Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
March 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 March 4
noon-1:00pm EST
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI, Chapter 11: “How Can Stochastic Parrots Help Us Code?” & Chapter 12: “Codes For Creativity and Surprise” (pp. 135-166)
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.
WEB WALK
Tuesday March 11
noon-1pm DST
Return to the Gorge: trekking along Nick Montfort’s Taroko Gorge 16 years on…
Reg Beatty
It was in 2009, during a trip to Taiwan, that Nick Montfort ‘wrote’ a poem about the distinctive landscape of the Liwu River and its surrounding gorge. Perhaps unconsciously he was donning the robes of one of the many Chinese 13th century scholar-poets commemorating a piece of natural beauty, but instead of using calligraphy he composed his work with code. What he couldn’t have predicted was how this small code/poem would be capable of spawning so many variations by so many poets.
This presentation looks back to the original conditions for the creation of Taroko Gorge and how its formal contraints and subsequent reception were able to provoke and inspire its multiple remixes.
STORIES IN PLAY
Tuesday March 18
Noon-1:00pm DST
Overboard! and Murder Mystery Videogames
Jason Boyd
Join Jason in conversation with Jeremy Andriano (MA Candidate, Communication and Culture) to discuss Jeremy’s Playable Stories Archive entry on Inkle’s 2021 Overboard!—described as “a highly replayable detective game where you’re the one whodunnit”—and the genre of the murder mystery videogame.
STORIES IN PLAY
Tuesday March 25
Noon-1:00pm DST
Roundtable on Disco Elysium
Jason Boyd
The Playable Stories: Unarchived podcast team will discuss topics relating to the March episode on Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021). Ostensibly a detective RPG, in actuality Disco Elysium is an exploration of politics, economics, ethics, social responsibility and coming to terms with one’s personal demons.