Abstract

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) is an annual training and community-building event that offers intensive workshops, lectures, and collaborations focused on digital tools and methods in humanities research and teaching – at one time the largest DH curriculum in the world with some 30 partners and more than 50 course offerings, over 7500 alumni in its community of practice and in 2019 drawing over 900 attendees in-person plus, during COVID in 2021, its fully virtual edition drawing 2000 participants from around the globe. Based on a community-oriented, distributed leadership model and instructor- and partner-led evolving curriculum, I have had the pleasure of serving as its founding director, and we in the UVic-based Electronic Textual Cultures Lab have had the honour of acting as its facilitators since 2004, in association with the open scholarship teaching/training activities of my Canada Research Chair. There’s a recent article by myself, Alyssa Arbuckle and Randa El Katib, as later co-directors, about DHSI that tells elements of its history over time (2023); much of its history is also available via its legacy website, at https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/dhsi/. From it summer 2025 offering, U Montréal is DHSI's host, aligning its curriculum with that of the inter-university Centre de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur les Humanités Numériques (CRIHN), including also McGill U and Concordia U with members across a total of 12 institutions.

My focus here, specifically, is on elements of the transition from UVic to UdeM, succeeded in core leadership by Michael Sinatra, also director of CRIHN, and Parham Aledavood, its Associate Director – a positive transition that from the start sought to maintain DHSI’s mission, mandate, core principles, and operational model, as well as its core community, while moving from its long-standing home on Vancouver Island (a timing, vibe, and location that gave DHSI the nickname “Summer Camp for Digital Humanists” [Benton 2008]), to its new location at the heart of one of the most exciting cities and dynamic intellectual cultures in North America. The move was the result of deliberation among the operational and advisory group plus consultation involving representative members of instructors and partners, as well as members of DHSI’s community of practice, following realization that our agreed-upon budget framework was no longer able to sustain our operational model at our traditional institutional home. The move, and its many moving parts, was typified by a focus on sustaining DHSI’s community, open communication, attention to institutional cultural and operational norms, and beyond … and, along the way, has also effected a position succession (in additional to locational transition) as after serving as co-director in 2025 I’ve moved to the role of director emeritus, and still happily contributing to the community as co-instructor of one of DHSI’s 2026 offerings.

Brief Bios

Ray Siemens (FRSC; https://web.uvic.ca/~siemens/) is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, Canada, in English and Computer Science, and past Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing; in 2019, he was also Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Loughborough University and, 2019–2022, Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities in the Centre for 21st Century Humanities at the University of Newcastle.

Michael Sinatra is Professor of Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal. Trained in Romanticism at Oxford and a specialist in Leigh Hunt, he has been involved in digital publishing and the digital humanities for twenty-five years. He is one of the founding members of the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur les humanités numériques (CRIHN) and has been directing it since its inception in 2013. He is currently the co-chair of centerNet: An international network of digital humanities centers (2022-2026), and was the President of ADHO: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations in 2024-2025, the global digital humanities organization comprising 13 member institutions.

Parham Aledavood is a PhD candidate in Literature and Digital Humanities at the Université de Montréal, funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec (FRQ). Since September 2024, he has been the Associate Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI). He represents UdeM and DHSI at the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities (cc:DH/HN) and serves as a graduate representative at the Canadian Society of Digital Humanities (CSDH/SCHN).

Please see 'Notes' below for any suggested/official citation information added by the author(s) of this work. Otherwise, you can cite the HSS Commons instance of this publication as follows:

• Siemens, R., Sinatra, M., Aledavood, P., (2026), "Moving the Digital Humanities Summer Institute: Positive Transition and Succession in a Core, Community Pedagogical Infrastructure", HSSCommons: (DOI: 10.25547/1RAY-YR63)

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1. DHSI
2. project management
3. project transition
4. succession
5. transitions and succession