Toronto Metropolitan University
Centre for Digital Humanities
November 2024
- 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 November 5
noon-1:00pm EST
Moral Codes: Designing Alternatives to AI, Chapter 4: “Intending and Attending: Chatting to the Stochastic Parrots,” and Chapter 5: “A Meaningful Conversation with the Internet” (pp. 47-76)
Jason Boyd
In 2024-25, 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.
TMU FALL PRIDE
Tuesday November 12
noon-1:00pm EST
In-Person at the Collaboratory
Pride Edit-a-Thon!
Jason Boyd
To mark TMU’s Fall Pride, this workshop will teach participants how to collaboratively edit open-access texts on Wikisource by editing Earl Lind’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918). Lind was one of the earliest transgender individuals to publish an autobiography in the United States.
Participants are encouraged to create an account on Wikisource prior to the edit-a-thon.
The Library Collaboratory is accessed from the 3rd floor of the SLC Building: take the stairs to the 3rd floor and walk along the hallway past the elevators, or, if using the elevators, turn left when exiting: the Library Collaboratory is at the end of the hall, marked with large yellow doors.
WEB WALKS
Tuesday November 19
noon-1:00pm EST
A Journey in Web Land…
Reg Beatty
This is the beginning of a new series called Web Walks that will look at the “quiet, odd, and poetic web,” in the words of Kristoffer Tjalve, creator of Niave Weekly. In this installment we’ll look at a number of Tjalve’s projects but in particular his Diagram Website where he tried to map his own idiosyncratic take on the internet.
STORIES IN PLAY
Tuesday November 26
Noon-1:00pm EST
Roundtable on the Don’t Starve series and Survival Games.
The Playable Stories: Unarchived podcast team will follow up November’s episode on the Don’t Starve series (Klei Entertainment/Capybara Games) with a discussion of survival games and their narrative potential.
As part of the CDH’s Stories in Play series, this roundtable discussion involving members of the Unarchived team will use the podcast episode as a springboard for a broader discussion of the evolution of interactive narratives and their unique combination of gameplay and storytelling.