Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
November 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 Tyne Daile Sumner (tynedaile.sumner@torontomu.ca) or CDH Manager Reg Beatty (rbeatty@torontomu.ca).
DH@TMU
SPECIAL IN-PERSON EVENT
Monday November 9
10:00am-noon (Roundtable) EST
12:30pm-1:30 (Networking Lunch)
The Lab is Dead. Long Live the Lab!
— Spaces, Technologies @ the Future of Creative Collaboration
Tyne Daile Sumner
What is a lab for today? Once imagined as spaces for collaboration, experimentation, and new ways of thinking and making, labs, centres, and creative hubs now face a daunting, if not predictable, challenge: how to stay funded, how to stay alive! Between the pandemic, shrinking university budgets, the rise of generative AI, and shifting expectations about what it means to be on campus, the very idea of a shared space for intellectual and creative work is in flux.
But is the lab really dead or just in need or urgent reinvention? What kinds of spaces, infrastructures, and communities do we really want to foster? What can we do together that we can’t do remotely or alone? And are our existing models in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences still fit for purpose as digital technologies transform how we research, create, and teach?
Bringing together voices from a range of cultural backgrounds and academic disciplines, this roundtable invites a lively, critical, and speculative conversation about the future of space, technology, and scholarly collaboration. Rather than simply asking how we might sustain the labs and centres we’ve inherited, we’ll explore what could be worth changing and the new possibilities that might emerge if we dare to rethink the lab entirely.
Speakers:
- Michael Sinatra, Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal and Director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Digital Humanities (CRIHN)
- Lai-Tze Fan, Canada Research Chair in Technology and Social Change, Associate Professor, Director, The U&AI Lab and Co-Director, TRuST Scholarly Network
- Taien Ng-Chan, York Research Chair in Marginal & Emergent Media, Associate Professor, Department of Film & Media Arts at York University, Co-Director, The Sari-Sari Xchange, and Chair, Commission on Art & Cartography
- Afsoon Soudi, Assistant Professor, RTA School of Media & Director of the Creative AI Hub (Creative School at TMU)
- Anatoliy Gruzd, Canada Research Chair in Privacy Preserving Digital Technologies, Professor of Information Technology Management, and Director of the Social Media Lab at TMU
- Darren Wershler, Professor of English and Associate Director, Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology, Concordia University
Limited to 30 people.
Held at: Toronto Metropolitan University Archives & Special Collections LIB 404 | 350 Victoria Street, 4th Floor
With thanks for generous support from Toronto Metropolitan University Archives & Special Collections and Université de Montréal’s Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN)
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.
READING BYTES
Wednesday November 18
11:00am-noon EST on Zoom
‘Between Virtuality and Humanity: AI, Shakespeare, and the History of Character’ (Harry Newman 2026)
Tyne Daile Sumner in conversation with Harry Newman, Associate Professor in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Read the article here.
SMALL WEB
Tuesday November 24
noon-1pm EST on Zoom
Alive Internet Theory
Reg Beatty
The “Dead Internet Theory” (now about 15 years old) is like a revenant, brought back to life on various occasions when corporatization, slop, brain rot, bots endlessly talking to bots, and agents crowding out humans, gets to be a bit much. Part critique, part conspiracy theory, it has started to seem like prophecy.
Artist and technologist Spencer Chang has proposed his “Alive Internet Theory” not so much to discredit DIT but to remind us that, “With all this happening, it’s easy to forget there’s still so much life thriving on the open Internet.” We’ll look at some of this “life” through the lens of Chang’s software and art installations and start imagining what we might do ourselves.
The more proprietary, predatory, and puerile a place the web becomes, the more committed I am to using it in poetic and intransigent ways. –J.R. Carpenter (2015)
SMALL WEB WORKSHOP
Friday November 27
10:00am-noon EST on Zoom
Handmade Web Workshop
Reg Beatty
In the spirit of DIY, making can become an end (and pleasure!) in itself. This hands-on workshop will introduce a small set of HTML elements and CSS rules — the basic building blocks of a web page. We will approach this with a minimalist aesthetic, the better to see how it all works together, and learn how to play with our code. No prior experience is necessary.
I evoke the term ‘handmade web’ to suggest slowness and smallness as forms of resistance. –J.R. Carpenter (2015)