IDEAH 6.1 Introduction

We had the privilege of organizing the 2024 Conference & Colloquium for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria, the final gathering of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) gathering at UVic after more than twenty years of community and collaboration on the West Coast. This collection, the seventh of its kind, is a testament to the wonderful work of Ray Siemens, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, and everyone else that has made (and continues to make) DHSI a pillar of the digital humanities community. The articles in this collection grew from presentations delivered at the 2023 and 2024 Conferences & Colloquia, and we are very thankful that we were able to gather in person in the David Lam Auditorium on the University of Victoria campus, the traditional territory of the Lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) and W̱SÁNEĆ people, especially after our earlier gatherings shifted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Themes of stewardship and preservation lie at the heart of this issue: ErikaBailey and Lauryn Cole’s article contemplates their work with the Tacoma Community History Project (TCHP) and reflects on how digital tools such as CollectionBuilder can amplify a project’s original intent. In this case, TCHP has a mandate to preserve and present the “unwritten history” of Tacoma and South Puget Sound, and Bailey and Cole demonstrate how metadata and its structures can segregate communities rather than reflecting their connections and solidarities. The article exemplifies how the right tool can help a small team with limited resources to serve a community in a way that is both sustainable (in terms of both the environment and labour) and accessible (i.e., open source, easily searchable, and labelled with a view to sensitivity and cultural safety), all while providing new functionality. TCHP’s new interactive map view gives users a new yet familiar way to explore the unwritten history of Tacoma and the surrounding area, keeping the Tacoma Community History Project alive and accessible. Engaging with data according to geography rather than keywords better exemplifies the integrated nature of Tacoma, and Bailey and Cole’s article urges librarians and other cultural stewards to consider how they might adapt and reconfigure their collections to better serve their users. In their article “Emergence, not Emergency,” Angela Joosse, Monique Tschofen, and Jolene Armstrong document and reflect upon their experience as members of the Decameron Collective (nine members belonging to six different institutions) and the project management techniques they employed to facilitate the creation of a digital exhibit, Memory Eternal |Вічная Пам'ять, in just eight weeks. Joosse, Tschofen, and Armstrong consider the many ways in which agile project management, feminist ethics of care, and alternative techniques such as the development of user personae and sequence diagramming facilitated their project within a context (e.g., short time frame, COVID-19, etc.) where traditional project management alone very likely could have failed the collective. The result is an insightful essay that contemplates how to best develop a project management style compatible with a project’s core principles (with room for reflection and improvement upon the exhibit’s completion), and the Decameron Collective exemplifies the importance of placing relationship above other considerations in project development. And, of course, ideas about artificial intelligence make an appearance here too. Kyle Dase’s article, “The Machine in the High Castle: A Critical Approach to Content Generators through the Rhetoric of Sci-fi, Gen AI, and Writing as Labour,” provides a survey of content generators as imagined by twentieth-century sci-fi authors and reflects upon those authors’ anxieties that the creation of art, especially composing verse and writing prose, will be reduced to just another form …