By Karis Shearer (Principal’s Research Chair, Digital Arts & Humanities)
Returning to Glasgow is something I relish; I’ve been making regular, if infrequent, trips there for 25 years. So, when I saw that the UK and Ireland Digital Humanities Conference 2025 was to be held at the Advanced Research Centre, University of Glasgow in June under the theme “Collaborating Across Boundaries / Co-obrachadh thar Chrìoch,” I was immediately intrigued. So too were my colleague and friend Dr. Christine Schreyer and our PhD students Emily Comeau and Erin Scott: before long we were collaborating on a panel proposal called “Beyond disciplines: Weaving new methods through collaborative digital humanities.”
In some ways, our collaboration was easy because we were working from our established relationships. Yet, I find the most fruitful parts are the frictions that push us to clarify, to think further, and to work a bit outside of our comfort zones. Christine is the Director of the Institute for Community Engaged Research and a linguistic anthropologist who works on language revitalization; Emily is an Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies (IGS) PhD candidate whose research explores the role of digital technology in supporting land-based approaches to language revitalization; Erin is an artist and IGS PhD candidate who makes videopoems and writes about Scottish Gaelic, land, and identity (read their reflection on this trip here); and I am a literary scholar who works on audio archives, poetry readings, and data justice. Putting this panel together not only let us not only learn more about each other’s respective methods but challenged us to think about how they might be woven together to engage with an imagined cultural archive research project. Our intention was to both share and then model a prospective weaving of methods. While Christine and I have co-supervised together before and have held academic leadership positions together in the past, this was our first time undertaking a research presentation together and I think it helped us lay the grounds for a new project we’re now pursuing together (more on this in another post).
My own contribution provided an overview of the SpokenWeb project and the UBCO SpokenWeb “SoundBox” Collection,” which has preserved and made accessible one-of-a-kind literary recordings. I focused on a contemporary event we hosted in 2019 called “Performing the Archive: Daphne Marlatt.” “Performing the Archive” is a series founded by Jason Camlot in Montreal that brings writers to read with their “past selves” or — to put it another way — their recorded voices from the archive.
Our presentation at the UKIE DH conference then invited audience members to form groups, consider a particular case study prompt (an imaginary multi-media cultural heritage archive), and weave together their respective methods to address the research questions engendered by the prompt. The work the group undertook felt both fruitful and difficult, which I think is exactly the right response: weaving methods and collaboration is hard but it can also be a path to novel approaches to working with cultural heritage archives.
For me, the people really do make Glasgow. Highlights from the conference included reconnecting and catching up with some of my favourite scholars and friends in my fields (Digital Humanities and Canadian Studies) including Dr. Anouk Lang (University of Edinburgh) and Dr. Faye Hammill (University of Glasgow) and spending time with UBC Okanagan faculty and students. UBCO was well represented with 5 presenters, including my colleague and frequent-collaborator, Dr. Emily Christina Murphy who directs (Re)Media Infrastructure. I also had the opportunity to meet scholars like Dr. Melissa Terras (University Edinburgh) for the first time. Conferences are, of course, wonderful opportunities to see a range of current research and UKIE DH did not disappoint with their fulsome program. One of the most exciting panels I attended was on AI and GLAM institutions, which is a topic I’ve been following since 2019. In particular, the talk “Crafting Responsible AI Afterlives: Co-designing a toolkit for museums and heritage sites,” by Drs. Jenny Kidd (Cardiff University), Bethann Jones (Cardiff University), and Eva Nieto-McAvoy (King’s College London) spoke to many of the ethical issues that have been at the heart of my own research and thinking around the SoundBox Collection and SpokenWeb project. I hope to return to the DH UK and Ireland Conference in 2026 when it’s held in Southampton UK and bring my own thinking on the digital afterlives of poets to this generous, rigorous community of thinkers.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to read another perspective on this trip, you can read PhD candidate Erin Scott’s reflection on their trip to DH UKIE and to do field work on the Isle of Lewis here.
This research trip was funded by the UBC Okanagan Principal’s Research Chair program. I am immensely grateful for the ongoing support this program has provided, allowing me to bring my research program to new audiences and communities.