General:CWRC

From CWRC

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(Spring Workshop, Edmonton, April 30-May 2)
(The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada)
 
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Words move differently now, through semi-conductors, across screens, at lightning speed, and in vast quantities. Scholars have studied how words make and move us for centuries, but the digital turn demands new tools and new tool environments.
Words move differently now, through semi-conductors, across screens, at lightning speed, and in vast quantities. Scholars have studied how words make and move us for centuries, but the digital turn demands new tools and new tool environments.
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The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced "quirk") / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) has been funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation’s Leading Edge Fund to establish an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada.  
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The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced "quirk") / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) has been funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Leading Edge Fund to establish an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada.  
==What is CWRC?==
==What is CWRC?==
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*a database (Online Research Canada, ORCA) to house born-digital scholarly materials, digitized texts, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references). Content and tools will be open access wherever possible and designed for interoperability with each other and with other systems. The database will be seeded with a range of existing digital materials, as well as with information to provide the backbone of an Integrated History of Women's Writing in Canada.
*a database (Online Research Canada, ORCA) to house born-digital scholarly materials, digitized texts, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references). Content and tools will be open access wherever possible and designed for interoperability with each other and with other systems. The database will be seeded with a range of existing digital materials, as well as with information to provide the backbone of an Integrated History of Women's Writing in Canada.
*a toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online; editing, annotating, and analyzing materials in and beyond ORCA; discovering and collaborating with researchers with intersecting interests; mining knowledge about relations, events and trends, through automated methods and interactive visualizations; and analyzing the system’s usage patterns to discover areas for further investigation. Forms of collaboration will range from the sharing and building of fundamental resources such as filmographies, and author and subject bibliographies, to the collaborative production of born-digital historical and literary studies.
*a toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online; editing, annotating, and analyzing materials in and beyond ORCA; discovering and collaborating with researchers with intersecting interests; mining knowledge about relations, events and trends, through automated methods and interactive visualizations; and analyzing the system’s usage patterns to discover areas for further investigation. Forms of collaboration will range from the sharing and building of fundamental resources such as filmographies, and author and subject bibliographies, to the collaborative production of born-digital historical and literary studies.
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CWRC’s key is integration: of system components; of information whose value increases exponentially when combined and subjected to new modes of inquiry; of scholarly materials with the massive archive of digital texts; of scholars themselves.  
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CWRC’s key is integration: of system components; of information whose value increases exponentially when combined and subjected to new modes of inquiry; of scholarly materials with the massive archive of digital texts; of scholars themselves.
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[[File:CWRC_wordle.png|200px|thumb|center|Wordle visualization of the CWRC CFI application]]
== Who is CWRC for? ==
== Who is CWRC for? ==
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The CWRC project is led by [[General:SusanBrown|Susan Brown]], director of the Orlando Project and visiting Professor at the University of Alberta and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. The Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne (University of Alberta), directed by Professor Marie Carrière, is a leading partner in the research planning.
The CWRC project is led by [[General:SusanBrown|Susan Brown]], director of the Orlando Project and visiting Professor at the University of Alberta and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. The Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne (University of Alberta), directed by Professor Marie Carrière, is a leading partner in the research planning.
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The "principal users" for the CFI infrastructure grant are: [http://apps.business.ualberta.ca/oarazy/ Ofer Arazy], [http://www.unbf.ca/arts/french/marie-en.html Marie Carrière], [http://easweb.eas.ualberta.ca/person/croia Arie Croitoru], [http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/efs/staff/index.php?last=D&rank=Any&page=1&first=P Patricia Demers], [http://rsc.sfu.ca/people/cgerson.htm Carole Gerson], [http://www.ualbertacentennial.ca/people/displaybio.php?bio_id=675 Isobel Grundy], [http://english.dal.ca/Faculty/Dean_Irvine.php Dean Irvine], [http://www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/ Stan Ruecker], and [http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/Main_Page Eleni Stroulia].
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The "principal users" for the CFI infrastructure grant are: [http://apps.business.ualberta.ca/oarazy/ Ofer Arazy], [http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/clc/index.php?page_id=2&lang_id=0 Marie Carrière], [http://easweb.eas.ualberta.ca/person/croia Arie Croitoru], [http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/efs/staff/index.php?last=D&rank=Any&page=1&first=P Patricia Demers], [http://rsc.sfu.ca/people/cgerson.htm Carole Gerson], [http://www.ualbertacentennial.ca/people/displaybio.php?bio_id=675 Isobel Grundy], [http://english.dal.ca/Faculty/Dean_Irvine.php Dean Irvine], [http://www.ualberta.ca/~sruecker/ Stan Ruecker], and [http://ssrg.cs.ualberta.ca/index.php/Main_Page Eleni Stroulia].
Many other scholars are involved as supporters and future users: see this [[General:People|partial list of people involved in CWRC]]. Formal modes of affiliation are being developed.
Many other scholars are involved as supporters and future users: see this [[General:People|partial list of people involved in CWRC]]. Formal modes of affiliation are being developed.
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'''cwrc [the at sign] ualberta [a dot] ca'''
'''cwrc [the at sign] ualberta [a dot] ca'''
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== Further details about CWRC ==
== Further details about CWRC ==
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*[http://www.sfu.ca/ Simon Fraser University]
*[http://www.sfu.ca/ Simon Fraser University]
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== [[General:Upcoming Events | Upcoming Events: Congress, May 2010; Conference, 30 September - 3 October, 2010)]] ==
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== Upcoming Events ==
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'''Canadian Women Writers Conference: Connecting Texts and Generations / Colloque Écritures des femmes du Canada : textes et générations en contact (30 September - 3 October, 2010)]]'''
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University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB
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=== Spring Workshop, Edmonton, April 30-May 2 ===
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Our spring workshop will take place on these dates. Its purpose is to 1) introduce CWRC to those who are new to it; 2) consult about what kinds of activities CWRC should support;  3) start to develop projects and protocols that are going to be involved at early stages.
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The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC) is hosting  a workshop at the University of Alberta from Friday, April 30 to Sunday, May 2. The workshop aims to inform people about the CWRC infrastructure project, to spark people's imaginations and get a sense of what they want it to do, to provide opportunities for involvement, and to begin work on policies, processes and projects that will be be key to setting up the project.
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The workshop will start the morning of Friday, April 30 and run until noon on Sunday. A preliminary workshop schedul e is [[media:
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Our keynote speaker, Dr. Johanna Drucker of UCLA, is a book artist (you can see digital versions at [http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/ her online project on artists' books]), a visual and cultural critic, and a leading and provocative thinker about what computers can and should do for the humanities. She'll be speaking Friday afternoon about her current design work towards a system to support innovative, collaborative scholarship in a networked environment. 
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'''Public talk:
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Friday, April 30th, 3:30, TELUS Centre 134
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Johanna Drucker, on the design possibilities for scholarship in a networked environment
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This keynote will be followed by the launch in the foyer of Rutherford Library south of an online curated exhibit, [http://exhibits.library.ualberta.ca/streetprint_artistbook/index.php“ The Creative Codex and Its Variants: Canadian Women Artists’ Books"], a collaboration between Special Collections and the Can WWR project. The launch will be followed by a reception.
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All are welcome. There is no workshop fee, but please email cwrc@ualberta.ca by Friday, April 23 if you plan to attend so that we can plan the refreshments, or if you would like further information.
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The workshop is produced in partnership with the Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de Littérature Canadienne, and generously supported by the University of Alberta Libraries, the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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=== Congress: Sunday May 30th, 12-1:30 (ACCUTE) and  3:45-5:15 (ALCQ/ACQL)===
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Our two sessions at Congress this year in Montréal:
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'''ACCUTE Brown Bag Lunch'''
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12:00-1:30 location TBA  This will be an information session about CWRC, ways of participating, and some of the early projects, with plenty of time for discussion and questions.
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Panelists TBA
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'''ALCQ/ACQL Séance / Session'''
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15h45-17h15 / 3:45-5:15  12B, MB S1-435: Envisager les interstices: Possibilités pour les histoires intégrées des écrivaines canadiennes / Envisaging Interstices: Possibilities for CWRC’s Integrated Histories of Canadian Women’s Writing   
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Présidente de séance / Session chair: Erin Wunker, Dalhousie University
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Bronwyn Haslam (writer, independent scholar, co-founder of Tente Press in
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Montreal)
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Tasha Hubbard (documentary film maker, PhD candidate U Calgary)
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Karis Shearer (Postdoctoral Fellow, McGill University)
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T.L. Cowan (Postdoctoral Fellow U Calgary)
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Jennifer Henderson (Associate Professor, Carleton U)
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Lianne Moyes (Associate Professor U de Montreal)
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=== Fall Conference: Canadian Women Writers Conference: Connecting Texts and Generations (30 September - 3 October) CFP ===
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CALL FOR PAPERS
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CWRC 1: Canadian Women Writers Conference: Connecting Texts and Generations
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An Interdisciplinary, International Conference
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Canadian Literature Centre, University of Alberta
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30 September - 3 October 2010
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The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced “quirk”) will provide a digital platform for new collaborations in humanities research. Supporting team-based scholarship, digitization and editing, and embedding its material in political, commercial and cultural contexts, CWRC brings digital arts into dialogue with other artistic practices that are part of a contemporary landscape of imaginative and creative work and critical research. CWRC has been successful in securing, under the leadership of Dr. Susan Brown (University of Alberta / University of Guelph), substantial funding from both the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and provincial funding bodies.
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CWRC’s centerpiece is a Canadian Women Writers project, a radically interdisciplinary, collaborative and bilingual research initiative that will be developed across three primary modules: 1) a virtual archive of textual, visual, and audiovisual materials relevant to research in women’s writing in Canada; 2) a searchable, expandable, user-producer textbase of historical, bio-critical data on women’s writing in Canada; 3) an interactive forum/salon for the circulation of discussion, new textual, audio and visual material, and readers’ and writers’ communities.
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This gathering will be the first of up to three conferences planned around this flagship project of CWRC.
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This venture with multilingual, multi-genre, and multi-media content is anchored in the premise that digital and electronic instruments are key to enabling and producing new meanings in embodied, experiential, participatory ways. In coordinated collaboration with related major projects partnered with CWRC (TransCanada Institute; Editing Modernism in Canada; canadiana.org, among others), this Canadian Women Writers initiative aims to bring into alignment established and emergent histories, to integrate divergent perspectives on history, and to engage users as producers in a variety of textual, visual, and audio formats.
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The conference will bring together scholars, writers, booksellers, librarians, publishers, and software designers, along with invited keynote speakers, to catalyze discussion -- particularly on women’s writing in Canada, literary history, historiography, collaborative methods, and digital and feminist scholarship -- through papers, panels, readings, and online hook-ups and demonstrations.
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Plenary Speakers:
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·        Nicole Brossard (Author, Montréal)
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·        Louise Dennys (Executive Publisher and Vice-President, Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, Vintage Canada)
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·        Lucie Hotte, (Research Chair on the Literatures and Cultures of Francophone Canada, University of Ottawa)
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·        Rosemary Sullivan (Author and Canada Research Chair, Department of English, University of Toronto)
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We invite papers that illuminate the vast diversity of Canadian women’s writing, past and present, in all genres and formats (printed text, manuscripts, journalism, screenwriting,  graphic novels, songs, music, performance art, artists’ books), of all cultures, regions, and linguistic groups. Papers should be relevant to CWRC’s emphasis on collaboration and digital scholarship. They may:
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·        comment on the critical reception of Aboriginal, minority and/or multilingual writing;
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·        explore the potential for comparative study and analysis through an integrated online history and/or its implications for Canadian Comparative Literature;
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·        pursue both historical specificity and trans-historical connections;
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·        consider the plurality of Canadian women’s literary histories;
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·        examine these histories in relation to various versions of the nation or a transnational perspective;
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·        address the practicalities of the marketplace;
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·        interrogate distinctions between popular and elite, subversive and insider writing;
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·        investigate platforms necessary to make Wikipedia-like resources literary, creative, scholarly and extensible;
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·        address the limitations of current available sites (e.g.,. lone databases) and the potentials of interlinked or integrated knowledge systems;
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·        explore modes of circulating, disseminating and expanding an integrated history;
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·        offer frames for reading digital works as media systems, social practices, or cultural networks;
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·        offer examples of using digital tools to produce new kinds of cultural or historical analysis;
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·        illustrate the emergence of new forms of technological infrastructure and media.
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Forward abstract (500 words), along with a one-page CV, in English or in French, to:
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clccollo [the at sign] ualberta.ca
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Deadline for submission:  29 March 2010
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Members of the conference committee:
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Dr. Susan Brown, University of Alberta/Guelph University
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Dr. Marie Carrière, University of Alberta
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Dr. Patricia Demers, University of Alberta
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Dr. Cecily Devereux, University of Alberta
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Dr. Carole Gerson, Simon Fraser University
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Dr. Christl Verduyn, Mount Allison University
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Address all mail inquiries to:
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Canadian Women Writers Conference/Colloque écritures des femmes du Canada
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Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne
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Humanities Building 4-115
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University of Alberta
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Edmonton, Alberta
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T6G 2E5
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APPEL À COMMUNICATIONS
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CSÉC 1 :
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Colloque Écritures des femmes du Canada : textes et générations en contact
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Un colloque interdisciplinaire et international
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Centre de littérature canadienne, Université de l’Alberta
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30 septembre - 3 octobre 2010
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Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) offrira un environnement numérique pour de nouvelles recherches en sciences humaines. Cette infrastructure virtuelle de collaboration scientifique et technique sera le moyen privilégié pour le partage, l’échange, la diffusion et l’interaction des textes littéraires et critiques du Canada et leurs différents contextes socioculturels et linguistiques. Grâce à la direction de Susan Brown (Universités de l’Alberta et de Guelph), le CSÉC est désormais généreusement financé par la Fondation canadienne pour l’innovation (FCI) et des organismes de financement provinciaux.
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L’axe central du CSÉC est un projet de recherche sur les écritures des femmes du Canada, une initiative foncièrement interdisciplinaire, collaborative et bilingue comprenant trois modules principaux : 1) une archive virtuelle de matériaux textuels, visuels et audiovisuels pertinents à la recherche menée sur les femmes de lettres du Canada; 2) une base de données textuelle évolutive de recherche et de production de données historiques et bio-critiques sur l’écriture de femmes canadiennes; 3) un salon/forum interactif consacré à la discussion, au partage de nouveaux matériaux textuels, auditifs et visuels ainsi qu’aux communautés d’auteurs et de lecteurs.
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Cette rencontre sera la première parmi trois colloques envisagés dans le cadre de ce projet du CSÉC.
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Cette entreprise multilingue, multi-genre et multimédia préconise que les outils numériques et électroniques puissent donner forme concrète et participative à de nouveaux sens. En collaboration dirigée avec d’autres grands travaux associés au CSÉC (l’Institut TransCanada; Editing Modernism in Canada; canadiana.org, parmi d’autres), ce projet sur les écritures des femmes cherche à aligner des histoires reconnues et émergentes, d’intégrer des perspectives historiques divergentes et de transformer l’utilisateur en producteur par rapport à divers formats textuels, visuels et auditifs.
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Ce colloque rassemblera chercheurs, auteurs, libraires, bibliothécaires, éditeurs, concepteurs de logiciel ainsi que conférenciers d’honneur pour déclencher des discussions – notamment sur l’écriture des femmes canadiennes, l’histoire littéraire, l’historiographie, les méthodes collaboratives et la recherche numérique et féministe – émanant des communications, des panels, des lectures et des relais et présentations en ligne.
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Conférencières d’honneur :
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·        Nicole Brossard (Auteure, Montréal)
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·        Louise Dennys (Éditrice exécutive et vice-présidente, Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, Vintage Canada)
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·        Lucie Hotte, (Chaire de recherche sur les cultures et les littératures  francophones du Canada), Université d’Ottawa
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·        Rosemary Sullivan (Chaire de recherche du Canada, Department of English, Université de Toronto)
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Nous sollicitons des communications qui éclairent la grande diversité de l’écriture des femmes du Canada, des origines à aujourd’hui, de tous genres et de toutes formes (texte imprimé, manuscrit, journalisme, scénario, roman graphique, chanson, musique, art de l’interprétation, livre d’artiste), de toutes cultures et régions et de tous groupes linguistiques. Les communications  doivent être pertinentes à l’attention que voue le CSÉC à la collaboration et à la recherche numérique. Elle pourront :
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·        traiter de la réception critique de l’écriture autochtone, minoritaire ou multilingue;
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·        explorer la manière dont une histoire intégrée en ligne peut céder à  l’étude et l’analyse comparées  ou les implications d’une telle histoire pour la littérature canadienne comparée;
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·        se livrer à la spécificité historique et les rapports trans-historiques;
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·        étudier la pluralité des histoires littéraires des femmes au Canada;
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·        examiner ces histoires par rapport à de différentes versions de la nation ou dans une optique transnationale;
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·        aborder les aspects pratiques du marché;
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·        questionner le rôle des distinctions entre le populaire et l’élite, l’écriture subversive et soi-disant conformiste;
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·        analyser les environnements nécessaires pour donner aux ressources genre Wikipédia leur aspect littéraire, scientifique et évolutif;
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·        aborder les contraintes des sites couramment disponibles (par ex. les bases de données singulières) et les possibilités de systèmes de connaissances liés et intégrés;
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·        explorer les modes de circulation, de dissémination et de déploiement d’une histoire intégrée;
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·        proposer des manières d’interpréter des œuvres numérisées comme systèmes médiatiques, pratiques sociales ou réseaux culturels;
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·        proposer des exemples d’utilisation d’outils numériques pour la production de nouveaux modes d’analyses culturelle et historique;
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·        illustrer l’émergence de nouvelles formes d’infrastructure technologique et de média.
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Prière de faire parvenir un abrégé (500 mots) ainsi qu’un CV d’une page, en français ou en anglais à :
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clccollo [the at sign] ualberta.ca
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Date butoir : le 29 mars 2010
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Membres du comité organisateur :
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Madame Susan Brown, Université de l’Alberta/Université Guelph
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Madame Marie Carrière, Université de Alberta
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Madame Patricia Demers, Université de l’Alberta
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Madame Cecily DevereuxUniversité de l’Alberta
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Madame Carole Gerson, Université Simon Fraser
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Madame Christl Verduyn, Université Mount Allison
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==[[General:CFPs | Calls for Papers]]==
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Correspondance postale :
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==[[General:Project Manager Position|Project Manager Position]]==
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Colloque Écritures des femmes du Canada/Canadian Women Writers Conference
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== [[General:Past Events | Past Events]] ==
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Centre de littérature canadienne/Canadian Literature Centre
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Pavillon Humanities, salle 4-115
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Université de l’Alberta
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Edmonton (Alberta)
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T6G 2E5
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Current revision as of 19:02, 14 October 2010

Contents

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada

Words move. They move us to understand Canada’s tradition and diversity. They move 166,701 majors, including future leaders in politics, business, education, and culture, yearly through humanities programs of Canadian universities. They move $3.3 billion yearly through our publishing industry. They move people halfway around the world to visit Anne of Green Gables’ farmhouse on PEI.

Words move differently now, through semi-conductors, across screens, at lightning speed, and in vast quantities. Scholars have studied how words make and move us for centuries, but the digital turn demands new tools and new tool environments.

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (CWRC, pronounced "quirk") / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada (CSÉC) has been funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation’s Leading Edge Fund to establish an online infrastructure for literary research in and about Canada.

What is CWRC?

The Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory / Le Collaboratoire scientifique des écrits du Canada is an innovative online project designed to enable unprecedented avenues for studying the words that most move people in and about Canada. At this critical juncture when Canada’s literary heritage is moving online, management of information about Canadian cultural history still relies on tools derived from print models, which cannot accommodate the explosion of online materials. Literary studies must shift from the conventional model of solitary scholars working on small groups of texts, towards fertile large-scale cross- disciplinary collaborative energies. CWRC’s specialized interface will connect scattered and siloed data; investigate links between writers, texts, places, groups, policies, and events; advance understanding of past and present cultural change; and produce fascinating new knowledge accessible to Canadians and the world.

The Collaboratory will be an innovative web-based service-oriented platform combining:

  • a database (Online Research Canada, ORCA) to house born-digital scholarly materials, digitized texts, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references). Content and tools will be open access wherever possible and designed for interoperability with each other and with other systems. The database will be seeded with a range of existing digital materials, as well as with information to provide the backbone of an Integrated History of Women's Writing in Canada.
  • a toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online; editing, annotating, and analyzing materials in and beyond ORCA; discovering and collaborating with researchers with intersecting interests; mining knowledge about relations, events and trends, through automated methods and interactive visualizations; and analyzing the system’s usage patterns to discover areas for further investigation. Forms of collaboration will range from the sharing and building of fundamental resources such as filmographies, and author and subject bibliographies, to the collaborative production of born-digital historical and literary studies.

CWRC’s key is integration: of system components; of information whose value increases exponentially when combined and subjected to new modes of inquiry; of scholarly materials with the massive archive of digital texts; of scholars themselves.


Wordle visualization of the CWRC CFI application

Who is CWRC for?

CWRC involves more than one hundred scholars from across Canada, with the aim of engaging the Canadian writing research community at large and researchers worldwide, as both contributors and users, in the task of devising new tools and methods of scholarship to meet the digital turn. The CWRC infrastructure builds on the Orlando Project's expertise in collaborative online scholarly production.

CWRC’s partners and supporters include:

The CLC provides leadership on the research side of this project, playing a major role on the CRWC Board, convening regular meetings of researchers and projects involved in CRWC, coordinating research grant applications and funding, and contributing to outreach, dissemination, administration and scholarly output in both official languages.


Participants

The CWRC project is led by Susan Brown, director of the Orlando Project and visiting Professor at the University of Alberta and Professor of English at the University of Guelph. The Canadian Literature Centre/ Centre de littérature canadienne (University of Alberta), directed by Professor Marie Carrière, is a leading partner in the research planning.

The "principal users" for the CFI infrastructure grant are: Ofer Arazy, Marie Carrière, Arie Croitoru, Patricia Demers, Carole Gerson, Isobel Grundy, Dean Irvine, Stan Ruecker, and Eleni Stroulia.

Many other scholars are involved as supporters and future users: see this partial list of people involved in CWRC. Formal modes of affiliation are being developed.

Anyone with potentially compatible research projects or a strong interest in being involved in the development of digital tools for the Canadian writing research community is invited to contact:

cwrc [the at sign] ualberta [a dot] ca

Further details about CWRC

The leading Edge Fund enables institutions to build on already successful and productive initiatives supported by past CFI investments. CWRC builds on the award-winning, successfully commercialized Orlando Project’s innovations in humanities scholarship, manifested in its published texbase (Brown et al 2006). Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, is a born-digital literary history resource extensively structured with semantic tagging of its interpretive contents. It has been heralded by users as a trailblazer: “because of the ways in which the extensive data can be mined or formulated, Orlando ... serves as a model for similar databases” (Harner), and praised for its “working method and the multidirectional results” (Bold; see also Booth, Fraiman, Hickman). The Orlando Project’s innovation continues in its ongoing experimentation with methods for advancing literary historical analysis with computers (Sinclair 2009), in its interface research (Ruecker et al 2009; Brown et al 2006a; Brown et al 2007), and in its exploration of data mining and visualization (Brown et al 2009; Sinclair et al 2009).

The CWRC project promises to deliver an innovative online system designed to enable unprecedented avenues for studying Canada’s literary heritage. Today, we are witnessing explosion of online materials, as many original resources are being migrated online, and the methodological implications are profound (Anderson; Felluga). The “Million Books” problem has been recognized by scholars and granting councils as one of the most pressing challenges to traditional humanities methodologies and simultaneously one of the greatest opportunities for real innovation in the development of digital methods (Crane; Olsen and Argamon). Still, the methodologies adopted by literary researchers rely on tools derived from print models, which cause a fundamental impediment in taking advantage of the newly available resources. Literary studies must shift from the conventional model of solitary scholars working on small groups of texts, towards fertile large-scale cross- disciplinary collaborative energies. The objective of the CWRC project is exactly to help shift the methodology for the domain through an integrated software infrastructure that will connect scattered and siloed data and support the investigation of links between writers, texts, places, groups, policies, and events.

The Collaboratory will be comprised of 3 elements:

  1. A database (Online Research Canada, ORCA) to house born-digital scholarly data, digitized texts, and metadata (indices, annotations, cross-references). ORCA will continuously expand, remain current with scholars’ results, and aggregate data within scholarly contexts. Content and tools will be open access wherever possible and designed for interoperability with other systems.
  2. A CWRC toolkit for empowering new collaborative modes of scholarly writing online; editing, annotating, and analyzing materials in and beyond ORCA; discovering and collaborating with researchers with intersecting interests; mining knowledge about relations, events and trends, through automated methods and interactive visualizations; and analyzing the system’s usage patterns to discover areas for further investigation.
  3. ORCA content and the CWRC toolkit will be integrated through a web-based service-oriented platform, to enable efficient deployment of emergent tools supporting literary research.

The CWRC infrastructure will enable literary scholars to advance our understanding of past and present cultural change and produce new knowledge accessible to Canadians and the world. At the same time, CWRC will advance digital humanities methodologies in a number of ways: 1) through the development in close consultation with a community of literary scholars of a platform for the collaborative production and maintenance of an extensive body of born digital scholarly materials as well as bibliographical materials, biocritical reference matter, and digital archives of existing texts; 2) through the production in consultation with this community of literary scholars and the digital humanities community of a suite of tools designed to allow researchers to interrogate digital materials in new ways; 3) through its experiments in social networking and attempting to crowdsource (cf. ReCAPTCHA) the immense labour of creating high-quality digital content; 4) through the provision of a testbed within which scholars can deploy experimental tools and interfaces. The development of these tools in partnership with this community will assist digital humanists in producing tools and interfaces that are well suited to scholarly use.

CWRC’s international team of more than 100 affiliated scholars includes leading Canadian digital humanists, and prominent Canadianist scholars and projects. And because words pose some of the thorniest problems for advanced computing analysis and computing tool usability, the team boasts experts in software engineering, GIS, and business. Such interdisciplinarity is needed to scale up Orlando’s pioneering features to enable a globally distributed community of literary researchers to study highly contextualized, multi-lingual content, and, through their experimentation with new-generation tools, to transform academic protocols for a whole field.

The project is multi-lingual and interdisciplinary in expertise and approach: literary studies, humanities computing, computing science, business, and earth science. CWRC will be mainly open-access, accessible to Canadians and the world.

Sponsors

Upcoming Events: Congress, May 2010; Conference, 30 September - 3 October, 2010)

Canadian Women Writers Conference: Connecting Texts and Generations / Colloque Écritures des femmes du Canada : textes et générations en contact (30 September - 3 October, 2010)]] University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB

Calls for Papers

Project Manager Position

Past Events