2026 Woodsworth College Undergraduate Digital Project and Research Award

On May 5, 2026 the Digital Humanities faculty announced the 2026 Woodsworth College Undergraduate Digital Project and Research Award winners at the Annual Digital Humanities Undergraduate Conference. The award celebrates digital projects completed in a DHU course in the 2025-2026 academic year. Nominated projects explored a wide range of topics, including the transformation of radiophonic sound into techno music, the similarities between medieval manuscripts and twenty-first-century personal media, and the Indigenous-Italian-Canadian Connections project. So many fantastic projects made for delightful but difficult evaluation work. Both the winning and runner-up projects combined deep research, a social justice perspective, and skill with digital tools.

This year’s Prize goes to Tamara Doiny, a third-year Book & Media Studies, English, and Digital Humanities student, and Lily Lai, a fourth-year History & Philosophy of Science & Technology, Mathematics, and Digital Humanities student, who is graduating in June. Click here to view Where To: Freedom Seeker Journeys. This team’s project from Prof. Jennifer DeSilva’s DHU436H Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities class drew on advertisements from eighteenth-century British newspapers to follow “freedom seekers” who successfully escaped from enslaving London households. Using the Runaway Slaves in Britain database, Tamara and Lily built a database of advertisements that indicated direction of travel, sightings, and clothing descriptions, in order to explore agency and decision-making of enslaved people. Their StoryMap project compares information from these ads and layers it onto antique maps for the public to explore. Their work reveals more about how London’s free and unfree populations lived together amid colonial structures and anti-slavery campaigns.

This year’s Honourable Mention goes to Mahanoor Chowdhury, an Architectural Studies and Digital Humanities student, and Kayla Rho, a Chemistry, Biology, and Digital Humanities student. Both team members will graduate in June. Click here to view Geographies of Worth: How Origin and Skill Shaped the Ransom. The team’s work in DHU436H built on The DECIMA Project’s Historical GIS project that explores Livorno, a free port in Tuscany, through a 1646 census. As the state-sponsored census only counted free household heads, Kayla and Mahanoor strove to reveal the large enslaved population that was forced to live and work in Livorno. They used archival lists of mostly Muslim men, who were captured and enslaved by the Tuscan authorities, to explore their origins and determine what characteristics made ransom most likely. Their StoryMap project combined archival documents, contemporary sketches depicting enslaved galley rowers, and digital tools to illuminate patterns in their capture and redemption.