Good afternoon, members of the committee.

My name is Daniel O'Donnell, and I teach Old and Middle English as well as digital humanities at Iniskim, or the University of Lethbridge.

I'm delighted to be appearing before the Standing Committee on Science and Research to share my views.

I will continue in English, since this is my first time at this committee.

Just over a decade ago, Italian researcher Domenico Fiormonte published an article in the journal Historical Social Research, focusing on what he called an “Anglo-American hegemony”, which he believed controlled access to the most prominent journals, conferences and standards in the then fast-growing discipline of the digital humanities.

The discipline of the digital humanities was and remains today a key driver in applying computation to cultural, social and political problems. It's the field that first modelled Michelangelo's David in 3D, contributed to some of the most important mechanisms for processing texts with computers, and helped develop the standard character encodings that allow us to use computers in languages other than English.

Today, researchers in the digital humanities are at the cutting edge of cultural applications in artificial intelligence, big data, and the critical examination of how infrastructure shapes the questions we ask about ourselves. If it's the job of scientists to solve problems and if it's the job of humanists to problematize solutions, then digital humanists end up doing both. They develop cutting-edge tools, and they also offer technologically literate critiques of those same solutions when they fall short or require improvement.

This brings me to the motion before your committee. Fiormonte's claim that there was an “Anglo-American hegemony” in the leadership of the global digital humanities was, in fact, incorrect. To the extent that there was a small group of scholars leading the field's most important organs and projects, those people were neither British nor American. They were Canadian. In fact, there were as many francophone Canadians on Fiormonte's list as there were British people. Just as importantly, these Canadians were not based at the usual suspects, our big U15s such as the University of Toronto, McGill, UBC, or the University of Alberta. Instead, they came from smaller U15s or francophone U15s like McMaster and Université de Montréal, and especially from smaller comprehensive research universities such as Victoria, Guelph and my own university, the University of Lethbridge.

I flag this because, as the Bouchard report suggests, Canadian researchers, especially from smaller comprehensive research universities, have lost a lot of ground since Fiormonte wrote his article. At that time, Canada was second only to the U.S. in its number of digital humanities centres. Today, we're nowhere close to third or fourth place.

Our researchers, too, have moved. The U15s now dominate Canadian digital humanities, largely because they have the resources to attract talent from the smaller ones. Of the eight Canadians on Fiormonte's list in 2012, six have been recruited by U15 institutions, and only two remain at smaller universities as Canada research chairs. I, too, was on the list and was recruited, having been offered a job at the University of Saskatchewan, although I had to turn it down for personal reasons.

I stayed at the University of Lethbridge because it once supported my SSHRC-funded research on scanning early medieval crosses in 3D and my work as the chair of the Text Encoding Initiative, a major international computing standard. However, even as we speak today, I am in discussions about moving a major SSHRC-funded textual project and the associated graduate student to a U15, because we no longer have the resources at the University of Lethbridge to create a position for the adjunct who brought us the project in the first place.

In preparing my remarks, I reviewed testimony from my colleagues Vincent Larivière of the Université de Montréal and Dena McMartin, my own vice-president of research, and both emphasized the importance of understanding excellence in the broadest sense as a question of capacity rather than competition.

In “'Excellence R Us': university research and the fetishisation of excellence”, an article I co-wrote with a number of colleagues from the U.K., Australia and Canada, we argued that national research capacity is far more important to research success than a narrow focus on identifying winners and losers. This is particularly true when it comes to developing the kind of knowledge reservoir the Bouchard report describes as having been critical in the global response to COVID, and I would argue it underpins our societal developing consensus and developing understanding of things like marriage equality 20 years ago, gender equity and systemic bias. Much of the reservoir is filled at global universities, like my daughter's alma mater of Harvard or mine of Toronto and Yale, but universities like Lethbridge, Guelph and Victoria also play a critical role.

Our system is one that has been great, historically, at fostering research across the country, rather than concentrating it in a few elite locations, which is perhaps a uniquely Canadian form of research excellence. As DH over the last 10 years demonstrates, we are now beginning to lose that advantage.

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