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.
Randa is a MITACS Accelerate and INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Social Scholarship. She is also the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute with Ray Siemens and was the founding Editor of Early Modern Digital Review, a journal that reviews digital projects that study the early modern world.
Currently, Randa is spearheading the Implementing New Knowledge Environment’s Open Scholarship Policy Observatory (OSPO) that collects, tracks, and builds understanding of open social scholarship. With Graham, Ray, and INKE partners, Randa also works on the Canadian HSS Commons, an online space for research and community collaboration. She is also actively involved in carrying out research on various topics pertaining to scholarly research infrastructure, platform studies, and knowledge diversity.
In 2015, Randa joined the lab after meeting some members of the ETCL team at the Leipzig summer school and has held several positions in the lab before her current one, including Research Assistant, Special Projects Coordinator, Lab Mentor, and Assistant Director (Open Knowledge Initiatives). She co-founded and ran the Open Knowledge Program that invites university and community members to carry out research on topics of public importance in the lab.
Randa holds a PhD in English with a focus on Digital Humanities from the University of Victoria; her dissertation involved designing and co-developing several open source web mapping prototypes to geolocate and visualize cultural materials for the humanistic study of space and place. Randa also held a Postdoctoral Fellow position in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto, where she carried out research on scholarly communication, digital humanities, and open scholarship.
What Randa cherishes most about her role is the collaborative spirit with her colleagues and the ever-evolving nature of her work, ensuring that no two days are alike.
Her passion for studying spatiality and maps extends to exploring new places, relishing diverse experiences in cuisine and music, and bringing these inspirations back home. She is currently on a sci-fi binge and particularly enjoys the different interpretations of humanity the genre offers.