Dear Arts Digital Scholarship Community,
I came into the role of DiSA Director believing Arts scholars are essential to the digital turn. Our disciplines ask the critical questions that technical systems require of their capacity, behaviours, and effects, while we also use them to expand our research processes, capacities, and outreach.
DiSA began within the Public Humanities Hub through the initiative of Dr. Mary Chapman and was later stewarded by Dr. Mark Turin. Their strong structure and generous mentorship made the last two years possible.
Along the way, many people influenced its form, particularly colleagues at the Research Commons (Eka Grguric, Abi Muthukumar, Holly Pickering) and Head (Doug Brigham) and the Digitization Centre (Bronwen Sprout). Thank you to Ricardo Serrano and Arts ISIT, to Public Humanities Hub (Directors Dr. Mary Bryson and Althea Thauberger), and more recent connections with Centre for Computational Social Science (Dr. Laura Nelson), Advanced Research Computing (Rachel Chuang) and SFU’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (Joey Takeda and Rebecca Dowson). Our graduate and undergraduate assistants were integral to everything DiSA accomplished. Special thanks to the Office of the Vice-President, Research and Innovation, and to the Faculty of Arts Office of the Dean, for funding and supporting this work and for trusting what comes next.
DiSA supported research across more than a dozen disciplines, from digitizing and cleaning over 200,000 pages of legal transcripts to building a database of 1,200 art objects. We supported Arts Digital Scholarship Projects through funding and in-kind graduate assistant support and shared expertise. Our technical guides, researcher features, workshops, conferences, funding, and events connected Arts scholars with one another and with communities beyond UBC.
This summer, the Faculty of Arts approved our proposal to merge DiSA and the Centre for Computational Social Science into the Centre for Computational and Digital Social Science, Humanities, and Creative Arts (CODI). I will co-direct it with Dr. Laura K. Nelson. Co-direction guides leadership in full representation of Arts perspectives in creative arts, humanities, and social sciences. I look forward to what CODI will make possible across our research as we navigate, collectively, how Arts scholarship takes shape in a digital future.
With gratitude,
Christine D’Onofrio
Former Director, Digital Scholarship in Arts
Co-Director, Centre for Computational and Digital Social Science, Humanities, and Creative Arts (CODI)
Questions are welcome at director.codi@ubc.ca.