This post is part of the Meet the ETCL Team series, which introduces the wonderful people who work in the lab and who have worked with us in the past.
Alix joined the lab in January 2019 as a Digital Scholarship Fellow. She is a PhD Candidate in the English department at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where she is writing a dissertation on twentieth-century Indigenous writing in Canada.
Part of Alix’s dissertation is a TEI edition of E. Pauline Johnson’s Legends of Vancouver (1911). She’s creating it in partnership with SFU libraries, and it will be hosted there, along with a digital image gallery of the many different Legends of Vancouver book covers. She has been doing some TEI work with CWRC on The People and the Text project, and she’ll spend her time in the lab developing the TEI component of her dissertation. Her research involves comparing multiple editions of texts, so collation tools like Juxta Commons are apps she could not do without.
Alix is working on a number of projects related to her doctoral research. She recently published a paper in Canadian Literature about the publication history of Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed (1973) and the excised pages she found in the archives at McMaster University. As part of her research, Alix (and her supervisor Deanna Reder) visited Campbell at her home in Saskatoon and consulted with her while writing the article. As a result of her discovery of these excised pages—which Campbell believed had been destroyed when the novel was first published—McClelland and Stewart is going to republish the book with these pages finally included.
Another satellite project Alix is working on involves republishing Legends of Vancouver with the University of Manitoba Press’s First Voices, First Texts series, under the new title of Legends of the Capilano – this is the title that Johnson had originally intended for the collection of stories, that were based on the oral narratives of Squamish storytellers Chief Joe Capilano and Mary Agnes Capilano. The proceeds from this edition will support the Chief Joe Mathias BC Aboriginal Scholarship Fund, a scholarship administered by the Squamish community that Chief Joe Capilano and Mary Agnes Capilano belonged to.
Alix has attended DHSI for the past six years and co-taught the Drupal for Digital Humanities course last year, so she knows a lot of people from the lab in that context, and is enjoying working together in this new way. Alix recently moved to Nanaimo from Vancouver, so she’s enjoying having a community of like-minded people on Vancouver Island.
When she’s not in the lab, Alix enjoys watching Netflix, hiking and being in nature. She also enjoys reading supernatural and historical fiction, and even did her undergraduate thesis on Harry Potter. Trish introduced her to Thingiverse on her first day in the lab, and she has already 3D printed a Luna Lovegood wand.