DHSI 2025, Montreal

During the first week of June 2025, Olivia and I taught a week-long course, “Creating Digital Collections with Minimal Infrastructure: Hands On with CollectionBuilder for Teaching and Exhibits”, at Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI).

DHSI was hosted at University of Victoria for more than 25 years, providing much needed training opportunities to support and grow digital scholarship in the Humanities. The institute offers week long intensive courses, interwoven with keynotes, colloquium talks, networking, socializing, and other conference events. It brings together a unique mix of faculty, librarians, and grad students, with all levels of abilities and seniority, all learning something new. UVic’s quiet suburban park-like campus near the ocean, and staying in the dorms, gave the experience a wonderful summer camp vibe.

I joined twice as a learner, then the CollectionBuilder team had a course proposal accepted–which immediately went online due to COVID! Eventually, we were able to teach in person at Victoria twice, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience with great classes and adventures.

However, DHSI saw HUGE changes in 2025, including a cross country move from University of Victoria to Université de Montréal. Given the challenge of that transition, and the general political uncertainty of 2025 adding chaos, everything went well. It was a big contrast from the West coast suburban campus to the East coast French-first urban campus in a major city–but Montreal is an amazing city, and Université de Montréal a great host.

At DHSI, we truly value the opportunity to connect with a diverse mix of people who are really interested in learning and building fascinating projects. We connect with instructors who are scholars from around the world. There is a ton of networking–and of course, everyone talks about how COOL our CB class is (you get to build your own digital collection from scratch!)–so this is a great opportunity to grow our profile, outreach, and impact with an international audience.

The close collaborations with learners also helps us understand issues that people encounter and the ideas they have for new features and use cases, which in turn guides our development and inspires our next projects. We leave DHSI tired, but energized!

You can explore projects created during the week in the DHSI Show and Tell 2025 collection or checkout the course outline.