Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
April 2026
- CDH events are open to the TMU community and beyond.
- Also, check out the workshops hosted by the Collaboratory!
The Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) is temporarily located on the 4th floor of the Podium (POD) building (where the School of Law is currently situated) and is planning to have a permanent home in the Library building (LIB) in the future. CDH events are held virtually (on Zoom) and in-person in the TMU Libraries’ Collaboratory.
Join us! If you have an idea for a CDH-hosted event or a question, please contact CDH Director Jason Boyd (jason.boyd@torontomu.ca) or CDH Manager Reg Beatty (rbeatty@torontomu.ca).
CDH Virtual
Drop-Ins
Each month, weekly drop-ins will be dedicated to a specific theme. Tiny Tools Tour, Web Walks, and DH Workbench are explorations of a digital resource or tool for research, creativity, and/or teaching. Stories in Play features discussion of entries in the Playable Stories Archive and episodes of the Playable Stories: Unarchived podcast, both of which are focused on storytelling in games. Reading Bytes is a reading group for discussion of published digital humanities scholarship. DH@TMU Talks feature CDH members presenting their research.
TINY TOOLS TOUR
Tuesday April 7
noon-1:00pm EST on Zoom
Digital Concrete: tools for making visual poetry
Reg Beatty
In 1955, the impetus to create a certain kind of visual poetry appeared simultaneously in Switzerland (with Eugen Gomringer) and Brazil (with the Noigandres poets Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos and Décio Pignatari). Joining forces, they adopted the term ‘concrete’ to foreground the ‘building up’ of poetic materials both visually and sonically.
Join Reg as he shows how concrete poetry was being practiced in Canada in the 60s and 70s. He will then introduce a number of digital tools that allow for unexpected manipulations of text for the creation of digital concrete poems.
FABULUDUS 2026
April 15-21
Fabuludus 2026 Playable Story Arcade
Come visit the Fabuludus 2026 Playable Story Arcade! Showcasing the work of students in the Literatures of Modernity MA Program at TMU, the Arcade will run from April 15th to 21st. Visit https://itch.io/jam/
IDARESU 2026
Hybrid Event: Zoom and In-person at the Collaboratory
April 27 – May 1
IDARE Summer University 2026
Interactive Digital Arts, Research and Education will be running its 2026 Summer University at the end of April. This year’s focus is “Eccentric Tools for Brief, Intense Digital Experiences.”
For more information and to register visit the IDARESU 2026 website.
DH @ TMU
In-person at the TMUL Collaboratory
Thurday April 30
5:00-7:00pm
Ancestral Mist
Jumoke Verissimo
Join us for a multidimensional journey through the Ancestral Mist project, a digital memory space that curates the complex archival narratives of Afro-Brazilian returnees (the Aguda) into an immersive storytelling experience using StoryMapJS.
Ancestral Mist acts as a creative “calling into being” for stories that vanished from the traditional record. The project bridges the 19th century archives of Salvador, Bahia, with the lived realities of returnee communities along the Bight of Benin. By tracing specific lineages through archival materials including the Livros de Notas housed in the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia (APEB), baptismal records in Agoue, and oral speculations of return, the project moves beyond the “homogenized” data of the archive to recover the weight of names that were nearly lost to history.
The presentation will feature a live walkthrough of the StoryMapJS pilot, followed by a deep dive into the project’s research methodology. The research team will discuss the challenges of our “ancestral inquiring” of colonial archives to find the “ghost names” and establish a presence that never even made it to the margins of liberty notes.
This project is the result of a collaborative effort dedicated to uncovering these hidden migration patterns. Joining lead researcher Dr. Jumoke Verissimo will be research assistants Peter Ton and Suprabha Vidharshani Irugalratne, who will share insights into the archival process and the digital art curation that brings this “Ancestral Mist” to life.