Biographies

Ray Siemens (PhD, FRSC; https://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/, ORCID 0000-0002-9599-8795) is Distinguished Professor at the University of Victoria (in Humanities and English, with cross-appointment in Computer Science) and previous Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing (2004-2015). He directs the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) and the SSHRC-funded Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, also founding and now co-directing the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) – having served as member of the SSHRC Governing Council, Vice-President / Director (Research Dissemination) of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations steering committee, and President of the Society for Digital Humanities. In 2019-20, he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Loughborough U and, 2019-22, Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities at U Newcastle.

Graham Jensen is an Assistant Director and Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities) in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria. He is also Principal Investigator of the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project. Previously at the University of Victoria, he was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow and Limited Term Assistant Professor in English. His research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Canadian literatures, modernism, literature and religion, and digital humanities approaches to open publishing, pedagogy, and community-building.

Click here to read Graham’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Adar Charlton (she/her) joins the ETCL as the Coordinator of Operations. She has previously been an instructor of Indigenous literatures at the University of Saskatchewan and Lakehead University after completing a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Manitoba on Indigenous book clubs and community work. She obtained her PhD from the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of English, researching place-based identity in Northwestern Ontario Anishinaabe literatures.

Click here to read Adar’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Dr. Brittany Amell (she/her) joins the ETCL as an INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Social Scholarship and MITACS Accelerate Industrial Postdoctoral Fellow in Open, Collaborative Scholarship (Arts & Humanities). Brittany is an interdisciplinary social sciences researcher, artist, and activist who focuses on social and rhetorical theories of knowledge making and sharing. Her previous research has examined the socio-rhetorical, political, and affective conditions of multi-modal texts, text-making, writers, and scholarly knowledge production. Key themes she’s been interested in have included academic legitimacy, the creation and impact of scholarly texts, re-imagining text-making pedagogies, and the interconnections between rhetorical genre studies, epistemic justice, and activism.

Click here to read Brittany’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Janni Aragon is the Director of the Technology and Society Program at UVic and a Political Scientist by training. Her OKP study stems from wanting to support open scholarship about social media and politics in Canada and the United States. The way that the study is narrowed is by examining prominent hash tags during a set period prior to the federal election in Canada. Likewise, the US case study will examine prominent hash tags during the start of the American Primary season. You can find Janni on Twitter @janniaragon.

Dr. Alyssa Arbuckle (alyssaarbuckle.com) is the Research Infrastructure Grants Officer for the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, cross-appointed with the Érudit Consortium. She is also Co-Editor of the Journal of Electronic Publishing and a researcher with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership, where she co-facilitates its Connection cluster. Until late 2023, Alyssa served as Co-Director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria as well as Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Alyssa holds an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Victoria; her dissertation focused on open social scholarship and its implementation.

Click here to read Alyssa’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Alan is a graduate research assistant at the ETCL. He joined UVic in September 2023 as an MA student in Sociology. His research interests include digital pedagogy, web archiving, postcolonial digital humanities, and open educational resources in the social sciences.

Click here to read Alan’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Trish Baer is an Adjunct Professor in The Department of Medieval Studies, who received her Interdisciplinary Ph. D. in 2013 in the departments of English and History in Art. Her work in Digital Humanities is centered on MyNDIR (My Norse Digital Image Repository; http://myndir.ca), which is an open access website featuring images of Viking gods and heroes from manuscripts and early print sources. Her research interests are focused on the transmission, reception, and remediation of illustrations of Old Norse mythology and literature through illustrations. Her project with INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) will expand MyNDIR’s resources, broaden its discoverability and accessibility online, and explore opportunities for implementing social networking and collaboration features.

Click here to read Trish’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

John Barber teaches in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program at Washington State University Vancouver. His sound+radio art has been broadcast on framework radio, RadiaLx, and Radio Futura, and included in several international gallery and online exhibitions. He developed and maintains Radio Nouspace (www.radionouspace.net) as both a curated virtual listening gallery and a practice-based research and creative practice space. He is also the developer and curator of Brautigan.net (www.brautigan.net), the comprehensive archive for information regarding the life and works of author Richard Brautigan. A new project is The Brautigan Library (www.thebrautiganlibrary.org), a collection of unpublished manuscripts, each with it own, unique story to tell. His twitter presence is @RadioNouspace.

Bernardo Bueno is a writer and lecturer in Literature and Creative Writing at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) in Brazil, where he also acts as permanent professor at the Graduate Program in Letters and Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. He is a Creative and Critical Writing PhD graduate (University of East Anglia, UK). During his period at UVic/ETCL, Bernardo is working on a proposal of a Digital Humanities Lab at PUCRS University. He is also interested in the dialogue between literature and technology (digital creative writing, interactive and procedural narratives, games, geek culture, artificial intelligence).

E-mail: bernardo.bueno [at] pucrs.br

Click here to read Bernardo’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Dr. Hélène Cazes is a professor at the Department of French and the former director of the Program of Medieval Studies at the University of Victoria. An alumna of the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, Ulm), she is “agrégée” de Lettres Classiques and holds a doctorate (Literature of the French Renaissance, 1997) from the University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre. She has been a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She has been awarded the Award of Excellence in Research (UVic, Humanities, 2013) as well as the University of Victoria Leadership Award. She studies the means and notions of knowledge transmission through texts, symbols and narratives.

Her recent funded recent projects addressed bibliography, friendship, humanism, childhood and, more recently, the making of “History of Medicine” and, particularly, the topical narrative of medical discoveries: her project on Vesalius showed the iconic status of scientific heroes and the construction of the idea of progress through history of science. Her new research project, started in 2018, is Perfecta, The perfection of the female body: anatomical discourse and the defense of women, 1500-1700.

See www.helenecazes.info.

Anne graduated from the University of Victoria in 2007 with a master’s degree in English and has been freelance editing since then. She worked as a research assistant in the ETCL during it’s establishment and early days of operation, and is delighted to return and work with the team once again.

Raey Costain (they/them) is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Victoria. They joined the ETCL as a Digital Scholarship Fellow in September 2023. They are the lead researcher and designer in digital communications and media ethics in the Visual Stories Lab (Anthropology). They also work as digital communications lead for the “Visual Storytelling and Graphic Arts in Genocide and Human Rights Education” project (SSHRC Partnership Grant) with Dr Charlotte Schallié (Humanities). Raey’s research interests include collaborative drawing-led methodologies, research communications for digital advocacy, and creative archives. When not finding new ways to visualize data or defending the academic merit of comics, Raey can be found reading, playing the piano, or looking after their large family of plants.

Click here to read Raey’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Kyle is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab and a sessional lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Victoria. He holds a PhD and an MA in English from the University of Saskatchewan. He also holds another master’s, an MSc in Digital Humanities, from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Kyle’s current research focuses on prototyping a network edition that uses a social network visualization as its interface.

Click here to read Kyles’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Mattia De Coene (she/her) is an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria majoring in English and Political Science with interests in both Social and Political Sciences, the Humanities and Literature, and most relevant to the lab, Digital Humanities!

Randa El Khatib is an Associate Machine Learning Engineer at Carfax where she works in natural language processing and understanding. Until early 2024, she was the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the MITACS Accelerate and INKE Partnership Postdoctoral Fellow in Open Social Scholarship at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Editor of Early Modern Digital Review. In 2015, Randa co-founded the Digital Humanities Institute – Beirut — the first digital humanities training institute in the Middle East — with David Joseph Wrisley.

Click here to read Randa’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Jason Ensor works at the forefront of academic technologies. With nearly two decades in arts-humanities historical research and public-facing digital business, he has built a reputation for developing, supporting and fostering the innovative use of technology within higher education as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination. A highly productive professional and scholar, Jason is Manager, Library Digital Infrastructure, at Western Sydney University where he oversees numerous digital services across multiple campus libraries. Holding a Doctorate, a Masters and a Bachelors in arts-humanities fields (Australian Studies, Cultural Studies, Communication Studies), Jason is also ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Foundations certified in IT Service Management, PRINCE2 (Projects in Controlled Environments) Foundations and Practitioner accredited in Project Management. and a 2018 graduate of the Western Sydney University Inspire Leadership program. He is currently completing a Diploma in Digital Information Management and accreditation in Business Analysis, Change Management, Lean Management of Risk, Lean Foundations and Managing Successful Projects.

Sajib Ghosh is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at the University of Victoria. He holds a Master of Arts in English and Applied Linguistics and English Language Teaching, and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English, both from Jahangirnagar University in Bangladesh. He is a Graduate Research Assistant and the Communications Coordinator in the ETCL, where he contributes to the lab’s communication activities and assists with various lab events.

Click here to read Sajib’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Dene Grigar is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. A Professor and Director of The Creative Media & Digital Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, her research focuses on the creation, curation, preservation, and criticism of Electronic Literature. She has authored 14 media works as well as 52 scholarly articles. She also curates exhibits of electronic literature and media art, mounting shows at the Library of Congress and for the International Symposium on Electronic Art and the Modern Language Association, among other venues. With Stuart Moulthrop (U of Wisconsin Milwaukee) she has produced the open source, multimedia book for scholars, Pathfinders, and the forthcoming book of criticism with MIT Press, Traversals.

The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL; etcl.uvic.ca) and the University of Victoria Libraries (uvic.ca/library) are proud to welcome Silvia Gutiérrez De la Torre (El Colegio de México) as Honorary Resident Wikipedian for 2020–21.

Gutiérrez is the Digital Humanities Librarian at the Daniel Cosío Villegas Library at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. She recently led the Wikipedia-Academic Library Liaison project, which established a model for sharing knowledge through Wikimedia projects in Mexican universities. Through this project, which was funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, more than 100 new Wikipedia articles were created and more than 600 were revised, drawing on resources in el Colegio de México’s collections. Gutiérrez is also the co-founder of the Mexico city chapter of RLadies, which promotes diversity in the community of the R programming language.

The ETCL and UVic Libraries are pleased to host Gutiérrez as the 2020-21 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a role that was previously held by Dr. Christian Vandendorpe from 2014–16, Dr. Constance Crompton from 2017-19, and Dr. Erin Glass from 2019–20. This initiative is co-sponsored by the ETCL, UVic Libraries, The Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership (INKE; inke.ca), and the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (ideas-idees.ca). Please direct any inquiries to the ETCL via Alyssa Arbuckle and to the UVic Libraries via Lisa Goddard.

Rachel Hendery is an Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia. Her background is in linguistics and her research mainly focuses on how digital tools and techniques allow us to research language contact and change in new ways. She co-directs the Intergener8 Living Lab within the Institute for Culture and Society at WSU, and also organises DH Downunder, the Australasian Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL; etcl.uvic.ca) and the University of Victoria Libraries (uvic.ca/library) are proud to welcome Nastasia Herold (University of Leipzig) as Honorary Resident Wikipedian for 2021–22.

Nastasia Herold is a German linguist and humanist. She is a PhD student in Romance Philology at the University of Leipzig and has collaborated with the Atikamekw First Nation (Quebec) since 2012. Herold lived and studied with the Atikamekw and, in 2013, initiated a local Wikipedia project to preserve the Atikamekw language and culture in Manawan (one of the three Atikamekw communities). Today, the project is led only by the Atikamekw and receives much attention in the Canadian media and abroad. Together with the Wiki Club Wikipetcia Atikamekw Nehiromowin and Wikimedia Canada, Herold was honored by the Canadian Social Knowledge Institute with the Emerging Open Scholarship Award in 2020.

The ETCL and UVic Libraries are pleased to host Nastasia Herold as the 2020-21 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a role that was previously held by Dr. Christian Vandendorpe from 2014–16, Dr. Constance Crompton from 2017-19, Dr. Erin Glass from 2019–20, and Silvia Gutiérrez de la Torre from 2020-21. This initiative is co-sponsored by the ETCL, UVic Libraries, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership (INKE; inke.ca), and the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (ideas-idees.ca). Please direct any inquiries to the ETCL via Alyssa Arbuckle and to the UVic Libraries via Lisa Goddard.

Matthew Huculak is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Victoria. He holds a PhD in English Literature as well as an MLIS. He is Director of the Modernist Versions Project, Co-founder of OpenModernisms and former Project Manager for the Modernist Journals Project. His research interests include digital scholarship, book history, periodical studies, and libraries.

Click here to read Matt’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Natalie Hutchinson (she/her) is an undergraduate student in the faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria. When she is not studying, she volunteers with the UVIc UNICEF Club as their Social Media Coordinator, and she is also a member of the Conseil Jeunesse de la Colombie-Britannique. She loves to spend her time in nature when she can and has a windowsill full of plants.

Arun is a Ph.D. student at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, working in the Media, Technology, and Culture concentration. His research interests include examining the media history of educational technologies.

Talya started with the ETCL as a graduate research assistant, contributing to the lab’s communication activities across various online platforms and assists with collaborative research projects and planning conferences and events. She now works primarily on the lab’s associated websites and provides technical support on various lab initiatives. Talya holds a Master’s degree in Sociology concentrating in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought (CSPT) at the University of Victoria as well as a BA Honours in Sociology with a minor in Technology and Society from the University of Victoria. Her research interests are the democratization of digital media and digital technologies, knowledge commons, internet decentralization, digital platform and AI capitalism, digital accessibility, user experience (UX) research and design, and techno-social relationships.

Click here to read Talya’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Paula Johanson is a writer and editor. Her Master’s degree in Canadian Literature came thirty years and thirty books after her BA in Writing and a teaching certificate. She coped with PhD envy by obtaining a graduate certificate in Digital Humanities and writing a dozen more books for educational publishers. Paula is an Open Knowledge Practicum Fellow in the ETCL, where she uses her press skills to manage Kashallan Press which releases the new works and re-releases the backlist works of Celu Amberstone in ebook, print-on-demand, and soon audiobook formats, as well as Doublejoy Books with eight of her own new titles.

E. B. Klassen is an environmental technician and activist who is working as a Community Fellow in the lab. He is a board member of the Sooke Transition Town Society, an active member of Zero Waste Sooke, and the organizer of the Sooke Repair Café. He works on the digitalization of Climate Action Plans with an aim to create open-source resources that will be easily accessible to municipalities and climate action groups.

Click here to read E. B. Klassen’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL; etcl.uvic.ca) and the University of Victoria Libraries (uvic.ca/library) are proud to welcome Dr. Amanda Madden (George Mason University) as Honorary Resident Wikipedian for 2023–24.

Dr. Amanda Madden is an Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). Her current area of research focus is the social history of violence in early modern Italy which includes her current book project, Civil Blood: Vendetta Violence, the Civic Elites, and State-Formation in Early Modern Italy (forthcoming, Cornell University Press) and the collaborative spatial history project, Mapping Violence in Early Modern Italy, 1450-1750. Her next book project is a spatial history of gender and crime in early modern Italy examining iterative changes in crime and policing, space, and gender; changes which reconfigured the early modern state. Madden is a former Marion L Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in digital pedagogy at Georgia Institute of Technology, Research Scientist for the Center for 21st Century Universities, and lecturer for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She received her PhD from Emory University in 2011 and her MA in Medieval Studies from The Medieval Institute at Western University in 2005.

The ETCL and UVic Libraries are pleased to host Amanda Madden as the 2023-24 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a role that was previously held by Dr. Christian Vandendorpe from 2014–16, Dr. Constance Crompton from 2017-19, Dr. Erin Glass from 2019–20, Silvia Gutiérrez de la Torre from 2020-21, and Nastasia Herold from 2021-22. This initiative is co-sponsored by the ETCL, UVic Libraries, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership (INKE; inke.ca), and the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences (ideas-idees.ca). Please direct any inquiries to the ETCL via Alyssa Arbuckle and to the UVic Libraries via Matt Hucalak.

Click here to read Amanda’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

John W. Maxwell is Associate Professor & Director of the Publishing Studies Program at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. John’s research has focused on the cultural trajectories of personal and educational computing, the history of publication technologies, the emergence of digital genres, the evolution of digital media, and the future of the scholarly monograph. John regularly teaches a course on text processing histories at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. He has been at work in new media since the early 1990s, especially in web development, educational technology, SGML & XML, and content management.

I am a casual academic, lecturer of English literature, bookseller and the Coordinator of HDR Training at the University of Newcastle, Australia. I completed my PhD in 2020, entitled ‘A Story to Match any Fiction: Environmental Sincerity in Contemporary American Fiction’. My research explores a broad range of contemporary fiction through the lens of ecological theory to demonstrate the underlying environmental consciousness in fiction. I argue that storytelling is incredibly powerful and shapes the way we see and experience the world around us. This places fiction in a position to inform and alter the ways we think and interact with the natural world.

I also dabble in computational stylistics and am working on a collaborative project that examines the semantics behind media communication of gendered violence.

I have a real passion for the humanities and strive to build up and support that passion in others. I am currently developing a program targeting humanities education in the high school setting for schools in regional, rural and remote communities.

Luis Meneses is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and Assistant Director (Technical Development) of the ETCL. He is a Fulbright scholar, and currently serves on the board of the TEI Consortium and on the IEEE Technical Committee on Digital Libraries. His research interests include digital humanities, digital libraries, information retrieval and human-computer interaction. His research at the ETCL focusses on the development of tools that facilitate open social scholarship.

Click here to read Luis’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Eduardo is a Mitacs research intern joining the lab from Mexico. He is an undergraduate student of the University of Guadalajara studying international relations. His research interests focus on digital diplomacy, AI, and its impact in the humanities, and how fake news and misinformation can affect several aspects of society, including politics, conflicts, and social structures.

Click here to read Eduardo’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

James Nahachewsky (PhD) is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Curriculum and Instruction. His research examines the impact of young peoples’ digital reading on teaching and learning, and multiliteracies’ pedagogy towards an education for social justice.

Brent Nelson is Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan where he teaches English Renaissance literature. He is Director of the John Donne Society’s Digital Prose Project and Principal Investigator of the SSHRC-funded research program on The Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland 1580-1700, which aims (among other things) to build a digital archive of historical and literary documents related to early modern collections of curiosities. He is a member of the research team of GEMMS: Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons and a member of INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments.

Faraz Forghan-Parast is a PhD student in Education, Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Victoria. With a collage of experiences in Translation Studies and Computer Software Engineering, Faraz stands at the nexus overlooking where art, technology, and language swirl into each other, and the merging points of these domains in his explorations. His current project, “On a Loom of Code and Colour,” is a software-assisted poetic dialogue with AI, exploring the depths of Persian poetry transcreation. A self-described “nomad,” he views translation not just as a linguistic, communicative endeavor, but as a soulful, romantic journey between cultures, capturing the heartbeats and whispers of diverse worlds. His passion for music resonates through the strings of the Iranian tar and setar, and pulses in the beats of electronic music. In every endeavor, Faraz strives to find and share the profound beauty of interconnected worlds, emphasizing the raw emotion and essence that lie beneath words and melodies.

Click here to read Faraz’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Hanh is a Ph.D candidate in the Faculty of Education (Department of Curriculum and Instruction) at the University of Victoria. Her research investigates instructors’ beliefs and practices about formative assessment in a post-secondary English program. Hanh works in the ETCL as a Graduate Research Assistant, where she works on several team projects and assists with ETCL events.

Click here to read Hanh’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Shera is a visiting master’s student from the University of Cologne (Germany) majoring in Media Informatics. Her research interests are platform studies and AI possibilities. In the lab she contributes to platform research for the Canadian HSS Commons.

Click here to read Shera’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

M.L. Prenger (“Mandy”) is a grad student in the English program at UVIC. She/they serendipitously contacted Trish Baer while working on an archival project regarding Louis Moe’s Valkeryian – and discovered there was a little place for her at University after all! It makes sense that a child born in the remote lands of Northwest Ontario (Thunder Bay) who grew up loving the woods, spending childhood summers immersed in great lake fishing and sharpened stick/imaginary bear hunting along the Kaministiquia, a child who sat in classrooms and frustrated teachers with her near constant daydreams of paddling-to-the-sea, tucking into tea with Mr. Tumnus, or looking down at her wide feet and wondering if she was also in need of an adventure – would eventually find herself working on the MyNDIR project. Myth and legend, trolls and wolves, gods and giants, Norse mythology is full of the good stuff. In her spare time, Mandy thinks about Missed Connections, birding, her children, her dogs, how she has fallen in love with Louis Moe (and how to break it to her partner) and how to be less cringy when interacting with the human world. Mandy will spend her time with the OKP creating Wikipedia pages for Olive Bray (translator: Poetic Edda), Katherine Boult (author, translator: Heros of the Norselands) and Mabel Cummings (author: Asgard Stories), all three women can be found featured on MyNDIR. She is also working on a interactive digital storybook for children on birdwatching.

Pia Russell is UVic’s librarian for Education, Children’s Literature, Indigenous Studies, and Gender Studies. Her scholarship focuses on BC’s social history, the history of the book, digital scholarship, and public history. Pia is deeply committed to the role of libraries as truth-telling institutions and as sites for social justice.

Maggie Sardino is a Mitacs Globalink research intern from the United States. In her role as research intern, she will be developing a research scan on the topic knowledge diversity and the various ways of knowing. She is also providing assistance with the DHSI— Online Edition.

Maggie is a rising senior at Syracuse University (SU) studying writing and rhetoric, citizenship and civic engagement and public communications studies. At SU, she conducts research within the Engaged Humanities Network exploring the best practices of community engagement within the university context. She is also a historical researcher and documentarian with City Scripts, an organization committed to bridging politics and the design of built environments to enact meaningful policy change. She serves as a facilitator and writer with the Narratio Fellowship which equips young refugees the skills and space to share their stories on their own terms. Maggie is invested in promoting more equitable relationships between universities and their surrounding communities as well as equipping under-represented communities with storytelling skills.

Click here to read Maggie’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Charlotte Schallié is an Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her research interests include representations of the Shoah in literature and film, oral history, visual storytelling, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, and Teaching and Learning about the Holocaust.

Lindsey Seatter is a Faculty Member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic U and a PhD Candidate in the English Department at U Victoria. Broadly, Seatter’s​ research focuses on the British Romantic period, women’s writing, and Digital Humanities. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation explores patterns across Jane Austen’s print and manuscript work, the evolution of the novel, and reader engagement with narrative practices. She has given presentations at national and international conferences on female literary networks, reading Jane Austen with computers, expanding the Romantic literary canon (#Bigger6), and teaching digital Romanticism. In addition to her language and literature teaching, Seatter is the Managing Editor of IDEAH Journal, an Associate Director of DHSI, and an Associated Researcher with the ETCL.

Click here to read Lindsey’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Shirin is an M.A.Sc. student in the Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Victoria, where her research focuses on granular materials and flows, developing of kinematic models, and investigating on isotropic and an-isotropic grains’ streams in silos. She is a Graduate Research Assistant at the Electronic Textural Cultures Lab, where she is working on feature comparisons on Iter web development, investigating options for DHSI remote interaction, and consolidating archives of ETCL digital files.profile.

Derek is an undergraduate student at the University of Victoria and is currently taking courses in Computer Science, Music and History. He discovered Digital Humanities from an workshop at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and now helps as an Research Assistant in the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab.

Click here to read Derek’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Lynne Siemens is an Associate Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria. She is focused on economic and community development in rural areas with a specific focus on ways that rural small businesses and entrepreneurs address the opportunities and challenges that exist by virtue of their geographic location. To conduct this research, she traveled to many communities within rural and remote parts of Vancouver Island and the surrounding smaller islands. This work is of interest to individuals, small business owners, and the communities as they work to sustain their communities economically and socially as well as government policy makers. Serving as a management advisor, she is also part of Implementing New Knowledge Environments project and studying INKE to trace the development of a collaboration as it is underway, rather than as reflection at a project’s end.

Tim is the Knowledge Management Technical Coordinator in the ETCL. He works primarily on detail-oriented technical projects in the lab, including web development, data entry, document digitisation, and computer systems upkeep. His previous work in the lab focused on the development of various Wikibooks projects, including The Lyrics of Henry VIII. He holds a BA in English from the University of Victoria, but in the near future hopes to pursue a BSc in Mathematics. His Twitter handle is @timsobie.

Click here to read Tim’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Ann Stahl is a Professor in UVic’s Anthropology Department and an anthropological archaeologist whose long-term research has focused on how daily life in rural West Africa has been reshaped over centuries by involvement in global exchange networks. Her work through ETCL is associated with an SSHRC-funded digital heritage initiative (“Improving African Futures Using Lessons from the Past”) in which she and partners in Ghana are working to develop sustainable and accessible digital heritage resources that help communities to sustain place-based relationships and foster knowledge revitalization. As a pilot for the broader project, she is working with the Banda Heritage Initiative to develop an accessible repository of digital heritage resources to be sustainably curated at UVic along with an exhibit based upon repository resources.

Chris Tănăsescu is a Research Scientist in the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Open University of Catalonia, outgoing Altissia Chair in Digital Humanities at University of Louvain, and Visiting Scholar at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (University of Victoria). He has conducted research, taught, lectured, launched books, and presented performances at universities and institutions in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Vietnam, Australia, Romania, and elsewhere, and before arriving at UCLouvain he served as Coordinator of Digital Humanities, professor of literature and computer science, and founding Director of DHSITE at University of Ottawa, Canada. He draws on natural-language-processing algorithms and multilayer networks in his communal poetry and his hypermedia cross-artform performances. He is an author, editor, or translator of over 25 volumes, the latest of which are a computationally assembled poetry anthology and a topic-modeling-driven intra- and inter-lingual translation poetry collection.

Ansh Thayil is a fourth year undergraduate student at the University of Victoria completing a degree in Computer Science. He is originally from India and moved to Canada to pursue his higher education. While being interested in web development, he also wishes to promote the use of open source technologies in India and other developing countries. His work at the ETCL is focused on the development and maintenance of the lab’s Canadian HSSCommons project – an open source platform for research, education, and collaboration.

Click here to read Ansh’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Jesse “JT” Thomas (they/he) is an MA student at UBC, studying Archival, Library, and Information Science. They primarily work on the IDEAH journal as a copyeditor and proofer. They are also involved in a number of other lab activities, including assisting with DHSI and ETCL events, writing open scholarship annotations and co-authoring posts for the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory.

Click here to read Jesse’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Archie graduated from the University of Victoria at the end of 2023. He is currently working full-time for Research Computing Services, a technology department of the university, and as a part-time contractor for the lab. Archie truly enjoys building software; nothing can make him happier than knowing that his work brings great value for his clients. Archie is always eager to learn more and dedicates most of his time to studying and working to be a better software developer. Working with the lab is certainly a great opportunity for him to achieve that goal. Archie really appreciates the project that he’s assigned to, the HSS Commons, and the people that he gets to work with.

Click here to read Archie’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Daniel (Dan) Tracy is Associate Professor and Head, Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In his role he leads the library-based press the Illinois Open Publishing Network, and open access press supporting scholarly journals, open textbooks, and digital humanities projects. His research focuses on information behavior related to digital publications and digital publishing systems in the evolving scholarly communications ecosystem. At ETCL Dan is a Visiting Scholar doing research related to information behavior with open social scholarship platforms. Additionally, evolving from his prior PhD work in literary studies, he is completing a digital scholarly edition of the 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, which is currently available as a beta site.

Click here to read Dan’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Caroline Winter (she/her) holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Victoria, where her research focused on British Romantic literature with a focus on Gothic fiction and the rise of commercial society. Caroline is currently pursuing an MLIS at the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies, and she is particularly interested in the intersections between library and information science and digital humanities.

Caroline joined the lab as an Open Knowledge Practicum fellow in 2017, started as the lab’s Open Scholarship Facilitator in 2018, and then became a Mitacs Accelerate & INKE Partnership postdoctoral fellow in open social scholarship and the lab’s Assistant Director. She contributes to the Open Scholarship Policy Observatory, has chaired the DHSI Conference and Colloquium, and collaborates on many of the lab’s other activities. To learn more about Caroline and her work, please visit www.carolinewinter.com.

Click here to read Caroline’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

David Wrisley is a comparative medievalist and digital humanist. His research straddles the domains of late medieval court culture, Mediterranean studies, multilingual corpora analysis and the spatial humanities. He founded and organized the first digital humanities training institute in the Middle East in Beirut in 2015.

David Wrisley’s research interests include European and Mediterranean Middle Ages; digital humanities; spatial humanities; digital textual studies; location-based inquiry; participatory mapping; digitally curated landscapes; comparative literature; Francophone literature; Arabic literature; medieval love theory (Islamic and European).

Janine works in the lab via an Open Knowledge Practicum. She holds two master’s degrees, one in Political Science from University of Vienna, and the other in Public Management from FH Campus Wien, Vienna. Currently, as an interdisciplinary (Germanic Studies / Curriculum and Instruction) PhD candidate in Holocaust Education at UVic, she is working in her practicum to develop computer-based tools that ease the learning of difficult history.

Click here to read Janine’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.

Olga Ziminova is originally from Saint-Petersburg, Russia, where she attended a physical-technical high school before switching into humanities and obtaining a BA in French-Russian translation. In 2019, fate brought her to Victoria where she completed an MA in the department of French and made connections with the Digital Scholarship Commons and the ETCL. As of 2024, she is excited to be working as a sessional instructor for her home French department as well as continuing her translation work for the lab!

Click here to read Olga’s Meet the ETCL Team profile.