Expert Details

Ray Siemens

Contact Information

Ray Siemens
Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing
Phone Number:(250) 721-7255
Email:

Languages: English
Website:
http://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/
Departments:
English
Computer Science

Research Information

Research Description

- The intersection of literary studies and computational methods
- Textual editing, document encoding, interpretation and criticism, and electronic scholarly publication
- Human-computer interaction, interface and the electronic book
- Early Tudor Renaissance English literature

Expertise Profile

From ancient cave paintings to hand-printed books to Facebook, people have been reading in various forms for thousands of years.

But what will reading look like in the future? What can we learn from the past to ensure new technologies enhance and expand the reading experience?

Dr. Ray Siemens, distinguished professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria and Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing, is internationally recognized as one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities.

He leads the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project, a multi-million dollar funded digital humanities research group at UVic. INKE investigates the many questions produced by the dynamic and burgeoning intersection between information technology and the humanities.

As director of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Dr. Siemens is involved in several large collaborative research projects on human-computer interaction, interface and the electronic book.

He is also the founder of the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which brings scholars from around the world to UVic for a week of intensive coursework, seminar participation and lectures.

Dr. Siemens and his lab take a team-based approach to every project they undertake, including teaching at the institute. The specialized technical skills required by digital humanities projects make collaboration and knowledge sharing essential.

With partners in computer science, he is working on a new innovative curriculum for a joint Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Science and Computer Science.

But it's not all about bits and bytes. Dr. Siemens also studies English literature and early Tudor non-dramatic poetry and has a soft spot for Henry VIII. He has given several presentations on song lyrics written by the youthful English monarch.

Interdisciplinary Research

Dr. Siemens works in areas where literary studies and computational methods intersect.

Research Keywords

Community Interaction

Community Projects

Dr. Siemens is founder of the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, an Intellectual Centre for Digital Humanities @UVic, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Earlier, Siemens founded the Centre for Digital Humanities Innovation at Malaspina U-C (now Vancouver Island University), and maintains affiliation with the UVic node of the Text Analysis Portal for Research (TAPoR) network and its VIU successor, the MeTALab.

International Involvement

International Research

Dr. Siemens has affiliation with the Institute for English Study at the University of London, the Department of Digital Humanities at King's College London, the School of Cultural Studies and Sheffield Hallam U, and the Department of English at NYU. He is involved in several research projects that are international in scope, among them the major international collaboration Implementing New Knowledge Environments.

Countries lived/worked in

The United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States.

Software Development

Siemens' current research promises to yield strategies to adapt and reorient existing tools, and create new computing tools in the areas of data-harvesting, textual content analysis, document encoding application and conversion, and dissemination/communication models and mechanisms.