Research Symposium 2026

#DHMakes explores the intersection between digital humanities (exploring the humanities with digital tools, for example, building websites, code, VR, etc. to examine areas like culture, history, art, etc.) and crafting. This lightning talk examines that making—building, coding, crafting, reconstructing—is not supplementary to scholarship but a rigorous mode of inquiry in its own right. Drawing on the work of Quinn Dombrowski and Amanda Visconti, I explore how hands-on, experimental, and community-centered DH projects produce knowledge through iteration, failure, and material engagement. Their scholarship demonstrates that making, playful experimentation, and public-facing digital projects are not service work or byproducts of “real” research, but intellectual contributions that shape questions, methods, and outcomes.

I connect these insights to my own research where recreating historical bookbinding structures operates as embodied research. Constructing models of sewn board bindings, laced-case structures, and other historical forms surfaces tacit knowledge rarely captured in catalog records or written descriptions: the resistance of materials, the sequence of labor, the limits of tools, and the decisions embedded in craft tradition. Making becomes a way of testing hypotheses about how books were produced, used, and valued.

By centering craft as method, this talk invites Western Libraries colleagues to see #DHMakes as a framework for recognizing experimental, material, and skills-based work as core scholarly activity—expanding how we define research within libraries and across campus.

This lightning talk introduces an auto-ethnographic research project that examines reference as a structurally mediated practice. Drawing on over twenty years of professional practice in a small, highly relational library setting operating primarily within a reference desk–based service model, alongside current work within a large, functionally organized research library, this project explores how shifts in structure influence professional identity, decision-making, and student support.

While these changes are often discussed in terms of efficiency and scalability, less attention has been paid to how organizational structure shapes the lived experience of reference work for library staff.

Using reflective writing, project artifacts, and the design of reference triage tools—such as rubrics, referral decision trees, and scaled training —this research analyzes the transition from relational, tacit-knowledge-driven reference to a distributed, role-differentiated service model. Rather than evaluating one approach as superior, the project focuses on the tensions that emerge between relational depth and scalability, tacit judgment and documented decision-making, and shared responsibility for “research help.”

This lightning talk presents the project as research in progress, offering a conceptual framing and early insights rather than finalized findings. By foregrounding lived professional experience, the talk invites reflection on what is gained, constrained, or made invisible when reference systems are redesigned.

This poster argues that the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) remains a valuable approach for transforming raw text into structured, meaningful humanities data. TEI is a widely used standard for encoding texts in a way that captures not only content, but also structure, meaning, and uncertainty. Gen-AI can assist with transcription but is not a panacea. AI tools often struggle with the accurate identification of names and places, leaving us with text that still requires careful review and interpretation.

TEI provides a framework for addressing these challenges by encoding not only the text, but also its structure, entities, and areas of uncertainty. By marking names, dates, and textual features, it supports more reliable analysis and makes editorial decisions visible. This structured data can then be shared and explored through networks, maps, and digital collections.

In this way, TEI helps turn transcription into data that can be understood, analyzed, and shared.

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) are widely recognized as high-impact practices, yet access to independent, non-curricular research remains uneven. Students encounter persistent barriers, including limited awareness of opportunities, informal recruitment practices, and uneven access to mentorship. Academic libraries are well positioned to address these gaps, but their engagement with undergraduate research has often remained tethered to course-integrated instruction. Building on Anthony Stamatoplos’ call to expand the role of libraries in supporting undergraduate research, this poster revisits the question of how libraries can more fully participate in this space.

Drawing on an analysis of existing library programs and practices, we develop a typology of library engagement in support of UREs. Importantly, many of these activities were not originally designed to support undergraduate research experiences explicitly, but nonetheless function as critical enabling structures.

Building on this typology, we propose a strategic framework for library engagement that reorients these practices toward more intentional support of independent undergraduate research. Across both typology and framework, the library is conceptualized as connective infrastructure: increasing visibility of research, facilitating student–mentor relationships, and lowering structural barriers to participation. This project offers both an analytical lens for understanding existing practices and a strategic model for expanding equitable access to undergraduate research.

The rapid development of AI systems and the widespread uptake of AI-powered research and writing tools have begun to reshape academic work. Platforms now marketed as “AI research tools” claim to support nearly every stage of the scholarly workflow, from brainstorming and citation mapping to evidence extraction and drafting. Yet this proliferation has outpaced the development of clear evaluative frameworks. The term AI often functions as a catch-all label that obscures important differences in how these tools operate, what data they rely on, and which academic skills they meaningfully support.

This project seeks to bring conceptual clarity to the emerging AI research tool ecosystem. We are constructing a structured database of tools currently marketed to scholars and documenting core features such as ownership, business models, jurisdiction, pricing, integration pathways, and source data. In parallel, we are defining and comparing underlying discovery and transformation mechanisms (e.g., keyword search, different forms of citation network analysis, semantic search, LLM-mediated synthesis) and developing a task-based typology of the academic functions these tools are designed to support.

By distinguishing research tasks from technical mechanisms and marketing claims, this project moves beyond the buzzword to offer a clearer analytical framework for evaluating AI in academic research and writing. The goal is not endorsement or rejection, but informed, critical understanding.

“Who is the Patron Saint of Libraries?” is a celebration of exemplary figures who loved books and fostered a culture of intellectual inquiry and information sharing throughout history. This poster will discuss the concept of the saintly patronage, share brief profiles of the exemplary figures that have been considered “patron saints of libraries” across the ages, and invite reflection upon the library heroes that inspire us in the profession today.

Academic data professionals, data librarianship and data services emerged as a specialized area in the 1970s in response to the emergence of government and other data sources being made available for research as Machine Readable Data Files (MRDF). The data required equipment to be read and people with specialized skills to provide access to these files. Early on, Archives, Social Science Data Centres, and Libraries were chosen to house both the data and staff, but through time, libraries are where this has mostly ended up residing.

Data professionals in Canadian post-secondary institutions in some instances had relevant background experience when they assumed these roles, or became professionals in these roles rather incidentally.

During my professional leave in 2025, I explored published works, records of training sessions, and conference proceedings with the aim of learning about the evolution of data professionals in the Canadian academic community and how this cohort grew in response to the need to support data access for researchers, faculty and students.

I will share highlights of the materials that I sought out, the challenges encountered along the way, and how navigating those challenges led to an inherently iterative research process, with moments of serendipity helping to fill gaps in the training timeline.

As digital humanities tools proliferate, barriers to technological access have increasingly given way to challenges of competency, framing, and pedagogical clarity. This project began with the development of a GIS-focused open educational resource (OER), during which significant variation (and frequent opacity) was observed in how existing materials articulate intended audiences, prerequisite knowledge, and methodological foundations.

This observation led to a broader research question: how are geographic and spatial methods represented across digital humanities pedagogy and scholarship? Given the centrality of spatial analysis to many humanistic inquiries and the technical complexity of GIS systems, representation plays a critical role in shaping accessibility and uptake. To investigate this, we constructed three corpora: (1) a collection of GIS-related OERs and training materials, (2) a ten-year corpus of articles from two major digital humanities journals, and (3) a subset of corpus 2 that matched a list of keywords connected to GIS/spatial analysis. Using BERT-based topic modeling, we analyze thematic patterns within and across these corpora.

Preliminary findings suggest that while spatial terminology circulates widely, technical and methodological dimensions are often backgrounded or embedded within broader thematic discussions. This raises questions about how digital methods are framed, who they are imagined to serve, and how pedagogical representations shape uptake.

This presentation outlines the project’s conceptual framework, corpus design, and early analytical results, and invites feedback on methodological approach and interpretive framing.

Outside of my daily work as a librarian, I write horror fiction. In this presentation I’ll share how I used Google Earth Pro and Jeff’s Maps to plan a survival horror novel set in the wilderness of Ontario, demonstrating how beginner-level digital mapping knowledge can intersect with creative work.

This talk revisits our earlier work on storytelling as a core intellectual practice of sensemaking in the context of academic library leadership and extends it with a new focus on the library as place. We argue that storytelling is not ancillary to the work of libraries, but constitutive of it: stories shape how communities understand evidence, authority, memory, and possibility. At a time when “truth” is increasingly fragile, consolidated, distorted, and weaponized by authoritarian and market forces, the library’s role must be understood not only as a steward of information, but as an active space where shared reality is constructed, contested, and repaired.

Drawing on conceptual and practical examples, we position the library as infrastructure for epistemic life: a place where ideas are allowed to live, circulate, and be constructed. Unlike platforms optimized for extraction or amplification, libraries cultivate slow knowledge, friction, and encounter. They hold open the conditions for plural voices while maintaining commitments to evidence, accountability, and care. In doing so, they resist the distortion of truth by power.

We call for a renewed emphasis on libraries as civic spaces that reknit the fabric of shared reality. This requires centering narrative practice, spatial design, and institutional courage. It asks librarians to see their work not only as service provision, but as democratic labor: tending to the fragile, collective work of making meaning together and creating a shared reality.

The Canadian Severe Storms Laboratory (CSSL) integrates advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to support severe weather research, monitoring, and impact assessment across Canada. Our work centers on managing, analyzing, and visualizing large geospatial datasets, and publishing them to our Open Data sites. Using ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, and web-GIS apps like Survey123, we develop automated data pipelines for ingesting and processing CSSL data.

GIS is also used to generate high-resolution maps, dashboards, and interactive web applications that communicate risk and research findings to partners, emergency managers, and the public. By combining remote sensing, spatial statistics, and web GIS, CSSL leverages geospatial technology to advance severe storm climatology, improve situational awareness, and support evidence-based decision-making in a changing climate.

Learn how Western Libraries' GIS team are leading this important work and collaborating on this cutting edge research.

Researchers are increasingly being asked to share their data, but also need to comply with ethical restrictions and not violate the confidentiality of research participants. Data anonymization is the usual solution, but successfully anonymizing a dataset without rendering the data useless is not straightforward. In fact I argue that data anonymization is a classic “wicked problem”: a problem that does not and cannot have a general solution. This does not make the issue of deidentifying any individual dataset insoluble, but it does make data anonymization as much an art as a science, much to the frustration of computer scientists, researchers, and data curators.

Place and space are intimately tied to memory, and returning to a place can revive memories. For survivors of state-sponsored violence, reclaiming sites of violences to sites of commemoration, documentation, and reclamation of space have become important forms of transitional justice and community healing. The Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador project began mapping massacre sites in collaboration with survivors over ten years ago. For the past four years the massacre mapping project has become the cornerstone of the project’s field data collection and documentation processes. This talk highlights our contributions to the development of the mapping and knowledge mobilization methodologies of the massacre mapping project, from the creation of the field mapping methods and tools to the development of participatory mapping workshops, and from remote sensing data collection to the development of virtual reconstruction. We discuss the challenges that surround survivor-led methodologies, and capacity building, and the importance of collaboration across international, and disciplinary boundaries.