Emilie Altman is working towards her master’s degree in the Cognitive Science of Language program. Her research looks at whether trauma impacts language decades after the trauma occurred. Emilie uses data analysis techniques to investigate the language of over 750 Holocaust survivors, interviewed in the 1990s. Before coming to McMaster University, Emilie completed her bachelor’s degree at Queen’s University in cognitive science and computing. Emilie also loves to travel, sing, and play board games. 

My project will be the creation of a virtual public exhibit centered around Ukrainian war narratives. The narratives were written by Ukrainian civilians about their experiences in the current Russia-Ukraine War. Over 1000 narratives have been collected so far, and collection is ongoing. The public exhibit of these narratives will be a means to uplift and share the voices of Ukrainian civilians, as well as educate viewers. The exhibit will include a map of Ukraine, with narratives organized by region. Within regions, users will be able to look at other demographics such as age range and gender. The narratives will be available in both English and the original Ukrainian languages. I plan to include contextual elements as well such as newspaper headlines and photographs from before and after the start of war. 

Alexis-Carlota Cochrane (she/they) is a Ph.D. Student in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her doctoral research explores online identity, digital culture, and algorithmic censorship, analyzing how identity, power and censorship intersect on platforms. At the Sherman Centre, Alexis is also collaborating on a project that critically explores the intersection of data breaches and security crises through experimental approaches like sonification, supervised by Dr. Andrea Zeffiro.

Alexis will perform a data scrape for her graduate residency project that maps user rhetoric around account suspension on Meta Platforms Facebook and Instagram. Her research offers a qualitative intervention into machine learning and human-computer interaction through the employment of Black and Brown feminist epistemologies, primarily through narrative storytelling and user testimonials. Her research project aims to study the perspectives of racialized users whose experiences on the platforms have been obstructed by Meta’s racially biased and discriminatory algorithmic categorization practices to better the process’ role in exacerbating various forms of oppression for racialized communities.

Niloofar Hooman (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University. She is also completing a joint Graduate Diploma (Ph.D.) in Gender and Social Justice. Niloofar holds a Ph.D. in Communication (2019), an MA in Cultural Studies and the Media (2010), and a BA in Social Communications (2007) from the University of Tehran. Her research interests include social media, digital activism, feminism, sexuality, and marginalized bodies, focusing on Iran in the frameworks of critical and feminist theories.

Feminism in Iran has its own locally specific yet globally significant trajectory. After the Revolution in 1979 in Iran, a religious government took control over Iranian society and imposed strict ideologies on every aspect of Iranian lives, including female bodies.

While over the Islamic regime era, disciplinary methods have been employed to manage women’s bodies, stubborn forms of female bodily presence on social media and streets were a key strategy by which women enact transgressive discourse to fight the patriarchal society and the regime’s hegemonic discourses. Through close readings of publicly available tweets on Twitter and comments on Instagram, Niloofar’s project for the Graduate Residency in Digital Scholarship seeks to provide a nuanced account of nude activism in the Iranian context. She focuses on three Iranian women who chose nude feminism to reclaim their bodies and deconstruct sexism, patriarchy, and cultural taboos through the corporal resistance in the recent uprising in Iran.

Sam McEwan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University. With a background in music performance and cultural studies, she has cultivated a broad array of interests that inform her dissertation and other project work. She is particularly drawn to discourses of authenticity in identity/performance, fan practices/discourses, and examining representations of women’s bisexuality in popular music.

During her tenure as a resident with the Sherman Centre, Sam aims to curate an archive of digital objects such as music, videos, sound bites, spoken word, and other audio/visual moments that offer a window into the aesthetic worlds of self-identified bisexual women. Sam asks how this collection of thoughts, feelings, songs, poems, dances, and otherwise creative self-expressions can represent a form of “talking back” through the expression of queer joy. While archives have been a crucial resource for the LGBTQ+ community by offering a record of their history and culture, the experiences of bisexual people have often been overlooked or delegitimized. She draws extensively on the idea of joyful resistance to inform how she understands these objects as important features of the way bisexual women articulate their identities as authentic, permanent, and in opposition to mainstream (mis)representations. 

My name is Lulwama Kuto Mulalu and I am a second year PhD student in Global Health at McMaster University. I have a keen interest in the political economy of knowledge production, decolonial storytelling, problem framing, forms of historic erasure, and how continued social amnesia in the global public consciousness relates to the perpetuation of ongoing grievous systemic injustices on the African continent in this present moment of intersecting crises. 

‘Faces of the Climate Crisis’ is an arts-based innovation and multimedia project that aims to engage local youth climate activists in order create a platform for them to speak to the lived experiences of their own communities regarding the unequal impacts of the climate crisis on the African continent. This database of stories is a form of narrative reclamation that allows Africans to speak to the [neo]colonial history behind the climate crisis; it will highlight how large parts of the world are turned into designated sacrifice zones and condemned to unimaginable suffering. The African continent has contributed less than 4% of global GHG emissions, but faces the most acute impacts because of record droughts, ongoing floods, etc.). This is a multi-modal arts-based climate justice awareness building campaign aimed at humanising statistics using visual/audio storytelling as a means of highlighting the psycho-social, political and economic consequences of the climate crisis on everyday people on the African continent who are often forgotten or have been intentionally silenced by decades of ineffectual reporting by mainstream western corporate media.

Nnamdi Nnake holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering and a master’s degree in History. Currently, he is pursing doctoral-level studies in the History of Technology and is researching how the socioeconomic exclusion of marginalized groups has historically intersected with the evolution of telecommunications technology in British Colonial Africa using Nigeria and Kenya as case studies. Nnamdi’s other interest is sociopolitical history and he discusses the history of nationalism via Nationhood Podcast.

Nnamdi’s project will explore technological determinism to study the extent to which historical developments are driven by innovations in technology. He hopes to build an interactive website where visitors can simulate governmental decisions regarding telecommunications technology to see the real-life impact. Using data from Nigeria and Kenya, the website would underscore how advancements in telecommunications technology have historically influenced the kinds of social exclusion experienced by people living below the poverty line with a focus on women, rural dwellers and the uneducated. This project shows how formal or informal actions, policies and procedures can deprive vulnerable people of equal access to political, economic, and social prospects. The study seeks to identify what designers of telecommunication technologies should consider in order to reduce discrimination and hence, guarantee inclusivity and user-centricity. Overall, it shows how technology interacts with society and emphasizes the importance of making it more fit-for-purpose.

Stephanie Rico is a second-year PhD student in the English and Cultural Studies and Gender and Social Justice departments. Her research explores the intersections of race, trauma, and sexuality in contemporary queer memoirs. In particular, how queer memoirists represent narratives of trauma and histories of sexual, racial, and colonial violence through nonlinear or hybrid forms of storytelling. Her research asks how engaging with queer memoirs that partake in alternate modes of queer historicizing and archiving enable us to realize a vision of queer relations, politics, and futurities.   

Stephanie’s residency project combines film photographs and records of queer historical spaces found in the “Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archive” with gathered oral histories and testimonials, documenting in the process, 2SLGBTQ+ heritage in Hamilton and colonial legacies of archival, temporal, and spatial erasure. By incorporating digital scholarship into her project, Stephanie highlights the radical presence, resistance, and repositories of queer cultural memory and knowledge that endure both in the archive and community today. Her use of digital scholarship as a counter-archival process and tool for community content creation reimagines and reencounters the archive through digital storytelling methodologies grounded in space, place, and people. By decentring and refusing colonial, Eurocentric archival practices historically and systemically built to further the erasure of queer, Two-Spirit, and BIPOC people, the project highlights both the continued presence of queerness in Hamilton and the salient truth that we have always been here. 

My name is Katy Celina Sandoval. I am a 1st generation Latinx graduate student doing her PhD in Neuroscience. I am passionate about empowering women and people of colour in academia and the field of STEM. My research studies the role of oxytocin in social behaviour in a mouse model of autism. I also lead a women’s circle in the Department of PNB and work as a digital content creator.

During my time in the Graduate Residency Program, I will work on creating a comic story of my academic experience as a Latina woman in STEM. The comic will highlight the work I do in and outside the lab, as well as the responsibilities of being a PhD student. I want to use this experience to include research-based and storytelling knowledge on Women in STEM. My main goal is to empower future generations and to humanize the experience of being a scholar: the successes and failures! In this process, I want to propose ways to reduce the gap in the number of women and underrepresented women in STEM by providing some insight from my personal experiences and other women of colour in STEM. Storytelling in a digital comic media will help engage with people and inspire changes in our communities.

Chase R. Thomson (he/they) is completing an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory. Previously, Chase completed a BA in English Literature with a Minor in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia (2021). Chase’s CGS-funded research seeks to explore how auto/biography, memoir, and archive(s) can inform individual and communal identity formation and resilience–particularly in transgender and gender non-conforming communities.

Community archives operate as evidence of the historical formation and resistance of individuals and communities. In particular, queer archives offer a rich and resistant history for young queer individuals to reflect upon and utilize to build confident and connected identities of their own. However, there remain major problems with the archive(s) as an institution. Access to the archive(s) is often unattainable, but furthermore, the content that is deemed archive-able often reinforces hegemonic, hetero/homonormative, and “Western” ideals. Making space in the archive(s) for the historical testimonies and materials of marginalized communities (in tandem with making the archives more accessible to the general public) is essential to strengthening the confidence and resilience of these communities today. Through community interviews, Chase seeks to produce a podcast that explores and interrogates how the Hamilton 2SLGBTQ+ Community Archives can expand their collections to include Indigiqueer, Two-Spirit, and transgender materials.

Cam is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, holding degrees in music and psychology from McMaster University. His research with the MAPLE Lab explores how composers use expressive cues such as loudness, pitch, and timing to communicate music’s emotional meaning. His project aims to elucidate how music’s complex structure affects its perceived meaning in explorations of historically renowned compositions.

Recent technological advances have enabled analysts to explore music’s historic changes using sophisticated algorithms. Although these quantitative techniques hold potential to clarify changes in musical expression, they often lack theoretical common ground with the qualitative methods of past musicological research. Cam’s project blends qualitative and quantitative techniques to trace the evolution of a musical language, using interactive data visualizations to communicate his findings. Specifically, he analyzes special sets of pieces composed since the seventeenth century, examining expressive changes in a long-held tradition. His exploratory analyses track compositional changes in a widely-studied musical idiom—revealing expressive patterns in works by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) and F. Chopin (1810-49). Interactive applications showcasing his findings allow readers to perform their own analyses while engaging with the data and musical excerpts examined.

Emma Croll-Baehre (they/she) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Emma completed a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature with a Minor in Women’s Studies (2014-2018) at the University of Western Ontario, followed by an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University (2018-2019). Emma’s Vanier-CGS supported doctoral work considers contemporary twin cultural production in the digital era. 

The digital age has seen a greater enmeshment of twins and technology, with the emergence of online twin cultural producers such as twinfluencers. Emma’s research considers the spectacularization of twinship in the digital age, an age characterized by duelling ideological currents of individualism and uniformity, aptly embodied by twins whose qualities of novelty and sameness have imbued them with cultural capital on digital media platforms (i.e. instagram, tiktok, etc.). Twins are ‘hyper-visible’ in part because their intimacies and interdependent embodiment illuminate conditions of our shared vulnerability in uncomfortable ways. Emma’s project will demonstrate how digital media both facilitates consumer capitalism’s cooptation of twinship and enables twins to subvert (‘Western’) hegemonic ideals of embodiment and intimacy.

Duygu Ertemin (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. She completed her BA in Archaeology at Bilkent University in Turkey, and her MSc in Cultural Heritage Materials and Technologies at the University of Peloponnese in Greece. She specialized in archaeometric techniques used in archaeological material analysis. Her current research explores connectivity through a communities of practice approach. She aims to conduct mineral and chemical analysis on potteries made by the 6th mill. BCE Anatolian Porsuk communities to identify production practices and help understand the social organization and interaction in the region.

Duygu was a graduate resident at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship in 2021 and worked on constructing an open access database for Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and its 6th mill. BCE pottery technologies by translating published literature into English and digitising them. Her aim was to enable non-Turkish scholars to access information and provide opportunities for collaborative work.

In 2022, Duygu extended her residency at the centre to learn more about the tools that digital scholarship provides for archaeological information communication. Duygu works with the Sherman Centre team to create a website where she can provide open access to the database she created in her 2021 residency, share an interactive digital exhibition of her ceramic analysis from Greece, produce ArcGIS story maps to provide interactive story telling for Anatolian prehistory, and finally to share her thoughts on archaeological topics with blog posts.

Akacia Propst (She/Her) is a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Her specialization is in bioarchaeology – the study of human remains from archaeological contexts. Akacia’s doctoral research looks at whether using new frameworks of analysis allows us to learn more from commonly studied bioarchaeological data. Her research specifically looks at patterns of health and intra-population variation within a late-Medieval population from modern day Osor, Croatia through the multi-variate study of diet, disease, and mortality data.

For the self-directed residency, Akacia is working on how to spatially contextualize her data based on burial location within Osor’s medieval cemetery through ArcGIS as well as looking at the applicability of Social Network Theory. She aims to explore whether or not these analyses can help highlight any important intra-population variation within the cemetery population, if it reflects socio-cultural differences amongst buried individuals, and any potential changing patterns of health over the period the cemetery was in use.

Cam is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, holding degrees in music and psychology from McMaster University. His research with the MAPLE Lab explores how composers use expressive cues such as loudness, pitch, and timing to communicate music’s emotional meaning. His project aims to elucidate how music’s complex structure affects its perceived meaning in explorations of historically renowned compositions.

Recent technological advances have enabled analysts to explore music’s historic changes using sophisticated algorithms. Although these quantitative techniques hold potential to clarify changes in musical expression, they often lack theoretical common ground with the qualitative methods of past musicological research. Cam’s project blends qualitative and quantitative techniques to trace the evolution of a musical language, using interactive data visualizations to communicate his findings. Specifically, he analyzes special sets of pieces composed since the seventeenth century, examining expressive changes in a long-held tradition. His exploratory analyses track compositional changes in a widely-studied musical idiom—revealing expressive patterns in works by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) and F. Chopin (1810-49). Interactive applications showcasing his findings allow readers to perform their own analyses while engaging with the data and musical excerpts examined.

Emma Croll-Baehre (they/she) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Emma completed a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature with a Minor in Women’s Studies (2014-2018) at the University of Western Ontario, followed by an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University (2018-2019). Emma’s Vanier-CGS supported doctoral work considers contemporary twin cultural production in the digital era. 

The digital age has seen a greater enmeshment of twins and technology, with the emergence of online twin cultural producers such as twinfluencers. Emma’s research considers the spectacularization of twinship in the digital age, an age characterized by duelling ideological currents of individualism and uniformity, aptly embodied by twins whose qualities of novelty and sameness have imbued them with cultural capital on digital media platforms (i.e. instagram, tiktok, etc.). Twins are ‘hyper-visible’ in part because their intimacies and interdependent embodiment illuminate conditions of our shared vulnerability in uncomfortable ways. Emma’s project will demonstrate how digital media both facilitates consumer capitalism’s cooptation of twinship and enables twins to subvert (‘Western’) hegemonic ideals of embodiment and intimacy.

Duygu Ertemin (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. She completed her BA in Archaeology at Bilkent University in Turkey, and her MSc in Cultural Heritage Materials and Technologies at the University of Peloponnese in Greece. She specialized in archaeometric techniques used in archaeological material analysis. Her current research explores connectivity through a communities of practice approach. She aims to conduct mineral and chemical analysis on potteries made by the 6th mill. BCE Anatolian Porsuk communities to identify production practices and help understand the social organization and interaction in the region.

Duygu was a graduate resident at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship in 2021 and worked on constructing an open access database for Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and its 6th mill. BCE pottery technologies by translating published literature into English and digitising them. Her aim was to enable non-Turkish scholars to access information and provide opportunities for collaborative work.

Shaila Jamal is a PhD Candidate at the School of Earth, Environment & Society and a Doctoral Fellow of Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Her research interest includes travel behavior analysis, demographic variations in travel, ICT and travel behavior interactions, and active transportation. She has co-authored twelve journal publications and contributed to several research reports while working as a professional and volunteering for non-profit organizations.

The purpose of this project is to conduct a meta-analysis to summarize quantitative studies that explore the influencing factors of mode choice of older (65+) and young adults. The proposed project is part of a SSHRC funded Ph.D. research “Intergenerational Differences in Travel Behavior”. The meta-analysis will focus on North American studies, given the relative comparability between countries. The study will emphasize four travel modes: automobile, transit, cycle, and walk. In terms of influencing factors, the focus will be given on socio-economic characteristics; mobility tool ownership; built environment attributes; and living arrangements. The paper will be prepared as a reproducible document to provide details of the research workflow to ensure transparency and facilitate the reproducibility of meta-analysis. The document will be written as an R markdown file, and all required files, including the data and codes used for the meta-analysis will be available in a public repository.

Angelo Gio Mateo is a Masters of Public Policy in Digital Society student. He has a Hons. B.A. from the University of Toronto. He has experience in government and in the legal field on immigration and refugee issues. He is also interested in big tech platforms collection of personal data and its use to manipulate user behaviour and gain revenue from advertising.

Canada is increasingly using technology and data in government decision-making processes. Current academic literature has discovered that Canada’s immigration and border agencies are using algorithms in the decision-making process, creating a digital obstacle for immigrants and refugees who are not afforded the same Charter and administrative law rights that citizens have. Angelo’s project seeks to answer whether Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada; the Immigration and Refugee Board; and Canada Border Services Agency are using or planning to use private social media data in immigration application decision-making or enforcement. These agencies already use public social media data, such as posts that do not have any privacy restrictions on Facebook or WhatsApp messages between a couple to prove the relationship’s authenticity for a spousal sponsorship. But Angelo seeks to question whether immigration and border agencies are able to access private social media data (or its related metadata), whether it is working with social media companies to access this data, and how this data is being used by these agencies.

Wachiya! My name is Marrissa Mathews (she/her) and I am Omushkegowuk Cree from Treaty 9. I grew up in Kapuskasing in northeastern Ontario with familial ties to Weenusk First Nation and Moose Cree First Nation. I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University in the Comparative Public Policy stream. Currently, I hold a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship award and I am working on my dissertation that focuses on urban Indigenous youth success and the effects of federal urban Indigenous youth policy in the Friendship Centre movement.

My project for the Graduate Residency in Digital Scholarship is complementary to my dissertation work in that it is the development of a website that houses the research findings to support the knowledge mobilization stage of the work. A part of the dissertation is a comparative policy analysis of two federally funded urban Indigenous youth programs that emerged from the federal government’s Urban Aboriginal Strategy (UAS). The programs that are being examined are the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres (UMAYC) and the Cultural Connections for Aboriginal Youth (CCAY) program. The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres (OFIFC), the organization where I completed their research ethics process for this work, developed a research framework titled the USAI Framework which stands for utility, self-voicing, access and inter-relationality. A website that houses the research findings would support each of the aforementioned tenets which is important to me as an Indigenous researcher.

Adrianna Michell (she/her) is a MA student in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory(2021) at McMaster University and an incoming PhD student at the University of Toronto in the department of English. She previously completed her BA in English & Cultural studies (2020) also at McMaster. Her research concerns futurity and disability, with ongoing interests across the diverse fields of eco-criticism, digital media, and critical health humanities. Outside of her academic interests, she volunteers with organizations working toward sexual violence prevention and education within higher education. 

My residency project is part of my MA research, which argues that through discourse analysis of Covid-19-related posts on the social media site Twitter a dialectic of biopolitical labour is revealed—one that disabled subjects have always contended with—through which Ontario workers rendered “inessential” or “essential” lives through the categorization of “inessential” and “essential” work. Further, I investigate how disability theory might disrupt, disavow, or dispute the categories of “essential” and “inessential” online, as we consider disabled and labouring bodies as made capacitated or debilitated in multiple, perhaps contradictory or compounding, ways. Working through a “cripistemological” (Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer) frame, I explore how digital discursive interventions such as #PaidSickDaysSaveLives speak to the biopolitical implications of labouring (including immaterial and digital forms of labouring) in/through a pandemic more broadly.

My residency project is part of my MA research, which argues that through discourse analysis of Covid-19-related posts on the social media site Twitter a dialectic of biopolitical labour is revealed—one that disabled subjects have always contended with—through which Ontario workers rendered “inessential” or “essential” lives through the categorization of “inessential” and “essential” work. Further, I investigate how disability theory might disrupt, disavow, or dispute the categories of “essential” and “inessential” online, as we consider disabled and labouring bodies as made capacitated or debilitated in multiple, perhaps contradictory or compounding, ways. Working through a “cripistemological” (Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer) frame, I explore how digital discursive interventions such as #PaidSickDaysSaveLives speak to the biopolitical implications of labouring (including immaterial and digital forms of labouring) in/through a pandemic more broadly.

Brianne Morgan (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University, with a specific focus on biological anthropology.  Her research interests include metabolic bone disease, visualization and imaging of skeletal remains, syndemic theory, and diagnosis in paleopathology. Her current work focuses on the analysis of scurvy and anemia in skeletal collections from various contexts throughout 18^th-19^th century Quebec.  

Co-creators Akacia Propst, Taylor Peacock and I are developing our project The Null Hypothesis. Thiswill be a science blog where individuals can submit stories about their research process. Our mission in creating this website is to demystify academic research and promote both media and science literacy in an engaging and approachable way. Throughout the Sherman Centre’s Graduate Residency, we will be developing the “Science Tales” section of the blog, where individuals can share funny, personal anecdotes about their research. The purpose of this section is to allow academics to connect with the public, break down misconceptions of what scientific research looks like, and promote greater public awareness and engagement by doing so. In the future, we aim to develop The Null Hypothesis to also highlight the importance of often unpublishable research with non-significant results by creating a space where researchers can share and discuss their non-significant results. 

Gloria Park (she/her) is a Master of Public Policy in Digital Society candidate at McMaster University. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Criminology and a certificate in Digital Marketing from York University. On a larger scope, her research examines how technology and public policy intersect together. Specifically, her goal is to demonstrate the growing need for policies in the area of data collection, privacy, and social media.

My project seeks to address how social media apps are permeating user’s personal, social and private life by intrusively storing data. My goal is to explore social media users’ knowledge and comfort levels of personal data being collected. Through the use of semi-structured interviews and surveys, data will then be collected, visualized, analyzed, and presented. Questions surrounding comfort levels of social media, data collection, and frequency of social media usage will be observed. The overarching objective is to ask: how comfortable are we, as users, of data collection?

Akacia Propst (She/Her) is a 4^th year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Her specialization is in bioarchaeology – the study of human remains from archaeological contexts. Akacia’s doctoral research focuses on using new frameworks of analysis to study health and intra-population variation within a late-Medieval population from modern day Osor, Croatia through the multi-variate study of diet, disease, and mortality data.

Myself and co-creators Brianne Morgan and Taylor Peacock are developing our project The Null Hypothesis. Thiswill be a science blog where individuals can submit stories about their research process. Our mission in creating this website is to demystify academic research and promote media and science literacy in an engaging and approachable way. Throughout the Sherman Centre’s Graduate Residency, we will be developing the “Science Tales” section of the blog, where individuals can share funny, personal anecdotes about their research. The purpose of this section is to allow academics to connect with the public, break down misconceptions of what scientific research looks like, and promote greater public awareness and engagement by doing so. In the future, we aim to develop The Null Hypothesis to also highlight the importance of often unpublishable research with non-significant results by creating a space where researchers can share and discuss their non-significant results. 

Jess Rauchberg is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication and Media Arts at McMaster University. Jess’s research is grounded in critical/cultural communication, crip theory, and feminist media studies. Her doctoral thesis examines North American-based digital disability justice organizing on social media platforms and the tensions emerging from algorithmic oppression and technocultural political change. Jess’s writing can be found in the Journal of International & Intercultural Communication, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and Flow Journal. 

Jess will be working on a tentatively titled project, “Bestie Vibes Only: TikTok’s Platform Vernacular and the Problematics of Visibility.” The project assesses the viral micro-blogging platform TikTok and simply asks: how do we talk on TikTok? Jess will assess TikTok’s unique multimodal features (e.g., duets, stitches, #ForYouPage) to determine how communication and content-generation on TikTok are distinct from other social media platforms. Jess’s project additionally seeks to trouble TikTok’s campaign to market itself as a platform for visibility, representation, and social transformation. She will analyze TikTok’s use of shadowbanning and other forms of algorithmic censorship to interrogate the limitations of visibility and representation on social media platforms. The project will be rooted in platform feminisms, critical algorithm studies, crip data studies, and critical digital race studies. 

Bio: Maddie Brockbank (she/her) is a PhD student in the school of social work at McMaster University. Maddie has her BSW (2019) and MSW (2020) from McMaster. Her research, practice experience, and community organizing initiatives have been in anti-violence work with men, specifically in exploring the links between sexual violence prevention, masculinities, and engaging men in primary prevention efforts.

Project: Maddie’s project aims to develop an online training for staff, faculty, and students at McMaster University around the Sexual Violence Policy and Protocol. Specifically, Maddie hopes to collaborate with anti-violence services on and off campus to develop a webinar that addresses how McMaster personnel can respond to disclosures, support survivors, develop an awareness of resources for referral, and promote a culture of safety. This project was borne out of the Student Voices on Sexual Violence survey, which found that approximately 61% of McMaster student respondents indicated that they were unaware of campus resources, policies, and protocols in place around addressing sexual violence. Through the integration of anti-oppressive, feminist, and anti-racist principles, Maddie’s project intends to equip staff, faculty, and students with the information necessary to support sexual violence prevention on campus.

Bio: Alexis-Carlota Cochrane (she/her) is a Latinx Queer academic with a dedication to the battle against racism and discrimination. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto with a focus in Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and a Certificate of Digital Communications from Sheridan College. In Alexis’ research at McMaster University, through her Master of Arts candidacy in Communication and New Media, she examines how mass-mediated portrayals of racialized identities are often discriminatory and favourable depictions are dependent on identity. 

Project: Through qualitative and quantitative research taking the form of one-on-one interview discussions, my residency project will work to consider how active social media users see race and identity being portrayed in the online context. This research will work to inquire how mediated portrayals become more favourable the less racialized or intersectional the identity of the person being mediated is. The objections of this project are to: understand how mediated depictions are affected by identity and positionality, the narratives that are a result of these depictions and how racialized BIPOCs view themselves represented in mediated spaces. This research will utilize an intersectional feminist framework.

Bio: Linzey is a PhD student in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. He completed his BA and MA in English Literature at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. An emerging poet, activist and educator born and raised on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, his research explores queer Caribbean and diaspora writings as sites of unexplored formations in counterpolicy and citizenship. 

Project: At present, critical and creative writings about the queer Caribbean and diaspora experience (QCDE) remain scattered, limited, and largely inaccessible for Caribbean and diaspora peoples inside and outside of accepted models in formal education and learning. Linzey’s residency project preoccupies itself with constructing a crucial bibliography meant to curate the rich (hi)story about the queer Caribbean and diaspora experience produced in writing. Through the development of a bibliography of (QCDE) poetry, fiction and nonfiction produced over the past 120 years, which will ultimately provide the necessary data for the construction of an interactive- map database project, he is interested in generating correctives to problems of inaccessibility and censorship of information about queer Caribbean and diaspora life in a fundamentally anti-queer regional and international cyberspace culture. 

Bio: Hello! I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of English & Cultural Studies at McMaster, where I specialize in the intersection of food, domesticity, and digital media. My dissertation work considers the food blog as an online platform that reworks autobiographical and archival conventions for a neoliberal, creative industries economy, asking how this platform shapes and defines notions of food politics and ‘good’ food. My other research interests include digital identity work, ASMR, and visual culture.

Project: As part of my dissertation work, my 2020-2021 residency project investigates the role of gourmet food institutions in creating, promoting, and circulating narratives of food blog success. By charting the demographic data of food bloggers recognized by the Saveur magazine annual Food Blog Awards, my work aims to: (a) investigate the Awards’ adjudication patterns in regards to the digital food projects of underrepresented groups; (b) better understand the food blog’s reputation as a genre tied to whiteness, traditional femininity, heteronormativity, and upper/middle-classness; and (c) evaluate the role of gourmet food institutions, like Saveur, in framing the food blog as a project of neoliberal creativity. In sum: how are the Awards influenced by a context in which demands for entrepreneurship, networking, and un(der)paid passionate labour are unevenly levied upon various bodies? As an ever-present corollary to these aims, my work is also deeply tied to conversations about digital and social media research ethics.

Bio: Theresa N. Kenney (she/her/siya) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Her doctoral research engages with asexual, aromantic, and Asian North American theorizing in order to explore how queerly platonic relationalities are felt, imagined, and enacted within queer Asian North America. Her work theorizes intimate queerly platonic relationalities as alternative political alliances that resist white coloniality and (re)imagine queer possibilities. Theresa can be found on Twitter: @ToPoliticise

Project: My residency project aims to digitally archive the surge of asexualities research and writing by Canadian and/or Canada-based scholars. I am particularly interested in the connections between asexuality and the constructed Canadian national imaginary that reproduces the settler nation-state through white settler sexuality and settler innocence. I question: How might asexuality contribute to, comment on, and/or critique the Canadian settler imaginary? To what extent is the academic, creative, and activist production of asexuality-based discourse tied to the Canadian national imaginary? I explore the intimate, national, geographical, digital, transnational, and archival networks bound to the production of asexual discourse by assembling a public digital archive of asexual research and by analyzing the spatial networks between these scholars to expose the connections between and perpetuated by whiteness, asexuality, and the Canadian settler imaginary.

Bio: Luis Navarro (Mexico City) is a PhD student of New Media and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Luis is creating a computer-music software inflected by musical expressions derived from political resistance and opposition (e.g. Cumbia). He expects this software to be an ideology critique of the dominant computer-music world system. Luis is a member of the McMaster Cybernetic Orchestra, the live coding collectives RGGTRN and Grupo D’Binis.

Project: I will investigate extraction (e.g. of mineral, data) in the Americas and its relation to software. The result of the residency will be a visualization showing the connections between creative/art-oriented software(s) and the raw materials that are used to build computers, and thus enable them. The bibliography of the texts investigated will be made available publicly through a blog entry in the Sherman Centre blog. The intended audience for this visualization and bibliography is people studying humanities and sciences at McMaster and the general public in the Americas. To further the latter, I will translate the visualization to Spanish so it’s available to a broader public. I will also make a two-month talking circle with people from McMaster who are interested in issues related to extraction and computation for them to contribute to the conversation before the publication of the visualization.

Bio: Sarah Paust works at the intersection of critical medical anthropology and digital anthropology. As an MA student and Fulbright awardee in the Department of Anthropology, her research interests include global health finance, health disparities, and digital technologies. Her current project explores how provincial public health agencies use social media to reach Indigenous populations, as well as how activists and nonprofits use the same digital platforms to advance, critique, or push back against such interventions.

Project: My residency project investigates the racialized nature of digital surveillance in public health while centering the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had on Indigenous communities. In addition to a literature review spanning biopolitics, Aboriginal health studies, and surveillance studies, I analyze how local Public Health Units use social media to disseminate COVID-19 messaging and present my findings in a virtual mock course Stored on an open-source website, this course will consist of 5-6 mini-lectures that introduce the work of influential theorists, contextualized with current events and short examples drawn from the kinds of public health social media campaigns that I analyze for my master’s research. My goal with this website is to introduce young people interested in public health or social justice to concepts such as biopolitics, surveillance, and biological citizenship as useful theoretical frameworks for making sense of the ongoing COVID-19 emergency.

Bio: Shalen Prado is a second year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Her doctoral research focuses on archaeological landscapes and seascapes of northeastern Scotland. Using paleoethnobotanical approaches, Shalen aims to examine human-environment relationships from the Iron Age to the early Medieval period by retrieving sediment samples from archaeological sites in Scotland. These samples contain microbotanical residues that allow archaeologists to investigate foodways, architecture, social interaction, and cultural identity.

Project: Shalen’s project will collate information on microscopic plant remains (e.g., phytoliths and starch grains) retrieved from archaeological contexts (e.g., artifacts, human teeth, and sediment) to create a functional online photographic database. These digital photos of microscopic plant remains are imperative for successful identification of plant species recovered from archaeological sites. Shalen will take photos of modern reference specimens and archaeological specimens processed at the McMaster Paleoethnobotanical Research Facility (MPERF) using a microscope camera. These photos will be organized into an online database which will allow other archaeologists and paleoethnobotanists to identify microscopic plant remains in Northern Europe.

Marley Beach is a fourth-year undergraduate student in the Department of History. She holds a diploma in Baking & Pastry from George Brown College, and after working in kitchens for a few years returned to combine her two passions, food and history. Her interest lies particularly in trans-national cultural exchanges and social changes as reflected in diet and cuisine.

Her residency research project, funded by the USRA, investigates trends in English language cookbooks and recipes produced or used in North America from 1600-1850. This period saw major changes in the demographics, culture, and economy of the continent. These changes affected what food was available and how that food was prepared by both colonists and Indigenous peoples, leading to the emergence of new distinctive cuisines. She will first collect a data set from cookbooks and recipes, broken down by their individual components.  She then intends to use this data to create a publicly accessible database, so that it can be used for analysis not just by herself, but by other interested food historians or enthusiasts. 

Raquel Burgess is a PhD student in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Yale School of Public Health. She holds a BSc (Kinesiology) and a MSc (Global Health) from McMaster University and has worked in medical education research for McMaster’s Department of Family Medicine. She is passionate about innovative ways to improve population health, specifically through health communication.

Broadly, Raquel’s research interests lie at the intersection of ‘place’ and health education. In recent times, her interests have expanded to consider novel health communication challenges and opportunities brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Emily Goodwin is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research investigates the creative work economies, neo/liberal media practices, and auto/biographical and museological conventions of the food blog genre. Emily holds a BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Brock University, and her broader research interests include digital identity work and curation, visual culture, and cultural and critical theory.

Emily’s residency project investigates the role of gourmet food institutions in creating, promoting, and circulating narratives of food blog success. Her project charts the demographic data of food bloggers recognized by Saveur magazine’s annual Food Blog Awards, in order to investigate the Awards’ promotion the digital food projects by underrepresented groups and to better understand the food blog’s reputation for hegemonic whiteness, traditional femininity, heteronormativity, and upper/middle-classness. The resultant re-mapping of Saveur’s depiction of food blog ‘success’ also supports her doctoral research, which analyzes sample food blogs selected from the Saveur Award campaigns

Adrianna Michell is a graduate of the English & Cultural studies BA program and will be returning in the fall to complete her MA in the Cultural Studies and Critical Theory program. Her research concerns Hamilton literature and the relationships between people and place considering settlement and climate change. 

Adrianna’s work is supported by an Undergraduate Student Research Award and investigates the relationships between land and the people that occupy it as depicted in narratives written by Hamilton based writers. The project considers how these authors mark connections between people and place to speculate new and better ways to relate to land. Through her Sherman Centre Residency, Adrianna will explore new digital approaches to take this work back into the community and consider how digital representations of space complicate and mediate the relationships of people to place.

Helen is a PhD student in the department of Political Science. Her research focuses on the impact of targeted Internet Blackouts against ethnic minorities in Ethiopia and Cameroon. She is interested in studying this growing phenomenon to expand theories of digital authoritarianism in an understudied region.

Project: My project is an exploration of a growing phenomenon; intentional Internet Blackouts (IBs) used by government leaders to halt opposition movements. IBs are used to disrupt citizens internet access and to stop the flow of communication online. Often times, IBs occur before the onset of protests and elections. In 2018, 25 countries experienced one or more IBs totaling 195 instances worldwide (Taye 2019). Blocking access to the internet destabilizes citizens from engaging in their day to day activities but it also allows the government to send a direct message to citizens. To study this wave of IBs, I plan on constructing an online map to track and monitor IBs across the world. This visualization will be published on a website that is accessible and useful not only for academics, NGO’s but also to support impacted communities and interested global citizens.

Katherine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and she studies the infectious disease “The Plague”. Her dissertation focuses on reconstructing the spread of this disease across the globe, using clinical samples and ancient DNA recovered from archaeological victims of ancient outbreaks. By investigating past and present incidents of the plague, her work contributes to a better understanding of which populations were affected, why it went extinct in certain geographic regions, and how it has managed to persist throughout human history.

Project: Due to recent technological innovation, DNA sequencing of historical artifacts has produced an overwhelming volume of publicly available data. While powerful in its analytical potential, this avalanche of information has created significant barriers to the efficient reuse of published data. Katherine’s project aims to design software that facilitates retrieving these online records which contain vital information about our evolutionary past. This work involves database design, APIs, and non-traditional avenues of software publication. In addition, her project explores methods of digital storytelling, such as StoryMaps, to display historical records on an interactive global canvas. Katherine seeks to investigate how digital exhibits may diversify our target audience and prove valuable as means for collaboration as both accompanying pieces and standalone scholarly products.

Jantina is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies and I specialize in the study of writing by women and devotional writing from around 1550-1700. My SSHRC-funded research explores the relationship between body and text in anonymous devotional texts written by women in the seventeenth century. People often assume that early modern women wrote under a male pseudonym in order to avoid the stigma of their gender but, in the texts that I study, the authors write their anonymous texts as women in order to instruct their readers in a new, devotional, body language. My work at the Sherman Centre extends my research by exploring how textual analysis can be used along side more traditional close reading techniques to examine thematic shifts in devotional genres following the institution of the Church of England in 1534.

Project: This project applies textual analysis techniques to a selection of early modern devotional texts to explore how themes in devotional literature published in England shifted between 1550 and 1700. I will be compiling a dataset of texts and then conducting stylometric analysis using topic modelling, n-gram analysis, and data visualization to explore how the ways in which people described their motivation to worship changed after the Reformation and into the Restoration. By experimenting with a dataset that has been limited to devotional texts, I am also testing whether previously identified thematic preoccupations become statistically measurable when we limit the breadth of our dataset by genre. It is my hope that the results of these investigations will provide new evidence through which to understand how the concept of praise contributed to the ascendance of poetry in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century. 

Emily is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, and holds a BA and MA in English Language and Literature from Brock University. Her SSHRC-funded doctoral research investigates the food blog genre as a site of museological and auto/biographical influences, conventions, and remediations, with particular attention to the possibilities of a reflexive and recursive food politics embedded within the circuits of neo/liberal media practices, creative work economies, and Enlightenment models of connoisseurship and taste. Emily’s work at the Sherman Centre will complement this doctoral work by offering a focused investigation of the role of gourmet food institutions in creating, promoting, and circulating narratives of food blog success. More broadly, her research interests include digital identity work and curation, visual culture, and cultural and critical theory.

Project: My residency project considers the annual “Food Blog Awards” campaign, conducted by the gourmet food publication Saveur since 2010. The campaign’s archive of past winners and current nominees arguably decentres the publication’s mass-media power through its mapping of diverse digital food projects. Yet to what extend do the features of the Food Blog Awards support the recognition of digital food work by underrepresented groups, including people of colour, 2SLGBTQ+ people, and immigrants? Furthermore, how is the work economy surrounding (and bolstered by) the Awards influenced by neoliberal values of entrepreneurship, networking, and creativity? In addressing these questions, I will chart the broad trends of Saveur’s categorization and promotion of blogs (including data regarding Award titles, blogger demographics, and repeat nominations) and will complement this data with close readings of promotional materials, FAQs, and category definitions. The resultant re-mapping of Saveur’s depiction of food blog ‘success’ will support my main doctoral research, which analyzes 10 sample blogs selected from the Saveur campaigns.

Rudaina is a second year PhD student in the Cognitive Science of Language Department. She currently focuses on the question: How does the contact between Arabic and Hebrew languages affect written Arabic in Israel? Specifically, what are the motivations for the adaptation processes? Rudaina’s interests include corpus analysis and borrowing words. Her academic background is about the current and historical contact between Hebrew and Arabic. She has been an instructor of Hebrew to Arab speakers in middle and high schools in Israel.

Project: Contact between Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic inside the state of Israel affects both spoken and written Arabic. My project at the Sherman Center aims to build a digital archive of borrowed Hebrew words in written Arabic in electronic media (which are borrowed by writers from different educational backgrounds, ages, and genders) in websites in North and Center of Israel. The corpus will include several hundreds of words based on sources from the printed press which are addressed to Arab readers in Israel and from public written communication. The proposed digital archive will look at: 1. The most frequently borrowed items from Hebrew within the last two decades; and 2. The type and level of adaption, both phonological or morphological, that borrowed words show.

The materials in the digital linguistic archive will support learning and discovery at different scales of language studies since it will be an open linguistic resource for researchers worldwide.

Joann is currently a second year Masters student in the School of Geography and Earth Sciences at McMaster University. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Waterloo, with a Bachelor of Environmental Studies in Geography and Environmental Management.  She is passionate about learning about human and environmental health, community development and knowledge translation. She has experience working with government agencies, non-profit organizations, and post-secondary institutions. 

Project: Climate change is expected to impact Canada in several ways, including through an increase in the number and extent of extreme heat events (EHEs) (Paterson et al., 2012). This is concerning, as high temperatures can cause negative health impacts (Watts et al., 2015). Health vulnerability among immigrants is important to consider as Canada welcomes many immigrants every year, and is home to a diversity of ethnic backgrounds (Hankivsky, 2014). The objectives of this project are to: 1) explore the impacts of EHEs on hospital admissions and air quality in Hamilton; and 2) explore whether new immigrant arrivals are, as a vulnerable population, at greater risk of EHEs. Quantitative methods will assess the relationship between EHEs in Hamilton and hospital admissions for heat-related illnesses at local hospitals during those events. Qualitative methods will also be used. Interviews will be conducted with service provides and immigrants in Hamilton, and analyzed thematically.

Sam is a doctoral candidate in the history department. Sam specializes in Cold War medical history and international relations. Her SSHRC-funded research examines how the fight against poliomyelitis fit into international and transnational relations between divided Germany and its occupiers between 1947 and 1965, exposing the ways in which politics and ideology permeate supposedly “neutral” areas such as science and healthcare. Sam completed her B.A. (Hon.) here at Mac, and her MA at Western University.

Project: My project explores ways to visualize the interconnectivity of public health between East and West Germany using GIS mapping software. While conducting archival research, I photographed thousands of pages of weekly reports on epidemic disease occurrence across East and West Germany. I will experiment with different methods of data transfer and cleaning to create a dataset from which I can create visual representations of these epidemics, particularly heat maps.

The statistical information spans two periods: pre-vaccine and post-vaccine. In the first period, public health remained a shared concern for East and West Germans. The map will demonstrate interconnectivity between two new nations: how disease flowed across state boundaries. The map will also track change in epidemic occurrence post-vaccine. From 1955 to 1962, Germany was the testing ground for two duelling vaccines: Jonas Salk’s injected polio vaccine and Albert Sabin’s oral polio vaccine. My epidemic map will show the ramifications of these two vaccines’ differing acceptance rates on each side of the border, which led to a visible German-German epidemic border. The resulting GIS map will provides a wider audience with a visual representation of how epidemic disease is a concern which transcends borders, and how vaccination protects populations.

I am a second year PhD student in Cognitive Science of Language Department. I am also a researcher at the Reading-Lab in The Centre for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics (ARiEAL). My interests include corpus analysis, word learning, and sociolinguistics. My research focuses on the dynamics behind the spread of newly popular words and the question of how these words are learnt by adult speakers. I have been conducting eye-tracking, EEG, and computational linguistics studies to answer these questions.

Project: Twitter data has been a popular way to examine sociolinguistic studies. My project aims to answer two questions by looking at the United States and Canada geo-tagged tweets: (1) what makes a word popular? (2) how are these words spreading? To be able to answer the first question I am planning to investigate phonological/phonetic structure and semantic connections of words which are either recently popular or losing their popularity. To be able to answer the second question, I will investigate the geographical distribution of those words over time based on their adaptation rate both visually and mathematically. I will use R to apply text mining, visualization, and machine learning models.

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and I study a puzzling and particularly lethal disease: Plague. I work in the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, where I extract plague DNA from the archaeological remains of its victims. Using this peculiar data, I am exploring how ancient pandemics of plague are connected to modern outbreaks, and what interplay of factors has shaped our relationship with infectious disease throughout human history.

Project: Digging into Digital Anthropology. The project I am conducting in collaboration with the Sherman Centre involves the creation of an undergraduate course on digital scholarship within anthropology. Digital anthropology takes many forms, including studying communication (ex. social media), digital means of producing new data (ex. automated interview transcription), as well as using tools to analyze and visualize the results (archaeological mapping and statistical software). While these approaches are steadily gaining momentum in other fields, the adoption of digital anthropology into Canadian academic teaching has not been as swift. And yet, there is an ever-present expectation that both students and faculty will have fluency in specialized software tools with limited guidance and resources to develop their skills. In response, this project seeks to provide training in both theoretical approaches and hands-on experience in identifying, analyzing, and visualizing publicly-accessible anthropological data. In addition, students will be advised on how to create ethics statements to justify conscientiousness in research design, data selection, and subject awareness. Upon completion of the course, students will walk away with the knowledge and skills to design and carry-out independent research projects in the digital humanities. By combining novel methodology with traditional anthropological topics, I aim to provide a foundation around which digital anthropology in Canada can be built upon, critiqued, and weaved into general practice.

Channah is a second year PhD student in the Religious Studies Department, and she currently focuses on feminine imagery in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Channah’s academic background is in Hebrew Bible through a MA in Religion obtained at Eastern Mennonite Seminary and a Master of Theology obtained at the Vancouver School of Theology. She has assisted professors, tutored students and led tutorials in the subfields of Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Archaeology, Female Deities, and the Hebrew Bible.

Project: In my research at the Sherman Centre I hope to analyze two Dead Sea Scrolls, one called 4Q184 and another called 4Q185. These two have traditionally been paired as sapiential texts that, not unlike the biblical book of Proverbs, discuss the ways of good  and evil in broad terms so as to dissuade a reader from sin and instead encourage toward the path of God. While both scrolls are poetic texts, I believe they are not necessarily a pair, and that instead 4Q184 should stand alone as an didactic poem that warns against specific evils. In order to do this study, I will be using stylometrics to quantify the style of both scrolls and analyze their literary fingerprint. I hope to examine its morphological and syntactical idiosyncrasies and main characteristics, sentence length, vocabulary richness, word length, word frequency, word combination, and other such features that would help quantify the writing style of the text. Once the data is available I hope to contrast the results of 4Q184 with 4Q185 in order to see similarities or differences that might help elucidate whether the two texts use similar or dissimilar writing styles, and, finally, whether the two should or should not be considered an interdependent set of ancient Hebrew poems.

Kristine Germann is an MA candidate in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory (CSCT) in the Department of English and Cultural Studies.  She has a career in culture that spans the roles of; producer, curator, artist and advocate.  Kristine has worked with leadership teams developing; city building initiatives, public art programs, arts funding and cultural events in not-for-profit, cultural institution and government settings.  The work can be summarized as an investigation of the often-blurred boundaries between the private, public and the development of interventions that challenge, change and form authorship.  Her areas of academic research include; spectacle, aesthetics, public space and politics.

Project: Working title: schooled. The proposed project will examine the trace and residues of meaning horses have left upon the collective human consciousness; their evolving meaning(s) post-industrial and technological age(s) and the horse as an object of cultural spectacle and historic monumentalizing with many imbedded interpretations including; freedom, power and colonialization.  An experiment creating the presence of the horse through sound, defines a space between the ‘real’ and ‘representational’; how the audience expresses and completes meaning through body experience and memory; and a broader symbology of the sociopolitical place that horses currently hold in our cultural landscape.

The resulting works will operate as social sculptures and in a relational art framework. The creation of a trace of a horse utilizing digital technology – an investigation of the horse’s absence within a negative space.  The project will reflect a tension in its aesthetics, content and frameworks as it is not a metaphor for horses or a horse and will reference directly a gesture of re-enactment, recording and re-construction of a performative action(s). The focus of digital scholarship and research will be the creation of two (2) digital audio works.  The first iterations of the project will focus on a multiple channel format (output) and three-dimensional format (output) audio mapping of the movements and sound(s) generated by living horses.

Michael Johnson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religious Studies, specializing in psalms, Second Temple Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early Jewish prayer. His dissertation, “A Reassessment of the Genres of Psalms in 1QHodayot^a,” examines genres of psalms in the Hodayot tradition (Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran) and offers a new model of genre for the corpus. His work at the Sherman Centre is a distinct project that will serve as the basis for future work on the Hodayot manuscripts.

Project: Michael’s Sherman Centre project uses 3D modelling and 3D printing of folded, wadded, and crumpled scrolls to assist in the analysis of damage patterns and the visualization of different phases of damage incurred by Dead Sea scrolls. His past work dealt with 3D modelling manuscripts that were found rolled, but now he is modelling manuscripts that have more chaotic patterns of damage resulting from the failure to properly rewind the scroll. To undertake material reconstructions of scrolls that have been wadded at a secondary stage, the phases of damage must be distinguished and documented so that irregular damage patterns from wadding are not confused with regular patterns from rolling or vice versa. This project focuses primarily on the manuscript 1QHodayota, which appears to have multiple phases of damage, to assist in a revised reconstruction of the manuscript. This project is primarily focused on developing modelling skills, methods, and workflows in preparation for a future project.

Thesis: Reassessing the Genres of the Hodayot (Thanksgiving Psalms from Qumran) http://hdl.handle.net/11375/24895

Stephen Surlin works in multiple mediums including, 3D modeling, 3D printing, sound design, and musical performance. Surlin’s work and research often uses speculative design and design thinking methodologies to imagine near futures and produce diegetic prototypes that can influence our strategies in the present. Surlin received his BFA at University of Windsor and an MDes from OCAD University and is currently enrolled in McMaster University’s PhD program in Communication, New Media and Cultural Studies, with a focus on creating archives using new media and the digital networking infrastructure needed to sustain them.

Project: My project will continue my previous research that considered the tools and infrastructure needed to create the physical infrastructure of networks, resulting in a consideration of geo-political implications and the role of governments and global corporations in the creation, maintenance and ownership of the servers that physically house the world’s digital information.

My current research in critical race and technology studies, primarily references the work of Safiya Umoja Noble, i.e. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018), The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online (2016). These texts emphasize the ways corporations driven by advertising revenue can influence the way information is shared using their systems and platforms.

These theories will inform my future research at the Sherman Centre, leading me to consider mesh network systems that can provide shared wireless internet to marginalized communities that are often in positions to be most reliant on commercial platforms (Mossberger, 2016). In looking for existing models that can subvert these top-down information distribution systems found in platforms like Google or Facebook I will consider the community organizations and quasi-community-ownership models of community gardens to provide a model for the physical infrastructure and people power needed to run a local area network. I plan to continue research on the kind of networking technology and methods that can be used to embed mesh networks in community gardens, including the permissions by the municipality and community organizations. I will also begin research on the ability for systems of trust, e.g. ratings, content flagging, reviews, etc. that can be applied to account for the content moderation done by larger corporations that will now be the responsibility of the community. These systems of trust can be modelled from platforms like: YouTube, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Yelp, etc.

Sarah Whitwell is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at McMaster University. Her research explores the use of violence in the postemancipation South to subjugate African Americans. Building on her previous work on the antilynching movement, Sarah is currently writing her dissertation on how black men and women devised a range of resistance techniques to contest racialized violence in its totality of forms. She is especially interested in the ways that gender shaped resistance.

Project: In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, racialized violence impacted African Americans across the postemancipation South. Generations of African Americans endured the constant threat of individualized and collective incidents of verbal abuse, sexual harassment, and physical assault. It is a false generalization, however, to characterize the black response in terms of passivity. My dissertation examines how black women devised a range of informal resistance techniques to contest racialized violence in its totality of forms. The current digital scholarship project supplements my dissertation. Previously, I created a relational database with data on incidents of violence extracted from the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal Writers’ Project, the first-person testimony culled from the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, and the records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. My goal now is to submit my database to computational analysis with the goal of producing a series of visualizations. In particular, I am interested in elucidating the relationships between specific types of violence and the methods of resistance employed in response.

This Sherman Centre Fellowship project supplements my doctorate research on the environmental history of nineteenth century global gold rushes. My in-progress dissertation argues that international influences affected Canadian relationships with nature during the industrialisation of the primary resource industry. I use the Porcupine gold rush in northern Ontario as a case study to show how transnational forces can effect local environments. The current project is a flow map of people, goods, and ideas moving around the world between 1848 (the first gold rush in California) and 1909 (Porcupine). Although not an exhaustive list of every gold rush person, object, and idea that crossed the globe in the late nineteenth century it reveals patterns which complicate my archival research. Using a database of moved objects compiled during primary research, the flow map project seeks to identify directional and thematic trends in overseas movements associated with the gold rush. The current project builds on previous mapping projects in which I overlayed historic maps onto modern satellite imagery to show changes in claim boundaries and waterways over time. By treating the gold rushes as linked international events, this work (and my dissertation as a whole) challenges the dominant trend in the historical discipline toward national research constrained by political borders.

This digital scholarship project will develop on an online toolkit, or data portal, that consolidates available data on water security issues affecting Indigenous Nations in the Columbia River Basin (CRB) and Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Basin (GLSLB). Indigenous Nations are increasingly experiencing the effects of climate change and taking steps to adapt to current and future environmental risks. In response to ecological changes and altered human activities, First Nations in Canada and the United States are creating climate change adaptation programs for water security. The management of water resources by First Nations is inherently transboundary as those nations existed prior to modern border delineations. The digital scholarship project highlights First Nation strategies from the CRB and GLSLB to enhance equitable and responsible management of Indigenous water resources. Highlighting the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of First Nations and advancing innovation pathways through Indigenous mapping using story maps and geospatial data.

The proposed project is a public access online database of primary source and supplementary materials in African intellectual history. The materials incorporated come from my archival work for my dissertation. This database would bring together these scattered sources into one easily accessible online resource. The database will initially have three portfolios of Uganda intellectuals from the period of transition to British colonial rule in Uganda in East Africa. These portfolios will be comprised of short biographies, no more than 500 words, written in an encyclopaedic style and accompanied with a few excerpts from their written works, no more than five pages each. The excerpts will be selected to show the dynamic character and variety in their writing as a means to support the key arguments in my thesis that these men were multidimensional figures engaged in a vibrant culture of knowledge exchange and debate over representations of the past. One challenge for this project will be acquiring copyright for all the excerpts I wish to include. This may prove to be a complicated and time-consuming task as the documents are the property of a mix of private and public owners. I would also like to include a historiographic essay that draws together the primary source materials and offers suggestions for how to use them in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and beyond.

My research is on networking and digital activism during the Egyptian revolution that started in 2011. I look at the evolution of Twitter networks among Egyptian activists since the start of the revolution in 2011 till now. The theoretical framework is planted in social movement theory of networking and coalitions and in organizational theory on the importance of the existence of bridge builders to fill “structural holes” in the network. I specifically look at how Twitter networks evolved over time by investigating different moments of solidarity and schism within the Egyptian revolutionary movement. I investigate homophily patterns and whether activists’ tweets cluster based on ideology. I study the role played by certain activists as bridge builders between different ideological clusters. The research methodology is based on network analysis of tweets produced by Egyptian revolutionary activists during the period from 2011 to 2015. Old tweets are purchased from GNIP while recent ones are scraped online using the Twitter streaming API. The software tools used for network analysis are ORA and UCINET. The research is funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

In my research I am exploring how one ancient collection of Jewish poetry called the Thanksgiving Hymns fits into the broader landscape of other anthologies of Jewish poetry from the Second Temple period (515 BCE– 70 CE). The Thanksgiving Hymns were recovered among the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran in 1947, and their peculiar rearticulation of language from the biblical Psalms has mystified scholars ever since. For the Sherman Centre fellowship, I am using RStudio to discover corpus-wide patterns of syntax in machine-readable and syntax-tagged texts of the Thanksgiving Hymns in order to compare them with those in the Book of Psalms. Treating syntax-tagging of the corpora as strings, I will uncover reoccurring patterns: those that are shared as well as those that are unique to each corpus. This project will not unlock every mystery of the Thanksgiving Hymns, but it will enable us to assess one of the ways the Hodayot psalmist mimics and modifies the poetics of the Psalter.

My academic interest and research centre on the well-being of humans and other animals in shared social environments. The broader aim of my doctoral research is to increase positive outcomes for both humans and other-than-human (OTH) animals involved in social services, by documenting how animals are integrated into and neglected by social work practice in Ontario. Using critical, posthumanist, and queer theories as my framework for this investigation, I will attempt to investigate and represent multiple subjective social realities, including the realities experienced by OTH animals. My goal is to partially document the experiences of OTH animals involved in AAI with the hopes of gaining greater understanding of how they are impacted by their involvement in these interventions. My project with the Sherman Centre involves three pieces of this larger research program. I intend to use this opportunity to begin to explore innovative ways of collecting data with OTH animals, through engagement with wearable digital photo and video technology as well as sensory technology for the collection of veterinary analytics.

The Pavilion Lake Research Project (PLRP; www.pavilionlake.com) was founded and organized by the NASA Ames Research Center to characterize the microbialite population in Pavilion Lake, British Columbia. Microbialites are rock-like structures believed to be formed by the metabolic activity of bacterial communities. There is extensive evidence in the geologic record that suggests these structures have been around for billions of years, raising questions as to the onset of microbial life on Earth and the evolution of these microbial systems over time. For the past 10 years, this project works as a multidisciplinary effort seeking to advance the understanding of relationships between biology and geochemistry in the formation of these structures. Currently, there is no arrangement of isotopic data in a visual format that can be applied to the existing science goals of PLRP. My thesis project seeks to investigate the presence and preservation of isotopic biosignatures in microbialite carbonate. As part of this project, designing a visual representation of isotopic data sampled from microbialites from the 2014 field season will better demonstrate the spatial distribution of biosignatures and prepare future sampling missions.

Recent manuscript discoveries, coupled with increasing technological capabilities, have led to a proliferation of publicly-available ancient Buddhist texts, preserved mainly in Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan and Classical Chinese. A vast majority of these texts are available only as digital images, and cannot be parsed directly by computer programs. Because traditional optical character recognition (OCR) methods do not work particularly well with these languages, conversion of Buddhist texts to UTF-8 and other computer-readable formats is often done by hand. This process is tedious and prone to errors. My project is an attempt to apply the concept of genetic algorithms to these texts as an alternate method for making error-free UTF-8 versions of the original manuscript images. Instead of beginning with a template of characters we hope to find in the manuscript, as in traditional OCR, my technique involves vectorizing individual characters of a manuscript without any regard for meaning, and then attempting to replicate these vectors using sets of digital genes. This method effectively creates a fractal description of the manuscript that tells us about any single glyph in terms of its relationship to that particular image, instead of to an imagined absolute set of perfect glyph forms. Evolving a standardized set of vectors based only on what actually occurs in the manuscript image avoids human bias about what to expect in terms of individual glyph shapes, allowing for wide variations in handwritten character styles while also reducing the manuscript to a small, finite set of individual glyph categories. A human user can then assign a UTF-8 string to each individual glyph category, enabling the computer to perform the final conversion of the glyphs to a standard text format.

In my research I am tracing the growth Hamilton’s fastest growing suburb—the Ancaster Meadowlands—from a set of ideas and drawings to what it is today: a completed residential and commercial community. To do this I am examining municipal archives, collecting interview data, and mapping the growth of the area. I hope to learn more about the planning process, uncover some of the contours of the community’s land-use conflicts, and explore time-lapsed alterations to the area’s physical geography.