Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
January 2025
- 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
on Zoom
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.
READING BYTES
Tuesday January 14
noon-1:00pm EST
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI, Chapter 6: “Making Meaningful Worlds: Being at Home in Code,” and Chapter 7: “Lessons from Smalltalk: Moral Code before Machine Learning” (pp. 77-98)
Jason Boyd
Continuing in 2025, Reading Bytes will discuss Alan F. Blackwell’s Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI (MIT Press, 2024).
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI focuses on a timely topic that is causing a great deal of concern and anxiety in higher learning and in society more broadly: recent developments in AI (artificial intelligence). Blackwell’s book provides an opportunity to discuss the possibility of a more equitable and beneficial approach to the design and use of AI.
Each month we will read and discuss one or more chapters of Moral Codes. Participants are free to join discussions any month without having attended earlier Reading Bytes.
Moral Codes is available in open access through MIT Press Direct.
A SMALL WEB WORKSHOP
Tuesday January 21
noon-1:00pm EST
Introduction to making minimal websites and digital ephemera
Reg Beatty
The “small web” is equal parts political and aesthetic. It engages with questions, posed by the early web, about what it means to have a personal presence online but in the light of today’s ubiquitous social media and commercialization.
This Intro will touch on these aspects of the small web but will focus on one of its hallmarks—the handmade web page. Using a minimal palette of HTML and CSS we will see how quickly a page can be created and published. This can be anything from a professional portal linking dispersed materials, to a zine, a poem, or ephemera like a bulletin, a postcard.
For those of you that want to explore this further (or are unable to attend on Jan 21) we will be offering two hands-on workshops in February. These will be hybrid events held on Zoom and at the Library’s Collaboratory. The tentative dates are Feb 7 and 14 (both Fridays) from 10am until noon EST. If you are interested please use the registration button and we will stay in touch.
This course can be counted towards the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/humanités numériques. More information at: https://ccdhhn.ca/.
STORIES IN PLAY
Tuesday January 28
Noon-1:00pm EST
(Playable Stories Archive): Ludo-Bio-Fiction
A discussion of three recent entries in the Playable Stories Archive, Venba (Visai Games 2023), Florence (Mountains, 2018), and Unpacking (Witch Beam, 2021), and how games use aspects of day-to-day living to explore important moments in people’s lives.