By Erin Scott (IGS PhD candidate, Digital Arts & Humanities Theme)
In spring 2025, I traveled to Scotland. While there, I did some of the expected: I drank whisky, I played golf, and I bought a tartan purse made of Harris Tweed. I also did the unexpected: I harvested peat, took Scottish Gaelic lessons, and presented at the Digital Humanities UK and Ireland conference “Collaboration Across Boundaries / Co-obrachadh thar Chrìoch” at the University of Glasgow.
As an artist-scholar, my research asks big questions, such as, where and how do I belong?. This question arises from a complex sense of identity wherein my lived reality of being a settler Canadian brushes up against my matrilineal line of Scottish Gaelic heritage. The complexity lives within the consideration of these two identities as opposites: colonizer and colonized. Yet, history reveals that the Scottish Gaels from the Isle of Lewis, where my family still calls home today, have participated in and benefited from the ongoing colonization of so-called Canada. I am curious as to how to reconcile this polarity; to bring it closer together in an acceptance of the both/and.
While my research is still ongoing as a 4th year PhD candidate, I was fortunate to travel to Scotland to participate in a month-long artist residency, as well as presenting on my critical research around arts-based methods for Celtic language revitalization at the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities conference. In this way, my time in Scotland also held the both/and of my research methods and outputs through the mobilization of creative and critical research. I was fortunate to be financially supported on this research trip by my supervisor, Dr. Karis Shearer, who I also met up with in the latter part of the trip.
I arrived on Lewis on May 27th to the family home of my relatives. For the next week, I was shown photographs, told stories, and visited by people from all over the island who had heard I would be there and how I was looking to connect and eager to listen to both the Gaelic language and the stories told in this language. Eventually, I made my way from the East to the West of the island to set-up at Grinneabhat. This community-run centre is a refuge for Gaelic speakers, culture, people, and place. The organization offers exhibition space for Gaelic focused art works, most of which engage with land-based practices, as well as Gaelic lessons, knitting groups, parent and tot groups, and events. I was fortunate to experience it all: knitting with the elderly ladies who spoke to me only in Gaelic; to listening to traditional mouth music presented by Rachel Walker and Aaron Jones; to harvesting peat in the moors with the locals. And throughout all the deep immersion within Gaelic story, song, and lands, I was also reading and writing and recording.
As a student in the Digital Arts and Humanities IGS theme at UBCO, I both digital and analog media in my work to tell stories. During my residency, I brought a high-quality shure mic for audio and video recording, as well as a small light and a couple of tripods. I would set up on the edge of Grinneabhat lake and try to capture the sounds of the local birds such as the flight song of the Curlew, or the wind calling and wailing from the Atlantic. In this endeavour, I was not always successful at bringing back to Canada the sounds, smells, or sights of Lewis. Now, post-residency, I spend my time editing the video and audio as a way of deepening my understanding of the land, the language, and the people who continue to shape its stories. The discomfort of being in-between rushes to the surface in the visual overlay of landscapes from Lewis and landscapes from Kelowna. At times, they seem to blend together into one. At other moments, they are so distinctly different that it seems almost impossible to create an image that reconciles the complexity of emotional displacement I feel as a Canadian and second-generation Scottish person. This tension reveals how in seeking place and belonging, I also find layers of disconnect, intergenerational trauma, and genocide. This arises for my own family on Lewis and whistles out across the plains of Canada to create lasting impacts for the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples who have been subjugated and assimilated under Scottish settler-colonial rule. As my experiments continue with the digital recordings made on Lewis, I am also using poetry to consider ideas of place, belonging, language, and identity, with a particular interest in the wind—an important tool in the movement of people between these geographies. Combined, the digital and analog afford new contexts for complex understanding of belonging across these geographic and colonial contexts.
On June 15th, I traveled across the Minch, back through the Highlands, to return to my mother’s hometown: Glasgow. There, I presented work at the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Conference alongside my supervisor Dr. Karis Shearer, committee member Dr. Christine Schreyer, and fellow PhD Candidate, Emily Comeau. The conference’s theme was Collaboration beyond Boundaries/ Co-obrachadh thar Chrìoch. To tackle the theme, we presented an interdisciplinary hybrid roundtable-workshop where each of us presented examples of our digital methods used for our research focuses, which ranged from research-creation methods in mobilizing a community literary sound archive called the SpokenWeb SoundBox Collection, scuba diving and ocean-based methods for Kala language revitalization, digital application methods for Tlingit language revitalization, and arts-based methods for Celtic language revitalization. We then created a context where participants would group together and collaborate on an imagined archive, determining how they would create new research projects that weave their diverse disciplinary methods and approaches. The conversations were thoughtful, interesting, and at times, difficult. The context we created revealed the complexity of collaboration but also the dynamic nature of reconciling differences. In this way, I found my time on Lewis and my on-going research inquiries reflected in our roundtable-workshop.
One of the aspects of Digital Humanities that I most enjoy is the focus on the practical application of research. For many DH scholars, the research serves to engage multiple publics beyond the institution, and therefore, serves and connects across difference. I participated in a game-play workshop focused on companies making digital eco-friendly choices. It was presented by the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition and involved a group of participants designing a company, and then attempting to make ethical digital choices that lessened the ecological impacts of each company. While the game was lively and full of banter and jokes, it was the ending that had the greatest impact for me: there was no winner. And this isn’t to say it was because we all lost but that we all contributed to the same points. In the end, we only won by working in collaboration across the contexts of our individual organizations.
The conference was an incredible experience in both presenting my critical work that uses arts-methods which arise from my creative practice to a forum of digital humanists, as well as introducing me to an array of artists and scholars who work at the intersection of many creative and critical contexts.
As I left Glasgow, returning for the first time to Lewis, I watched the hills morph and shift in the train windows, the sound of the wind and wild Atlantic welcoming me back. There, I settled in for my final days in Scotland before returning to my children in Kelowna. On the longest day of the year and my last day on Lewis, I watched the sunset over Port Mhor Bhragar. In that moment, I knew this was the beginning of a long journey home to where I lived and to where I belong.
Erin Scott’s research travel was supported through Dr. Karis Shearer’s funding from UBC Okanagan’s Principal’s Research Chair program. We acknowledge and thank the Office of the Vice Principal Research for this support.
Erin Scott is a poet/performer, artist/scholar, Scottish/Canadian living on the unceded territory and ancestral lands of the Syilx/Okanagan Peoples (Kelowna, BC). They hold an MFA in Writing and Performance from UBC Okanagan. Erin is a PhD candidate in IGS Digital Arts and Humanities whose research-creation work contemplates a ‘both/and’ identity in relation to cultural, geographical, and traditional belonging through the creation of digital poetic texts and dialogic performance. Erin is a founding member of the literary arts organization Inspired Word Café. Their performance work has presented at festivals across Canada, she has won the John Lent Poetry/Prose Award and the Okanagan Short Story Contest, and is a graduate of the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio program. They have two chapbooks, two spoken word albums, two cats, four kids, and one incredible partner. She held the 2023 Principal’s Research Chair Fellow position under the supervision of Dr. Karis Shearer.