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 Digital Humanities Research Lead 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lee is currently on a Co-op term at the University of Victoria, where he is pursuing a Computer Science degree with a focus on software systems. Eager to apply his skills, he contributes part-time to the ETCL team, maintaining and developing the HSSCommons website. At the same time, he works full-time with Research Computing Services (ARCsoft) in software and web development. When not punching away on a keyboard, Lee can be found making music, dancing, or exploring new corners of the globe. The idea of building software from anywhere in the world fuels his boundless inspiration and love for technology.

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

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.

Stephanie Posthumus is an Associate Professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, where she teaches comparative literature, literary and critical theories, animal studies and eco-fiction. A pioneering scholar of French ecocriticism, plant and animal studies, and post humanism, she has published French Écocritique: Reading Contemporary French Fiction and Theory Ecologically (2017), French Thinking about Animals (2015), and Entre les feuilles: L’imaginaire botanique contemporain (2024). In the ETCL, Stephanie is a Visiting Scholar working on projects related to open social scholarship.

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.

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. His Twitter handle is @timsobie.

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

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.

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).

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.