Ryerson to host Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory

DHers take note: The week after THATCamp, Ryerson University will be hosting the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory’s Canadian Women Writers Conference from the 27th to 29th of October 2011. CWRC is “an online infrastructure project designed to enable unprecedented avenues for studying the words that most move people in and about Canada”. The conference, sponsored in part by the Centre for Digital Humanities, will feature three keynote speakers: poet Dionne Brand, who recently was awarded the Griffin Prize for her book Ossuaries; Lori Saint-Martin, award-winning author, translator, and UQAM professor, and Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library.

The conference theme is “Space / Place / Play” and papers will illuminate the vast diversity of Canadian women’s writing, past and present, in all genres and formats (printed text, manuscripts, journalism, screenwriting, graphic novels, songs, music, performance art, artists’ books), of all cultures, regions, and linguistic groups. As conference organizer Ruth Panofsky, Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson, observes, “the event will capture this dynamic moment in digital humanities scholarship where its application moves beyond archival recuperation to explore as well the possibilities of experiential play and digital topography as new modes of research into Canadian women’s writing. For more on the conference, please visit the conference blog.