The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and the Maker Lab in the Humanities would like to congratulate Trish Baer and Lawrence Evalyn, both of whom received the 2013-14 “Digital Humanities Praxis Innovation Award” at the University of Victoria (UVic).
For the 2013-14 Award, students from across the UVic were invited to submit projects (of all types, in a variety of formats) that demonstrate scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication. This year’s two successful projects met or exceeded the following criteria: 1) they were completed within the course of study for an 2013-14 undergraduate or graduate class in any department at UVic; 2) they met the course’s stated learning outcomes or expectations; 3) they demonstrated an innovative use of digital technologies for research, teaching, learning, or communication; and, 4) they blended computational methods with a critical approach to a humanities question or problem.
Baer’s doctoral dissertation, “An Old Norse Image Hoard: From the Analog Past to the Digital Present” unites the long established field of Old Norse Studies with the emerging field of Digital Humanities. Baer’s work is based on extensive original research of illustrations in manuscript and early print sources that preserve the history of illustrations of Old Norse literature. In addition to exploring the transmission, reception, and remediation of illustrations, Baer’s dissertation documents her creation of an XML digital image repository named MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository). MyNDIR was launched at the UVic’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (June 2013): myndir.uvic.ca. MyNDIR’s model represents a second-generation digital image repository that models academic standards and expands the tools and resources of Digital Humanities. Baer’s dissertation promotes visual literacy, advances knowledge dissemination, and benefits scholars in the fields of Old Norse studies, Book History, Art History, Visual Studies, and Cultural Studies, as well as members of the general public with an interest in Viking gods and heroes.
Lawrence Evalyn’s web-native essay for English 507 (Spring 2014), “Male and Female Gothics: A Computational Approach,” transforms the index of a bibliography into a gallery of graphs in order to investigate the gendered trends behind 70 motifs in 208 eighteenth-century Gothic novels. Resisting simple binaries in both graphic design and literary analysis, it argues that, in the wider perspective of the genre, gendered outliers are generally male, rendering the Female Gothic indistinguishable from the Gothic itself.
For the Award, both of these students will receive a certificate of recognition, together with a 2015 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) scholarship.
Please join us in congratulating this year’s two award winners for their innovative and inspiring research!