Critical Digital Humanities Network

English scholars develop unique resource for asexuality and aromanticism research

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 15:59:22 +0000

English scholars develop unique resource for asexuality and aromanticism research

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 04/11/2023 - 11:59

Cutline

U of T Mississauga's Jenna McKellips, left, and Liza Blake, right, co-created the Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography, which currently contains more than 500 references (photos supplied)

Sharon Aschaiek

Topic

Our Community

Critical Digital Humanities Network

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Faculty of Information

Graduate Students

Humanities

U of T Mississauga

It is now easier for researchers to study asexuality and aromanticism thanks to a new resource created by two University of Toronto English scholars.

Liza Blake, an associate professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at U of T Mississauga, and Jenna McKellips, a graduate student in English language and literature, have co-created the Asexuality and Aromanticism Bibliography.

The bibliography is unique in that it combines references to literature on asexuality, which is defined as having little to no sexual attraction to others, with those on aromanticism, which is defined as not being romantically attracted to others.

While other collections of citations and references on these orientations exist, Blake and McKellips say much writing in this area is scattered across the web, which can make research difficult.

“One of the best ways we thought to advance this field of study was to let people save themselves that extra step and just dive right in and find the relevant writing for them,” says Blake, who has taught classes on early modern asexualities and is co-editing a scholarly collection on this topic.

The project arose through the two scholars’ research process while the bibliography was launched last September.

“A lot of the work academic work on aromanticism is kind of buried within asexuality resources. So we wanted to make those writings visible without conflating them,” says McKellips, whose research focuses mainly on queer virginities – and more narrowly on asexualities – in the context of medieval drama.

The bibliography currently contains more than 500 references to asexuality and aromanticism writings that are primarily humanities- and theory-based resources, although there are plans to add psychological and sociological sources touching on scientific discourses on asexuality that influence theoretical formulations. There are also reading and teaching collections that instructors can use in their courses on asexual or aromantic studies.

In addition to writings by academics, the resource includes work by members of the asexuality, or “ace,” community. The researchers say providing scholars with access to materials beyond peer-reviewed journal articles increases opportunities for truly inclusive research.

“The ace community publishes a lot of reflective and theoretical blog posts and Tumblr posts and videos on asexuality as an identity,” Blake says. “We wanted to include these as part of the archive because they are so thoughtful and meaningful.”

The bibliography was developed with the support of U of T’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI), an institutional strategic initiative that enables transdisciplinary collaborations that deal with questions of power, social justice and critical theory. The initiative provided McKellips with a graduate partner grant to start building the resource.

The project is an example of the type of projects that CDHI’s UX Design for DH Accelerator Program was made for, says CDHI Managing Director Danielle Taschereau Mamers, adding that the accelerator program supports researchers in creating websites, digital exhibitions, databases and other digital projects.

The CDHI Accelerator team, which included Peter Luo, a user-experience design co-op student from the Faculty of Information, and CDHI developer Matt Lefaive, worked with McKellips and Blake to identify accessibility issues on their existing site and to make it a more usable resource for both academic and wider audiences.

“In addition to implementing new design elements and improving the bibliography’s search functions, Peter tested the new design with an array of users to ensure we were meeting the research team’s goals around accessibility and usability,” Taschereau Mamers says.

To make it easy for researchers to find relevant resources, all of the bibliography’s content is tagged from a list of several dozen relevant topics. They can also filter their searches by publication type – for example, article, book chapter or dissertation, and by academic or community writing.

“One of our big goals has been to make sure that we are not thinking about categories like race and disability as secondary to asexuality. A lot of the best writing on asexuality is precisely asexuality as an intersectional category,” Blake says. “Thinking about asexuality as a critical category is something that helps us challenge what makes it difficult for asexual people to exist in the world, and how that is impacted by things like race, disability and gender.”

Researcher's archival exhibition spotlights 70 years of Black performance history in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 29 Nov 2022 20:58:11 +0000

Researcher's archival exhibition spotlights 70 years of Black performance history in Canada

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 11/29/2022 - 15:58

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Seika Boye, an assistant professor, teaching stream, at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, began her career as a professional dancer and now conducts research on dancing and Blackness in Canada (photo by Craig Boyko)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

City & Culture

Black Research Network

Critical Digital Humanities Network

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

An exhibit curated by Seika Boye, a researcher at the University of Toronto, is preserving seven decades-worth of Black dance performance history in Canada.

“It’s About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900-1970 and Now” is an archival exhibition that highlights the undocumented history of Black dance performance in Canada from the time period.

Boye, whose career began as a professional modern and postmodern dance artist, now conducts research and creative works to ensure this history takes center stage after her students continuously asked about the scarcity of resources in Canadian academia about Black performance in the country.

“What is suggested when there aren’t resources to share about something is that it didn’t happen,” says Boye, an assistant professor, teaching stream, at the Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies in the Faculty of Arts & Science. “And of course, I knew that wasn’t true.”

Launched in 2018, “It’s About Time” documents Black Canadian dance performance history through five themes, which include the biographies of influential performers, media representation and reception of performance, and the community spaces that acted as hubs for dance. It also examines the legislation that tried to stop it – and the activism that followed. It has appeared in Ontario and Alberta, and is currently on display at the Audain and Teck Galleries at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C.

“People have always been keeping their personal archives, their family archives. But my work had in mind bringing those resources together, hearing from different people, and doing the archival research,” Boye says.

Each exhibit theme is conveyed through an array of artifacts, including newspaper clippings from the Toronto Daily Star and Globe and Mail that document events and legislation that excluded racial and ethnic groups from dancing or entering venues. “It’s About Time” also features artist portraits and souvenirs such as ticket stubs that showcase community efforts to create spaces for performance and training.

“My research asks, where were Black people dancing in Canada and what kind of dancing were they doing? We then move into questions about where people were allowed to dance, where they felt safe or safer dancing, and where they felt they were free to dance as they wanted to,” Boye says.

Safe spaces included University Settlement House in Toronto or the Negro Community Centre in Montreal, where lessons in tap dance and ballet were held. Additionally, social dances, concerts and recitals were a source of positive outlets for Black youth in the early to mid-twentieth century.

As “It’s About Time grows,” Boye’s other research initiatives on the topic have become intertwined with the exhibit. She is a co-investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant funded project “Gatherings: Archival and Oral Histories of Performance.” Together with researchers across Canada, Boye continues to archive oral histories of Canadian performance, including stories of the performers.

Boye has been interviewing people for more than 15 years as a dance writer and researcher prior to beginning her doctoral studies in 2010. One of those interviews include Ola Skanks, a Toronto-born performer. Skanks married western interpretive dance with dances of the African diaspora and learned dances from Nigerian students on exchange in the 1950s as a U of T student. Her personal collections of photos and newspaper clippings were lent to Boye and are included in the exhibit.

Influential performers in “It’s About Time” also include Leonard Gibson, a self-taught dancer who was born in Athabasca, Alta and raised in Vancouver. Gibson’s career in dance and film includes performances on national television networks such as the CBC and BBC and the 1963 historical drama film Cleopatra.

Through the exhibit, Boye seeks to bridge the past with the present. In inviting contemporary artists to respond to the archive, Boye’s goal is to grow the exhibit’s artistic community and connect with local communities as “It’s About Time” travels the country. For Boye, contributions from modern-day artists are also an avenue to rethink the purpose of a traditional archive.

“I want to ask questions about how we can involve artists in the ways that their legacy is built, in the ways that their art is remembered,” Boye says.

Supported by the Gatherings Project, Boye has collaborated with graphic recorder Adriana Contreras to create visual representations of hours of oral history interviews.

“This is about self-determination, and it’s very important for not only Black but other racialized communities to be a part of how their work is documented and a part of how they are remembered.”

Such contributions included that of award-winning writer and filmmaker Cheryl Foggo, who wrote a poem about her grandmother, whose family prohibited her from dancing. Titled “Even This Story is Secret,” the poem reimagined her grandmother dancing in her own space.

“Less often do we hear the histories of people who weren’t allowed to dance for religious reasons, or because dancing wasn’t considered safe, because dancing was considered a way that negative stereotypes would be reinforced in communities where assimilation was a method of survival,” Boye says.

Boye is a recipient of the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative’s UX Design for DH Accelerator Program. The program aims to deepen the exhibit’s website experience for users and researchers. “It’s About Time” will also be featured as a mobile exhibition at the Annual International Conference & Festival of Blacks in Dance in Toronto early next year. Hosted by dance Immersion and the International Association of Blacks in Dance, the event provides Black dance professionals with the opportunity to increase their visibility and network.

Originally commissioned by Dance Collection Danse, Canada’s only dedicated dance history archive and publisher, “It’s About Time” has since been supported by various university art galleries.

Critical Digital Humanities Initiative to examine history through lens of power, social justice

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 09 Dec 2021 16:16:49 +0000

Critical Digital Humanities Initiative to examine history through lens of power, social justice

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 12/09/2021 - 11:16

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Cara Krmpotich, left, and Heidi Bohaker, right, are leading an international team that aims to decolonize museum practices (photos supplied)

Tina Adamopoulos

Topic

Our Community

Critical Digital Humanities Network

Groundbreakers

Institutional Strategic Initiatives

Robarts Library

Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity

Faculty of Arts & Science

Faculty of Information

From wampum belts to historical photographs, Cara Krmpotich and Heidi Bohaker are seeking to digitally reunite thousands of Indigenous artifacts from the Great Lakes region with the communities who once created them.

The pair of University of Toronto researchers lead an international team that aims to decolonize museum practices by creating a database, or “knowledge sharing system,” that, for almost 15 years, has provided digital access to Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Huron-Wendat artifacts currently scattered in museums throughout North America and Europe.

Since 2005, the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Culture (GRASAC), has worked to both advance public knowledge about the history of Indigenous Peoples who inhabit the Great Lakes and provide Indigenous members of those communities expanded access to their artifacts.

“Settler colonialism is intimately connected with why so much Indigenous culture is in museums around the world,” says Bohaker, an associate professor in the department of history in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“We want to create this [database] in a meaningful and respectful way.”

The Great Lakes Research Alliance is one of several projects recently supported by the Critical Digital Humanities Intitiative (CDHI). The CDHI launched earlier this year and aims to bring together researchers from a variety of fields to analyze and unpack power and social justice from a historical perspective. It supports projects at the intersection of humanities and digital technology, with an emphasis on anti-racist, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship.

Elspeth Brown

“The work that the critical digital humanities does can be quite different from traditional humanities work because most projects are team-based, last for many years and involve technical and computer-related collaborations,” says Professor Elspeth Brown, who is leading CHDI and is also director of U of T’s Digital Humanities Network

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative is one of 19 projects currently supported by U of T’s Institutional Strategic Initiatives (ISI) program, a tri-campus network that unites researchers, students, faculty and external partners to fuel multidisciplinary solutions to today’s problems.

“We’re usually asked to think of technologies as being separate from decision-making that is shaped by social inequalities and bias,” says Brown. “But technologies and algorithms are made by people whose outlooks on the world emerge from these same social structures.”

In the case of the Great Lakes Research Alliance, Krmpotich, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information, received funding for the database project through the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative’s Emerging Projects Fund. The support allowed the alliance to hire Richard Laurin, an award-winning museum project developer, to design a new, password-free interface for a public site of cultural belongings. The project, which first began in 2018, seeks to remove barriers such as logins, especially for Indigenous youth, artists and language speakers. Until now, the password-protected site was built for GRASAC members.

“Indigenous peoples have taken over digital spaces as cultural ones,” Krmpotich says. “It’s an active, productive and creative part of life.”

Sheila Wheesk

Meanwhile, research assistant Sheila Wheesk is seeking to enrich the database of Indigenous artifacts by describing the history and significance of items in the catalog, and including the names of belongings in various Indigenous languages.

“The information from research assistants, whether in English, Anishinaabemowin or Cayuga, will make it easy for anyone to find an item – like a beaded bag, for example – in the system,” says Wheesk who recently shared a Best Graduate Paper Award with other research assistants working on the project.

“That’s why it’s important to have all of this in the database.”

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative is also supporting a number of other important projects.

Patrick Keilty

Patrick Keilty, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, is using support from the Emerging Projects Fund to fill in a gap in the historical record related to sex work, sexuality, and pleasure. Keilty is the archives director of the Sexual Representation Collection, the largest collection of adult film and sex work history in Canada with an emphasis on feminist, queer, trans and kink cultures. The archives contain 1,500 films, 3,000 AIDS-era video tapes and the personal papers of journalists, activists and others related to the global history of sex work and regulation of obscenity.

“Traditional archives and libraries don’t attach the same importance to these histories as they do others, which constitutes an archival gap,” says Keilty.

“What that means for historians, archivists and members of the sex industry is that to construct those histories, you often have to turn to the fan market to source and purchase your primary source materials.”

In other words, historians are forced to source materials from large, private (and often inaccessible) collections. In 2014, Peter Alilunas, a cinema studies professor at the University of Oregon, and Dan Erdman, a film archivist in Chicago, created an online archive space that gathers materials related to adult film history. They invited scholars around the world to collaborate in an effort to make these materials more visible and accessible.

Keilty answered the call.

With support from the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative, Keilty hired a research assistant to write a protocol on digitizing different media formats, which will equip researchers from universities around the world to contribute to the Adult Film History Project.

Through the project, students learn about digitization, the history of the Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library of internet sites and other cultural artifacts, and how to create metadata for effective information retrieval. Students are currently digitizing text-based materials, including case notes from legal cases and safe sex guides, and will soon digitize silent-era films.

“We’re interested in ways to build community, to disseminate items in new ways and create new arrangements online. We want to be a dynamic space that engages with old and new technologies,” Keilty says.

Earlier this fall, nearly 200 people registered for the fourth Digital Humanities Conference, which included presentations by U of T faculty, librarians, post-doctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students. Held online, the event featured conversations on everything from cultural identity and feminism to mapping archaeological sites and archiving music history.

At the conference, Mariam Karim, one of eight Critical Digital Humanities Network graduate student fellows, said the use of social media as a grassroots digital tool for documentation is limited in Arab women’s movements because it is often subject to censorship, and that meaningful engagement with social justice advocates and academics is vital to cite and preserve their work. Thy Phu, a professor in the deparment of arts, culture and media at U of T Scarborough, described a project that puts refugee perspectives front and centre, giving them control of a narrative about migration by documenting their own stories. And Robarts Library’s Alex Jung, an open technology specialist, and Kyla Jemison, a special formats metadata librarian, tackled the reconstruction of digital research infrastructures to community-driven tools such as Wikidata, a free, multilingual, open-knowledge database that makes information easily findable. Through shared meetups and training, participants from U of T Libraries have contributed about 4,000 Wikidata edits spanning a wide range of use cases including improved archival collections discovery and open-source bibliographic data and citation management.

One of the network’s most successful platforms is the Lightning Lunches series. The moderated panels bring three scholars together to discuss various themes centred on equity and justice. Discussions have included surveillance studies and challenges faced by multilingual digital humanities scholars.

The Critical Digital Humanities Network is also developing a spring speaker series and an international conference for next fall – and exploring global partnerships to break barriers in obtaining funding for critical digital humanities scholars.

“It’s often difficult for [critical digital humanities] scholars to find support,” Brown says. “That’s why it's wonderful that U of T gives us the opportunity to create a robust network.”

This article is part of a series about U of T's Institutional Strategic Initiatives program ─ which seeks to make life-changing advancements in everything from infectious diseases to social justice – and the research community that's driving it.