Critical Digital Humanities Initiative Undergraduate Digital Project and Research Award 

The Woodsworth College CDHI Undergraduate Digital Project and Research Award is a new award that recognizes outstanding digital humanities projects created by students in a DHU course or one of the courses cross-listed for credit in the Digital Humanities Minor.  

Digital humanities (DH) is a discipline that combines humanities with computing. It examines human culture, including art, literature, history, geography, and religion with the help of computational tools and methods.   

At the same time, it also studies the digital world from a humanistic perspective. Digital humanists analyze languages using digital text collections, create digital archives of prohibited books, develop video games for studying literature, and reconstruct historical cities using digital maps. 

Projects eligible for the CDHI Undergraduate Digital Project and Research Award can cover various areas such as data analysis or visualization, exhibits, archives, mapping, websites, born-digital art/artifacts, and critical making (film, stop-motion, video games, 3D modelling, VR/AR/XR, artificial intelligence/machine learning), reflecting the diversity of the field. 

 We were pleased to receive many fantastic submissions for the inaugural competition of this award. Below we have more details about the award-winning project by Raquel Lewin and the runner-up project by Addie Jennings.   

Raquel Lewin’s project, "The Toronto Housing Crisis and Zoning Bylaws," was created for Dr. Heidi Craig’s DHU236H1 class "Virtual Worlds: An Introduction to Spatial Humanities."  Lewin's  StoryMaps project explores the intersections between zoning regulations and the housing crisis in Toronto using publicly available spatial data. The project takes readers through a brief history of zoning in Toronto, the current situation, who it affects, and what can be done about it.  Click here to know more about the project

The runner-up project is "The Text is Yours, and You Belong to It: How Do Readers Perform and Embody Elegiac Texts?" by Addie Jennings. This project was made for Dr. Paola Bohorquez’s DHU339H1 class, "Assembling Relations between Self and Text: The Digital Commonplace Book." Jennings' Digital Commonplace Book investigates the relationship between text (the elegiac genre) and self (the mourning process). Gathering multiple class readings and research materials in an original assemblage, Addie experiments with citational practices characteristic of Commonplace Book-keeping to meditate on the performative aspects of reading and the physical or digital container of text shapes embodied reading text.  Click here to know more about the project

For more information on the Digital Humanities programs, visit our website here.