!!
Who are the ‘we’ in this?
There’s myself and Jen Evans from History; Laura Banducci from Greek and Roman Studies; Stephen Fai, Mario Santana-Quintero, Johan Voordouw from Architecture; Monica Patterson from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies; Alan Tsang, Ahmed El-Roby from Computer Science; Carmen Robertson from Indigenous and Canadian Studies; Tracey Lauriault and Sandra Robinson from Journalism and Communications; and Erik Anonby from Linguistics and Language Studies.
External to Carleton, we have partnered with Sarah Kansa, Executive Director of Alexandria Archive Institute / Open Context (San Francisco, California); Sean Tudor, Head, Collections Services and Information Management at Canadian Museum of Nature; Daniel Pett, Head of Digital and IT, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University; Trina Cooper-Bolam, CI, ICSLAC, Independent Exhibition Curator/Designer/Artist; Monique Manatch, Founder and Executive Director / Senior Researcher, at Indigital Cultures / Archipel Research and Consulting; Ryan Dodge, Chief Digital Officer Ingenium Corporation; Ethan Watrall, Associate Professor, Anthropology, Director, Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative at Michigan State University; Sara Perry, Director of Research and Engagement, Museum of London Archaeology (UK); Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage University of Edinburgh; Katherine Cook, Professeure adjointe, Département d’anthropologie, Université de Montréal; Rachel Optiz, Senior Lecturer in Spatial Archaeometry (Archaeology), University of Glasgow; Colleen Morgan, Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage, University of York / Archaeology Data Service.
I am humbled by the trust all of these people have put in this experiment.
Below are excerpts from our application and our plan for the coming year.
Multidisciplinary Research Cluster Overview
We propose to create a Cultural Heritage Informatics Collaboratory (the Greek letter CHI, or X, gives us the ‘X-Lab’). The goal is to foster CHI as an interdisciplinary field studying and pursuing the effective use of cultural heritage data, information, and knowledge for humanistic or scientific inquiry, problem solving, and decision making, motivated by efforts to improve human well-being.
Project Description
Cultural Heritage Informatics deals with managing the problems and potentials that the material past represents, and eliciting new insights. In some cases, there are ethical dilemmas surrounding the question of ‘what to do with’ materials that were collected in an era of colonialism and cultural genocide. In other cases, new cultural heritage materials are being generated faster than we know how to deal with them. Cultural heritage materials are used to remember (or mis-remember) dark episodes in our past. How we choose to approach these materials signals how we will honor and do justice to the various peoples who live on this land now called ‘Canada’. This is the task before us.
At CU there is a nexus of compelling research, skills, and interests that could be united under the ‘Cultural Heritage Informatics’ rubric, but are spread across multiple departments and faculties. This work has brought us individually into collaboration with colleagues at other universities, in museums, and in cultural heritage data repositories. All of this work employs techniques and approaches currently at the forefront of CHI. Similarly, we have students across faculties and programs pursuing theses and major research projects (in our main course streams, as well as the Specializations in Digital Humanities, and in Data Science) largely in isolation from one another and who would benefit from a central ‘home’ where they could obtain support and aid. Our goal is to thread these strands together to create a centre of gravity at Carleton located around our research and expertise. As Kinàmàgawin, Learning Together, Carleton’s Indigenous Strategy guides us, we propose that research in CHI has to provide meaningful partnerships with, and opportunities for, Indigenous students, faculty, and communities. We intend to provide an opportunity for an Indigenous PhD research assistant on this project to meaningfully shape the direction of our work from the outset. We explicitly commit, in the projects that we will generate from the present proposal, to develop ways of integrating student training for Indigenous students to explore/use/develop CHI towards understanding and representing their own history and culture, with us, and with our external partners.
For the present proposal, we will 1) survey, bring together, and identify opportunities in the intersections of the various strands of CHI research at Carleton and with our partners, through a series of workshops; 2) use this information to develop a pilot for a Cultural Heritage Informatics Field School. Digital humanities pedagogy embraces ‘building as a way of knowing’, and so designing and running the Fieldschool becomes a catalyst towards applying for two major transdisciplinary grant opportunities. The fieldschool model gives participants the opportunity for intensive collaborative projects in conjunction with professionals from both CU and our external partners. Our model is the successful Fieldschool run in the US by Michigan State University and directed by our partner Ethan Watrall. The Canada Science and Technology Museum (Ingenium Corporation) has a digital lab and research facility in its new conservation building that will house the Fieldschool.
Having done that, we can then generate at least two interdisciplinary grant proposals; appropriate programs might be the SSHRC Partnership, the New Frontiers in Research Fund, or NSERC Create. The process of putting such grants together can be used to spin out open access publications that will increase our impact, like position papers or white papers (perhaps for the International Journal of Heritage Studies).
Team Strength and Synergy
This project will advance Carleton’s internationally recognized pre-existing strengths in digital humanities, data science, public history, curatorial studies, visualization, and museum/institutional/field partnerships. Our CHI-Lab proposal dovetails neatly with Carleton’s International Strategic Plan, and Carleton’s new Strategic Plan by sharing our research knowledge in the wider community, enhancing our National Canadian museums’ digital capacity and strengths, creating international opportunities for training our graduate students and creating international collaboration opportunities for our graduate students, and differentiating Carleton’s brand in Ontario and Canada more generally.
The strengths of our proposed team lie in how our professional contacts and individual research interests complement each other’s in unexpected ways. For instance, Tsang (an early career researcher) approaches network analysis from a computer science perspective, while Robinson approaches it from a perspective grounded in Communications and Sociology. Cooper-Bolam approaches visitor interaction through socially-engaged performative research; those interactions can be mediated through social networking media. If we bring these three researchers together, what might we find? Similarly, others of us are doing work in identity formation on social media; others in data mining, and big data; others in knowledge graphs and semantic information discovery; others in computer vision, and immersive experiences, on topics as wide ranging as tracking the dissemination of historical disinformation by white supremacists, to the online trade in human remains, to historical network visualization, to immersive memorialization with survivors of Residential Schools. Our faculty colleagues at other institutions are at the forefront of cultural heritage work that straddles the border between archaeological work and living memory (including WWII internment camps in the US), giving their work added social impact. Our team of early career researchers and more established researchers will allow mentorship opportunities to flourish, and will promote fresh insights into the mix.
Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion - EDI
As a group, we come from a wide range of disciplines, career stages, and positionalities that affect our varying abilities to engage with cultural heritage informatics research. We recognize this about ourselves, and about our students and the potential communities whom we might serve in this work. As a group, we can begin by identifying data sources (or their lacunae) in cultural heritage materials that speak to equity, diversity, and inclusion, and building our initial funding applications around these sources/lacunae.
Our understanding of the role and purpose of cultural heritage informatics explicitly identifies the desire to improve human well-being as a motivator, and so we will integrate these considerations into the design of all our outward facing materials, and in the design of our research plans. Our initial call for participants in the Fieldschool will explicitly encourage participants from underserved communities, as well as encouraging final projects from the participants that use cultural heritage materials to help communities flourish in the present. As we grow and develop the X-Lab we will continue to use an EDI- first lens for our knowledge mobilization strategy, for focussing our research questions, and for keeping a space open for others to join us, whose knowledge and perspectives we can honour.
We commit now to build from and with the principles put forward in Kinàmàgawin, and in Carleton’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion plan for this project’s goals and outputs, noting also that Carleton has signed the Federal Government’s ‘Dimensions Charter’.
Project, Communications, and Outreach Plan
Research productivity: we will set up an internal communications channel using Carleton’s instance of MS Teams. Regular informal Brown Bags will be held there to allow us to learn about each other’s research and to plan, setting us up for three formal workshopping events where we will identify two potential funding projects, generate the substance of the proposals, and design the syllabus for the Fieldschool.
Outreach: To put our research into the public sphere for both outreach and pedagogical development, the ‘informatics’ part of the research will be made transparent through the use of ‘literate programming’ approaches to computational notebooks (where observations, analysis, and data are bundled together); these can be served with a platform called ‘Jupyter Hub’ and installed on Carleton’s Openstack infrastructure to take advantage also of high computing resources. A public facing website, with regular updates, video walkthroughs and explanatory materials will contextualize the work. The net effect is that our code, data, and research is archivable and reproducible (through dedicated project space on DataVerse via MacOdrum Library). These same documents can become virtual textbooks and be folded into learning management systems at Carleton or at other institutions, which will further our impact.
Impact on Society: Only the largest cultural institutions have the ability to integrate bespoke solutions; our X-Lab can democratize cultural heritage informatics for a wider audience. Expectations for accessible and reusable data across disciplines and research streams, including commercial, government, and academic contexts, are increasing. Promoting digital data reuse means new tools, skills, professional roles, and communication standards, which will transform the research process. By building in an open-access and open-science research workflow into the X-Lab, we have a positive impact on society by making our materials easily reproducible and re-usable by the wider community.
