We’re delighted to announce that Luis Meneses (PhD Computer Science, Texas A&M) will expand his role with the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab for the coming two years as holder of a prestigious MITACS Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship. MITACS Senior Grant Management Specialist Angela Fang wrote Friday to congratulate Luis — a former Fulbright Scholar who has lectured in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia on issues at the intersection of Computer Science and the Arts and Humanities — on his acceptance into this very competitive program.
Entitled “Best Practices and Models for Open, Collaborative Scholarship in the Arts & Humanities,” this project is carried out in partnership with UVic-based ETCL and Toronto-based Iter Canada.
Continuing and building on existing work, especially with projects in Iter’s collaborative research incubator, Luis notes “The objective of this project is to research, design, implement, and document the best practices for the development of open, social, digital projects in the Arts and Humanities on a national scale.” He continues, “I have seen many cases of successful digital humanities projects that fulfill their original objectives and achieve their expected level functionality but are abandoned at some point in time due to different reasons, including loss of funding, change in personnel or simply decay in interest. I believe that it is critical to research best practices for developing, maintaining, and sustaining open, digital scholarship projects in the Arts and Humanities in order to ensure that this critical work does not become abandoned with such high frequency, and instead can be available for study, reuse, and revision by generations of scholars to come.”
The program of research involves work in three phases: an environmental scan, consultations with domain experts, and the development and deployment of open collaborative online projects. The scan will produce an exhaustive survey and literature review of the current practices in open scholarship. Consultations will provide domain experts an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which they interact with open scholarship, useful to them as they consider their engagement with online projects and technologies, and useful to this work because, coupled with the environmental scan, best practices can be readily discerned. Further, gleanings from these two areas of research are put to the test throughout this program of research via the creation of online collaborative projects, carried out in an iterative process in tandem with the other work. In this way, the research is designed to produce valuable contributions along the way toward its capstone conclusions in summer 2022.
About Iter and ETCL
Iter (https://www.itergateway.org), meaning a journey or a path in Latin, is a not-for-profit partnership dedicated to the advancement of learning in the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance (400-1700) through the development and distribution of online resources. The Iter Bibliography includes the largest interdisciplinary collection (more than 1.45 million citations) of secondary source material for the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Iter Press publishes monographs, editions, and scholarly journals, including the Other Voices in Early Modern Europe series; Iter Community facilitates and supports communication, collaboration, and digital project creation for research communities of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL; https://etcl.uvic.ca) engages in cross-disciplinary study of the past, present, and future of textual communication, and is a hub for digital humanities activities across the University of Victoria campus, from coast-to-coast, and around the world. With a mandate including research, teaching, and service activities, ETCL acts as an intellectual centre for the activities of some twenty local faculty, staff, and students as well as visiting scholars (over 150 since inception), who work closely with research centres, libraries, academic departments, and projects locally, regionally, and internationally. Through a series of highly collaborative relationships, ETCL’s larger community comprises over 300 international researchers.