Organisciak receives Outstanding Contribution Award

GSLIS doctoral student Peter Organisciak is among the recipients of the 2014 Outstanding Contribution Award given by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities. The award recognizes a landmark contribution to the field of digital humanities made by a Canadian researcher or team or researcher(s) at a Canadian institution.

The 2014 award honors the group that created and initially maintained a project called A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities (Day of DH). Organisciak was recognized as one of the original creators of the project, along with Geoffrey Rockwall and Stan Reucker. Fellow award winners also included Megan Meredith-Lobay, Kamal Ranaweera, and Julianne Nyhan, who were instrumental in the maintaining Day of DH through it’s first four years.

The group, then colleagues at the University of Alberta, first conceptualized Day of DH in 2008 in response to efforts to define the boundaries of digital humanities.

“At the time, digital humanities was growing rapidly in popularity, and there were many attempts to explain what is or isn't part of the field. We decided to try a different approach: rather than saying what it is, we would show what it is. For the Day of DH, self-identified digital humanities scholars simply documented a day in their life, as a sort of bottom-up, collective definition,” Organisciak explained.

“However, while the project was meant to be a number of things, I believe its success lies as a community event. It connected scholars from around the world, helping share ideas and introducing people with similar research interests. Since many digital humanities scholars are not part of a DH center but rather work within other departments, it offered them community.”

Organisciak is a fourth-year PhD student at GSLIS and a research assistant in the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS). His research interests lie at the intersection of online systems and users, specifically at the juncture between the humanistic view of users and the technical considerations of systems design.

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