Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities

It's been a few years of hard work and many fruitful research discussions with my research partner, Sarah Zhang, and the fruits of our labour are out with our chapter in Future Horizons: Canadian Digital Humanities.   When we first started out together on this project, we worked on with the historical dataset of the Chinese headtax registers (the records of migrants as they stepped off the ship and onto Canadian soil).  In 2019, we were asked to present at Paul Barrett's graduate studies seminar where we talked about the migrants' head tax, GIS, and digital humanities.  From there, we worked on presenting it at conferences.   In 2021, we were asked to submit a chapter to a book that Sarah Roger and Paul Barrett were thinking about putting together.  And in April 2023, it was finally published.  

Across more than twenty chapters, Future Horizons explores the past, present, and future of digital humanities research, teaching, and experimentation in Canada. Bringing together work by established and emerging scholars, this collection presents contemporary initiatives in digital humanities alongside a reassessment of the field’s legacy to date and conversations about its future potential. It also offers a historical view of the important, yet largely unknown, digital projects in Canada. 

Future Horizons offers deep dives into projects that enlist a diverse range of approaches—from digital games to makerspaces, sound archives to born-digital poetry, visual arts to digital textual analysis—and that work with both historical and contemporary Canadian materials. The essays demonstrate how these diverse approaches challenge disciplinary knowledge by enabling humanities researchers to ask new questions.

The collection challenges the idea that there is either a single definition of digital humanities or a collective national identity. By looking to digital engagements with race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality—not to mention history, poetry, and nationhood—this volume expands what it means to work at the intersection of digital humanities and humanities in Canada today.

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Introduction
1. Digital Canadas? Transforming the Nation — Sarah Roger and Paul Barrett

Part 1. Situating and Disrupting Digital Scholarship
2. Where Is the Nation in Digital Humanities, Revisited — Roopika Risam
3. Rerouting Digital (Humanities) Scholarship in Canada — Andrea Zeffiro
4. Closed, Open, Stopped: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Possibility of Decolonial DH — David Gaertner
5. “This Game Needs to be Made”: Playable Theories ⇌ Virtual Worlds — Jon Saklfoske
6. Reimagining Representational Codes in Data Visualization: What Contemporary Digital Humanities Might Learn from Visual Arts-Based Disciplines — Julia Polyck-O’Neill
7. Making, Conversation: An Experiment in Public Digital Humanities — Kim Martin and Rashmeet Kaur

Part 2. Digital Poetics
8. Canadian Poetry and the Computational Concordance: Sandra Djwa and the Early History of Canadian Humanities Computing — Sarah Roger, Paul Barrett, and Kiera Obbard
9. Canadian Poetry and the Computer — Sandra Djwa
10. “saga uv th relees uv human spirit from compuewterr funckshuns”: Space Conquest, IBM, and the Anti-digital Anxiety of Early Canadian Digital Poetics (1960–1968) — Gregory Betts
11. From the Digits to the Digital: Bodies in the Machines of Canadian Concrete Poetics — Eric Schmaltz
12. Nations of Touch: The Politics of Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities — Dani Spinosa
13. STOP WORDS — Klara du Plessis

Part 3. Digital Canadian Archives
14. Wages Due Both Then and Now — Pascale Dangoisse, Constance Crompton, and Michelle Schwartz
15. Analog Thrills, Digital Spills: On the Fred Wah Digital Archive version 2.0 — Deanna Fong and Ryan Fitzpatrick
16. Humanizing the Archive: The potential of Hip-Hop archives in the digital humanities — Mark Campbell
17. Sounding Digital Humanities — Katherine McLeod
18. Unsettling Colonial Mapping: Sonic-Spatial Representations of amiskwaciwâskahikan — Kendra Cowley
19. Beyond “Mere Digitization”: Introducing the Canadian Modernist Magazines Project — Graham H. Jensen
20. “A Legacy of Race and Data: Mining the History of Exclusion” — Allan Cho and Sarah Zhang

Remembering Jim Wong-Chu: Happy 74th Birthday

Today is Jim Wong-Chu’s birthday and he would’ve been 74 years old. It’s been five years since the passing of my friend and I dearly miss his presence and mentorship.  Jim was a “writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer and activist, editor, and literary and cultural engineer,” but to me, most of all, he was a role model for young people finding their way in this world. He was a polymath of ideas and very inspiring and had a moral compass. Jim was born in 1949 in Hong Kong. In 1953, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Canada as a "paper son", a term which referred to the practice of children who immigrated to Canada by using real or falsified identification papers of relatives living in Canada.  

 

Though his formal education was never completed, Jim inspired me that formal education never ends, and learning is lifelong. He wanted to learn more about the publishing business, so he also worked as an associate editor for Douglas and McIntyre and as an associate editor for Arsenal Pulp Press. Jim attended the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) with a focus on photography and design from 1975-1981. He also attended the University of British Columbia for creative writing from 1985-1987, all the while working as a letter carrier at Canada Post. He was a founding member of various community and cultural organizations including:

•  Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (ACWW)
• Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society 
• the Pender Guy Radio Program, Asia Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR)
• Go for Broke Festival
• B.C. Sinfonetta Society
• Federation of British Columbia Writers
• The Chinese Community Library Association
• B.C. Heritage Trust
• Chinese Cultural Centre in Vancouver

Jim was also an author and editor of: 

• Chinatown Ghosts
• Strike the Wok: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Fiction; 
• Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians;  
• Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry

I'm heartened that Jim's work and legacy live on at the UBC Library's Rare Books and Special Collections.  In a way, it's comforting to know that I sit above his archival fonds each day, knowing that the many late-night conversations, early-morning deadlines, and everything in-between, continue as a lasting resource to many researchers and academics.    In 2021, for example, a graduate student Brandon Leung, writes about how Jim's life and insights influenced and shaped the way he researched and thought about Asian Canadian studies.   Here is a fantastic Finding Aid of the Jim Wong-Chu fonds (RBSC-ARC-1710) available online.   Jim, thank you for the memories.

C.I. certificates -- A Key to Unlocking The Past

There once existed a dizzying array of special identity documents – called C.I. certificates – that were issued by the Canadian Government exclusively to its Chinese residents. These pieces of paper were intended to control, contain, monitor and even intimidate this one community.

Scholars such as Catherine Clement is soon launching The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act exhibition and all of the scans all the scans of all the C.I. Certificates will be housed in a public archive at UBC.   2023 is an important but unfortunate anniversary as it's the 100th year since the passing of the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act in Canada (more commonly known as the Chinese Exclusion Act) that set the stage for Chinese being barred from entry into Canada based solely on their country of origin.

If there are family members who were in Canada in 1923, they would have been required to register when the Chinese Exclusion Act passed.  The C.I.44 was issued to certify that an individual had registered under Section 18 of the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. Registration was required for every person of Chinese origin in Canada. The certificate recorded detailed identifying information and bore a photo and related file numbers.  Files were kept of foreign-born Chinese in Vancouver, Victoria, and Ottawa.

However, the Chinese Immigration records currently stored at the LAC are somewhat messy.  According to my colleague June Chow, who is a highly respected activist and organizer in the community, the C.I9s do not appear to be complete. There are microfilm reels that are scattered, as the records were separated by port (Vancouver or Victoria) and by foreign-born versus native-born Chinese. Some reels are digitized while some are not; some records are indexed and some are not.  "It's quite a quagmire."

With the newly released CI.44 record set, the hope is that they can lead to finding other existing record sets.  This CI.44 record set documents the mass registration required of all Chinese living in Canada when the 1923 Exclusion amendment passed.   I have submitted an ATIP request to LAC to open those records.  I'm hopeful that my search for my ancestry can continue.