TMU Centre for Digital Humanities
March Offerings
2021

Existing cultural heritage digitization and archival methods lack the richness and versatility that is necessary for using library memorabilia and ephemera. At the same time, emerging interaction technologies that bridge the physical and digital worlds offer opportunities to provide users with rich sensory experiences. Our research brings these two domains together to investigate how tangible and augmented reality interaction design can help to address some of the challenges that scholars face when working with ephemera and memorabilia collections. Our first use case focuses on a collection of Jewish and Holocaust ephemera and memorabilia. In this presentation, we describe our ongoing research in this area, including a formative study that we conducted to better understand current practices and challenges in cultural heritage research, as well as prototype designs for the Tangible Augmented Reality Archives (TARA) application that supports discoverability and use of library and archival artifacts.

Dr. Stéfan Sinclair, a leading Canadian Digital Humanist who sadly passed away last year (https://csdh-schn.org/stefan-sinclair-in-memoriam-2/), was a co-creator, with Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, of Voyant Tools, a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts as well as a co-author, with Dr. Rockwell, of Hermeneutica (2016). Join Dr. Rockwell (University of Alberta) and Ph.D. candidate Kaylin Land (McGill University) for a demonstration of Voyant and an associated project Dr. Sinclair was leading: Spyral Notebooks.

Some learning walkthroughs for Voyant can be found at http://dialogi.ca. Examples of the use of Voyant can be read at https://beta.voyant-tools.org/docs/#!/guide/gallery.