Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
February 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 February 4
noon-1:00pm EST
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI, Chapter 8: “Explanation and Transparency: Beyond No-Code/Low-Code,” Chapter 9: “Why Code is More Important Than Flat Design,” and Chapter 10: “The Craft of Coding” (pp. 99-134)
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.
SMALL WEB WORKSHOPS
10am-noon EST
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.
These workshops 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.
These will be hybrid events held on Zoom and in-person at the Library’s Collaboratory.
This course can be counted towards the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/humanités numériques. More information at: https://ccdhhn.ca/.
BOOK LAUNCH
Tuesday February 11
Noon-1:00pm EST
Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities
Jason Boyd
Join Jason in conversation with Dr. Paul Barrett and Dr. Sarah Roger, editors of the collection Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities (U of Ottawa Press, 2023), as they discuss the present and futures of digital humanities in Canada.
This will be a hybrid event held on Zoom and in-person at the Library’s Collaboratory.
STORIES IN PLAY
Tuesday February 25
Noon-1:00pm EST
“Radio Nostalgia from Mars”: The Dystopian Future of Golf Club: Nostalgia (2018)
Jason Boyd
Join Jason for a discussion of the videogame Golf Club: Nostalgia, where the player golfs in the ruins of Earth while listening to a radio station from a colony on Mars. The game offers a means to reflect on late-stage capitalism, oligarchy, environmental catastrophe, and the likely realities of life on Mars. .