Research Portfolio - Digital Projects

Research My research interests include medieval wonders, maps, monsters, imaginary geographies, as well as usability and digital pedagogy. In my research, I am a proponent of digital making — the process of making, not just its products — as a technology of knowing. The projects on this page provide some examples of my work.

Project Paradise

BL Add. 24189: The Angel gives Seth seeds from the Tree of Life at the gates of Paradise.

Project Paradise is a conversation across a hundred-year gap — a conversation between the thirteenth-century Hereford world map and the fourteenth-century Book of John Mandeville. Both the world map and the Book place the Earthly Paradise the uttermost East of the world. This paper takes the Book’s references to Paradise and attempts to place them on the map. But what I could not map was more intriguing than what I could; the elusiveness of the Earthly Paradise, both knowledge- and map-resistant, exposes the limits of spatial knowledge, both in medieval narratives and in digital media. Project Paradise is an interactive exhibit that ties together maps, literary texts, and digitized manuscripts. Plotting literary texts and manuscripts unto a digital mappa mundi, the project recuperates the virtual worlds of the past by re-engaging in their spatial storytelling practices.

Networks of Unknowing

Declarations of unknowing distributed across OE texts, homiletic and poetic

Networks of Unknowing mines the Dictionary of Old English Corpus for the vocabulary of wonder. Through topic modelling and network graph visualizations, this project tracks the distribution, across genres and manuscripts, of tropes and verbal formulas associated with wonder.

Omeka Gym

Omeka Gym is a sandbox site for learning how to build digital archives and tell stories in time, space, and digital collections, with the free, open-source content management system Omeka and its mapping plugin Neatline. Supplementing excellent Omeka-learning resources already in existence, Omeka Gym offers a practicum for digital collections in the literary studies classroom. It explains how to translate from one metadata schema to another; it provides tutorials, exercises, and sample datasets about premodern art; and it shows sample assignments and suggestions for integrating DH — specifically, digital collections, mapping, and online storytelling — into literature classrooms.

A Word Is Born

A Word Is Born is a digital outreach initiative showcasing the life and work of the Dictionary of Old English. It documents the dictionary’s history, its workflow, and its pedagogical applications. A hydra-like project—at once usability study, exhibit, community-building exercise, metascholarship, and experiment in distributed learning—A Word Is Born brought together a group of librarians and medievalists with DH interests. It created not only a collection of digital resources, but also a web of relationships across the University of Toronto community.