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.
Matt was first introduced to the lab in 2010, as a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University for Editing Modernism in Canada (EMiC), one of the lab’s partner projects. He joined the lab in 2013–2014 as a postdoc for another partner project, the Modernist Versions Project (MVP). As part of this postdoc, a joint position shared between the ETCL and UVic’s English department, he and Stephen Ross developed and co-taught a course, Versioning & Collation in the Digital Environment at DHSI 2013.
A discovery of James Joyce materials in UVic’s Special Collections during Matt’s MVP work led to another postdoc in Special Collections, the first for UVic’s library. This unique opportunity to do interdisciplinary, collaborative work in Special Collections led to other library projects, including editing the essay collection Fronts of Modernity: The 20th-Century Collections at the University of Victoria Libraries and creating the digital exhibit From Paris to Victoria: Gisèle Freund’s James Joyce Photographs with Kathy Bohlman.
Matt is currently the Digital Scholarship Librarian and French subject librarian at UVic. The DS Librarian is a new position based in the Digital Scholarship Commons. It involves lots of collaboration, consultation, and connecting researchers with the digital resources they need to research, learn, and teach.
Matt is still involved in the lab: he and Randa run the Digital Scholarship on Tap interdisciplinary lecture series; he is part of the Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons that are coordinated by the lab and UVic Libraries, and he consults with Open Knowledge Practicum Fellows as part of the Open Knowledge Program operations group. He also co-taught the DHSI course Understanding the Pre-Digital Book at DHSI from 2015–2018 (you can read about this course in Doing Digital Humanities).
Matt’s favourite memory of working in the lab is gathering together on Friday afternoons for “teambuilding” at the pub to continue conversations about projects, questions, and ideas. The emphasis on collaboration and experimentation still influences Matt’s work, especially since his role as Digital Scholarship Librarian involves helping researchers create things in new ways.
When he’s not at work, Matt (a Ravenclaw) likes playing soccer with fellow ETCL alum Daniel Powell, spending time with his family, and trying to find time to sleep.