Database, Hardware and Services Infrastructure for the Creation of Textual Communities, as a Base for Research into Large Textual Traditions

Peter Robinson and Brent Nelson
Canadian Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund (CFI), 2012

Peter Robinson (English), Frank Klaassen (History), and Brent Nelson (English) are harnessing computer technology to develop online communities of scholars to allow access to a wide range of literary texts for study. There are, for example, 84 manuscripts and early printed texts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, more than 800 manuscripts of Dante's Commedia, and 5,000 of the Greek New Testament. The initiative will create a new model of research partnership among scholars in universities everywhere.

For more information please visit: http://news.usask.ca/2012/01/24/cfi-funds-u-of-s-research-into-health-food-safety-bioenergy-and-literature/#more-2757


Social, Digital, Scholarly Editing

Peter Robinson
SSHRC Connection Grant, 2012


Aboriginal Writing in Community Context: The Dissemination of a New Edition of Lydia Campbell's Sketches of Labrador Life by a Labrador woman

Kristina Fagan
SSHRC Public Outreach Grants - Aboriginal Research, 2011

This project will make the complete text of Lydia Campbell’s autobiography available for the first time since its original publication and will place it in the context of her significance to the people of Labrador.  Moreover, it will make this new edition and contextual material widely available to Labradorians through the use of a website, museum exhibit, and educational package.


Connecting Aboriginal Literatures and Community Service-Learning

Nancy Van Styvendale
SSHRC Insight Development Grant, 2011


The Grub Street Project

Allison Muri
SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2010

"The Grub Street Project" (http://grubstreetproject.net) is a collection of online zoomable maps and electronic editions from books and prints of 18th-century London. The intent of this project is to create a new resource to examine and display the literary and cultural topography of 18th-century London. This open-access publication will enable researchers to search and visualize the city's history and literature in ways previously impossible. The project will create a unique venue to display both the actual communications and trade networks of the city, from author to bookseller to reader, and the imaginary topography of the city as depicted by its own "high culture" poets and historians and "low culture" Grub Street hacks.


Animating the Mi'kmaw Humanities

Len Findlay
SSHRC Aboriginal Research Grant, 2010

"Animating the Mi'kmaw Humanities" is a transdisciplinary, intercultural project undertaken in collaboration with University of Saskatchewan scholars Marie Battiste (Education), Lynne Bell (Art & Art History), Isobel Findlay (Social Enterprises), and James Youngblood Henderson (Native Law). The team will study the teachings, oral traditions, art, and other aspects of the humanities of the Mi'kmaw of Atlantic Canada. It will be working with Mi'kmaw communities, schools, and colleges, and with universities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick where the recognition of Indigenous knowledge systems is nominal at best.


The Culture of Curiosity in England and Scotland, 1580-1700

Brent Nelson SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2009

When the famous seventeenth-century gardener John Tradescant named his home, with its collection of rarities and curiosities, "the Ark," he was expressing his desire to compile a microcosm of a wide world of variety beyond common experience. Such collections represented the sum of early modern European experience of the world at a time of rapid scientific and geographical expansion and reflected fundamental epistemological shifts in attitudes toward curiosity, wonder, and credulity on the cusp of the modern age. This project examines the formative culture of curiosity in England from 1580-1700 and will comprise two main components: a Web-delivered virtual museum of early modern collections of rarities and curiosities in England and Scotland ("The Digital Ark"); and a series of essays taking a literary approach to examine the cultural meaning and significance of curiosity, especially as expressed in collections of rarities and curiosities in early modern England.


Popular Culture and Repetition in Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Women's Sequel Fiction

Wendy Roy SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2009

This project examines the cultural and social implications of popular Canadian sequel fiction, focusing especially on early twentieth-century novels by writers such as L.M. Montgomery (the Anne of Green Gables books), Nellie McClung (the Pearlie Watson trilogy), and Mazo de la Roche (the Jalna books). It will consider the role sequelization plays in whether books are accepted as part of popular or literary culture; the process through which such series are adapted to other, even more popular, media such as film and television; and the information that reception of sequel fiction provides about evolving reading practices and changing social and political relations in Canada.


Computing and Media Studies Research Lab

Allison Muri Canadian Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund (CFI), 2009 Saskatchewan Innovation and Science Fund (ISF), 2009

This lab, dedicated to researching the cultural history of media and communication in early modern times, will examine combining computer visualization and digital publishing with traditional methods of literary history and scholarly editing. The main investigation to be carried on in the Research Lab is entitled "The Grub Street Project," a long-term project to create an open-access topographical information system using historical maps. The prototype for this system comprises the city of London in the eighteenth century, and will enable researchers to visualize its cultural and communications networks.


The Poetics and Ethics of Interpreting Children: Reading Case Narratives by British Child Psychoanalysts

Hilary Clark SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2008

This project focuses on the psychoanalysis of children, as practised in Britain from the 1930s until about 1990 by Klein and post-Kleinian analysts such as Susan Isaacs, Donald Winnicott, Esther Bick, and Betty Joseph. Its particular objective is to investigate issues of interpretation in child analysis: the play techniques developed to elicit speech, drawings, behaviours from children; the assumptions and codes that render these "texts" symbolic and guide their interpretation; and the ethical issues involved in seeking to interpret the "secrets" of children in this way. The research perspective is neither a historian's nor a psychoanalyst's, but rather a literary critic's: the project focusses on case narratives, the path and knots of interpretation that they describe, in order to get at the assumptions about interpretation in analysis and about children (particularly the sexuality of children) that they suggest—assumptions associated with the drive to know children's inner lives or worlds.


Talk that Walks on Paper: Canadian Poets Writing the Oral

Susan Gingell SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2007

Dr. Gingell and her graduate research assistants are investigating writers' motivations for recording their people's oral traditions and particular forms of orality on paper or in other media; their strategies for, and the political, ethical, and aesthetic implications of, doing so; and the pedagogical implications when teachers choose to make textualized orature and orality a part of the curriculum of English courses. The conference "The Oral, the Written, and Other Verbal Media: Interfaces and Audiences" and the festival eVOCative held June 19-21, 2008, were part of the programme of research.


An Electronic Index to the Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Anthony Harding, Professor Emeritus SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2007

Publication of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been widely recognized as a major achievement of twentieth-century scholarship, significant not only for Coleridge studies but also for the study of early nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history. However, the usefulness of this edition (the final volume appeared in 2002) has always been limited by the absence of a cumulative and analytical index. In 2001, Dr. Anthony Harding (University of Saskatchewan), as Principal Investigator, with Dr David Miall and Dr Terry Butler (University of Alberta) as Co-investigators, received a grant from SSHRC to construct an electronic index to the five volumes of the Notebooks.


Understanding Labrador Métis Identity Through Narrative

Kristina Fagan SSHRC Aboriginal Research Development Grant, 2006-2008

This research seeks to answer the question, "Who are the Labrador Métis?" While there is little scholarship on Labrador Métis identity, there are numerous written and oral narratives of Labrador Métis history by Labrador Métis people. Drawing on these narratives, this project studies the historical and contemporary identity of the Labrador Métis people from their perspective.


Mary Shelley: Woman of Letters

Lisa Vargo SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2006

This grant resulted in two digital editions: Percy Shelley's Posthumous Poems and Mary Shelley's Lives of the Eminent Literary and Scientific Men: An Electronic EditionMary Shelley's Lives reproduces five volumes of biographies that Mary Shelley contributed to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Italian Lives (2 volumes,1835), Spanish and Portuguese Lives (1837), and French Lives (2 volumes, 1839). The searchable digital edition is reproduced with permission of the University of Saskatchewan Library's Department of Special Collections. The scanned pages provide clear reading texts of the five volumes as facsimiles and searchable text. The web edition makes a little-known but significant literary and scholarly achievement accessible to readers in its original form.


Matters of the Heart: An Early Modern Cultural History

William Slights, Professor Emeritus
SSHRC Standard Research Grant, 2004