Message from the President (English)
Le message du Président (français) est aussi disponible.
The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs is a Canada-wide association of representatives from Canadian colleges and universities that began in 1986, founded as the Consortium for Computers in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en sciences humaines. Our objective is to draw together humanists who are engaged in digital and computer-assisted research, teaching, and creation. The society fosters work in the digital humanities in Canada's two official languages, and champions interaction between Canada's anglophone and francophone communities, in all areas reflected by its diverse membership: providing opportunities for publication, presentation, and collaboration; supporting a number of educational venues and international initiatives; acting as an advisory and lobbying force to local, national, and international research and research-funding bodies; working with allied organisations; and beyond.
Since SDH/SEMI's inception some two decades ago, as COCH/COSH, the society has had the great privilege of participating in the growth of one of the most dynamic, and evolving, interdisciplinary communities in the Arts and Humanities. Our roots are as an organisation formed by a consortium of Canadian academic institutions, and led initially by Elaine Nardocchio, to support, advocate, and examine the integration of computing into the work of those in the Arts and Humanities. In the mid-1990s - in part responding to the ongoing incorporation of computing into humanities disciplines, and under the leadership of Ian Lancashire - the society joined the Federation of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada, and became a community not of institutions but, rather, of individuals allied by their interest in the role of computing and new computing technologies in the evolution of their fields and their practices - both in traditional disciplines and new areas of inquiry that the past decade has seen expand.
So it is, to this day, and it gives me great pleasure to join Christian Vandendorpe, President (French), Geoffrey Rockwell (Vice President), Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Vice-President Outreach), Ron Tetreault (Treasurer), and Richard Cunningham (Secretary), and all members of the SDH/SEMI executive as the society's President (English).
Among our society's members are those at the forefront of areas such as textual analysis, electronic publication, document encoding, textual studies and theory, new media studies and multimedia, digital libraries, applied augmented reality, interactive gaming, and beyond. They are researchers and lecturers in humanities computing and in academic departments such as English, French, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Theatre, Music, Computer Science, and Visual Arts; they are resource specialists working in libraries, archival centres, and with humanities computing groups; they are academic administrators, and members of the private and public sectors; they are independent scholars, students, graduate students, and research assistants; and, though predominantly Canadian, they have been from countries in every hemisphere.
As an organisation, SDH/SEMI has supported and championed work in all areas reflected by its diverse membership: providing opportunities for publication, presentation, and collaboration; supporting a number of educational venues and international initiatives; acting as an advisory and lobbying force to local, national, and international research and research-funding bodies; and working with allied organisations such as the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing toward shared objectives.
On behalf of all those involved in SDH/SEMI, let me extend a warm welcome to you. I hope that you will consider joining our community, as a member, a participant in our annual conference, or through involvement in one of our ongoing initiatives.
With all best wishes,Ray Siemens
President (English), SDH/SEMI
Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, University of Victoria
Society website: www.sdh-semi.org