Dr. Constance Crompton (they/them)
Research Chair
Constance is a white, queer, able-bodied settler and Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities. Their research interests are in linked data, data modelling, code as a representational medium, queer history, and Victorian popular culture. They are a member of several research project teams: Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada, Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Partnership, and the Transgender Media Portal. Crompton is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists and a former vice-president of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques. Photo by Adrienne Row-Smith.
Michelle Schwartz (she/her)
Research Associate
Michelle Schwartz is a liaison librarian at Toronto Metropolitan University, supporting the journalism and media programs. She is the co-director of Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada (LGLC), a SSHRC-funded digital humanities research project that is building an interactive digital resource for the study of LGBTQ2+ history in Canada.
Dr. Laura Horak (she/her)
Research Associate
Laura is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP,2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019), and a special issue of Somatechnics on trans/cinematic/bodies. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.
Dr. Felicity Tayler (she/her)
Research Associate
Felicity is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa and co-applicant on the SpokenWeb partnership. She is an occasional visual artist and curator, and has published scholarly writing related to literary archives in anthologies, and in venues such as the Journal of Canadian Art History, Canadian Literature, and Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture.
Dr. Jada Watson (she/her)
Research Associate
Dr. Jada Watson is a white researcher living and working on unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation. A professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ottawa, she teaches in information studies and music, and coordinates digital humanities. Watson leads the SSHRC-funded SongData project, which explores the role of market data in the formation and evolution of genre categories. She has released a series of public reports addressing representation on country music radio, which has been cited in a legal brief submitted to the US Federal Communications Commission, as well as in the Grammy Recording Academy’s Report on Inclusion and Diversity.
Candice Lipski (she/her)
Managing Editor
Candice is a member of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project and has been working with TEI since 2016. Candice holds a degree in Psychology from UBC Okanagan and Journalism MA from UBC, with expertise in communications and research. She also works at CBC Saskatoon on the morning radio program, where she enjoys telling community-focused stories.
Elisa Mayeur (she/her)
Intern
Elisa Mayeur is a student in Digital Humanities at Université Lyon 2 and holds a master’s degree in Art History and Visual Cultures. She joined the LGLC team as a Visiting Student Researcher at the University of Ottawa in the spring of 2025. She is undertaking research at Archives Gaies du Québec (Montreal) and the Archives and Special Collections (ARCS) of the University of Ottawa, TEI encoding, and map-based visualization of project data. She is also a professor of dance and is interested in dance archives, as well as the challenges of using and sustaining digital archives.
Alice Defours (she/her)
Research Assistant
Alice Defours is a PhD student in Digital Humanities at the university of Ottawa and a metadata architect for the Humanities Data Lab, as well as research assistant for the LINCS project. Prior to joining uOttawa, she graduated from the Université Lumière Lyon II in “Mondes Anciens” (history-archaeology) then in “Humanités Numériques” (Digital Humanities). As a cultural programs’ coordinator, she values the impact of communication and transmission of knowledge through its accessibility. She also works as a freelance event manager and game designer.
Sam Lehn (she/her)
Research Assistant
Sam Lehn began working as a researcher on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project in spring 2022. She holds a degree in History from the University of Ottawa and her research interests include digital history and interpretation. Sam also works for the Canada Border Service Agency in Calgary.
Kit Chokly (they/he)
Research Assistant
Kit Chokly is a white trans graduate student living in the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation. Their research today examines trans-made media that challenge gender legibility. Kit has a background in illustration and graphic design and is always looking for opportunities to integrate these skills in his academic work to make research more accessible and useful for everyone.
Maddie Murakami (settler, he/him)
Research Assistant
Maddie Murakami is a trans male, half-Japanese, half-white settler born and living on unceded Anishinaabe territory. Currently, he is an undergraduate student at Carleton University working towards a Bachelors in Computer Science. He has been working on the tech team of the Transgender Media Portal project, where he’s primarily focused on building a minimal computing approach to our database and website.
Dr. Farinaz Basmechi (she/her)
Research Assistant
Farinaz Basmechi is a PhD student in Feminist and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Ottawa and researcher on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, content analysis, and digital media. She also holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of North Texas where she focused on online social activism and mixed-method content analysis. Farinaz joined the LGLC project in the spring of 2022 as a research assistant and is working to collect and analyze data on gay and lesbian liberation events in 1985.
Moni Razavi (she/her/elle)
Research Assistant
Moni is currently a PhD student in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. She graduated in Literature, Visual Culture, and Film Studies from Tallinn University in Estonia where she joined the Estonian Society for Digital Humanities. Starting from March 2022, Moni works as a research assistant in the lab to analyze the data on the first 10 editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Her doctoral thesis aims at exploring the potential of blockchain technology in copyright protection of derivative works such as translation and adaptation.
Pascale Dangoisse (she/her)
Postdoctoral Fellow
Pascale is a PhD candidate in Communication at the University of Ottawa, and researcher on the LGLC project. Her research focuses on the study of liberal political discourses on the topic of feminism and women’s rights in Canada. She started to work as a research assistant for the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project in the summer of 2018. She thoroughly enjoys searching through Archival documents and inputting all the new-found data into Excel and TEI-XML or discussing the Lesbian liberation movement’s struggles and political perspectives.
Dr. Bridget Moynihan (she/her)
Postdoctoral Fellow
Bridget is a white Postdoctoral Fellow with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership and with Library and Archives Canada-Bibliothèque et Archives Canada (LAC-BAC). Prior to this fellowship, she completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh (2020), her MLIS from Western University (2021), and her MA from the University of Calgary (2015). Bridget loves working in both physical archives and digital spaces, but especially loves working at the points where the two intersect. She joined the lab in May 2023 and would like to acknowledge that she currently lives and works on lands that are the traditional unceded territories of Anishinaabe Algonquin people.
Jana Smith-Elford
Postdoctoral Fellow
Jana Smith-Elford is a SSHRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in the lab. Her postdoctoral project, “Networked Feminism: Feminist Media, Digital History, and Social Change (1888-1900)” employs linked data to model the social, political, and literary networks represented on the pages of two late-Victorian general interest feminist newspapers.
Laura Hanikenne (she/they)
Intern
Laura Hanikenne is an intern at the Humanities Data Lab and will be working on the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project for nine weeks. Her interests lie in the digitization of documents, especially audiovisuals, and the preservation of history through them. She is also very interested in the representation of marginalized communities in media and cinema. Laura is currently a third-year student in library science at the Haute Ecole de la Province de Liège.
Els Thant (she/her)
Research Assistant
Els is a PhD Candidate in Translation Studies at the University of Ottawa. She has worked as a Translator since 1998 and will supports the LINCS team as a Translation Analyst. She is passionate about literature and likes spending her free time in nature, hiking or biking.
Huma Zafar (they/them/any/all)
Programmer Analyst
Huma Zafar is a developer at the University of Ottawa library, and a master’s student in the School of Information Studies (ÉSIS) at uOttawa. Huma has been working with the Humanities Data Lab on linked data conversion tools for TEI for the LINCS project, and is exploring the potential impact of decentralization on the reliability of open metadata systems through their research with the Scholarly Communications Lab.
Alexandre Keyes (he/him)
Research Assistant
Alexandre Keyes (he/him) is a white Franco-Ontarian research assistant working in the Humanities Data Lab for the new FCCR-Diversity project. His role in this project will be to produce a literature review that illustrates the published academic studies written about the intersection of digital technologies and oppression in Canada. Having completed his B.A. spécialisé en lettres françaises in April 2022, Alexandre will be studying at the Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté in September 2022 to get his master’s degree in Rare Books and Digital Humanities.
Jasmin Macarios (any/all)
Research Assistant
Jasmin Macarios is a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Ottawa with interests in how society is represented in media, as well as data and information science ethics and accessibility. Jasmin is currently working on digitizing the LOOT Oral History Tapes and doing research on ethical metadata and digitization methodology.
Rajvi Khatri (she/her)
Programmer Analyst
Rajvi has joined the team as a Programmer Analyst where she is contributing to front-end development, particularly working on ResearchSpace. She has a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering and experience with cloud computing and project management. During her free time you can catch her by the lake reading a book, cooking, or binge-watching TV shows.
Morgan Hector
Research Assistant
Morgan is a fourth year communications student minoring in digital humanities. She specializes in graphic design and videography. Her research interests involve data visualization and film history.
Imène Tissoukai (she/her)
Research Administrator
Imène Tissoukai works as the Research Administrator at the Humanities Data Lab at the University of Ottawa. She also works full-time as an Education Coordinator in the Learning and Organizational Development department at Elizabeth Bruyère Hospital. She holds a Bachelor of Specialized Interdisciplinary Health Sciences from the University of Ottawa.
Oxana Pilenko
Research Assistant
Oxana is a third year history student with a minor in political science and digital humanities. Since introducing digital humanities minor to her program, she wanted to explore the potential of digital tools in humanities research. She joined the lab as a research assistant for the Lesbian and Gay Liberation project in the winter of 2020 where she encodes events centring around the contributions of queer women and non-men. She is passionate about using digital methods to recover the sense of collective resistance in the history of queer mobilization.
May Ning
Research Assistant
May is a fourth year marketing student at the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa. She joined the Humanities Data team at the beginning of October 2018 as the Digital Humanities Research Chair Lab Coordinator. She is now working on the DH2020 Conference which will take place the week of July 20th in Ottawa. She enjoys design, media, and event coordination.
Tristan Lamonica
Research Assistant
Tristan is a master’s student in communication at the University of Ottawa with a thesis focused on a peer-to-peer decentralized internet infrastructure. He has a background in data science, analytics, and content analysis through his employment at the Parliament of Canada. He has also worked as a teaching assistant, social media manager, research assistant, and served in an advisory role for blockchain enabled AI startups.
Célian Ringwald
Research Assistant
Célian has a master’s degree in data science from Université Lyon 2. He worked three years for a company on visualization of information solutions and natural language processing links to mediatic problems, for example citation detection in press corpus. Interested by university research, he is getting a master’s degree in Digital Humanities, which he is finishing with the Humanities Data Lab as a research assistant. He actually works on TEI enrichment pipeline and will be involved in transformation tasks from TEI to RDF of existant projects.
Lori Antranikian
Research Assistant
Lori is a fourth year computer science student. She was really intrigued with digital humanities after taking DCN1100, an introductory course to the digital humanities in fall 2018. She joined the lab as a research assistant in January 2019 where she is working to analyze data on the first 10 editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.
Salem Maskell
Research Assistant
Paige is currently studying for their Honours Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a minor in Digital Humanities. Paige started as a creative data research assistant for the Humanities Data Lab in January 2019, where their research revolved around the frequency of use of unigrams in both dictionary definitivons and prose. Paige is an active poet with one publication and more in the works, with interests including data visualization, media studies, language, and literature.
Ruth Truong
Research Assistant
Ruth is an English MA student specializing in Digital Humanities at Carleton University. In January 2018, while finishing her English BA at the University of Ottawa, she began working with Dr. Constance Crompton on various small projects relating to the Digital Humanities. She is now mainly involved in the preliminary work for the LINCS project and has developed a particular interest in the process and benefits of converting focused datasets into Linked Open Data.
Dr. Chris Tanasescu
Research Associate
Chris is Coordinator of Digital Humanities at University of Ottawa, a poet, translator, and Asymptote Journal’s Editor-at-Large for Romania and Moldova. His research and creative work—under the alias Margento—combine his interest in graph theory, natural language processing, literature, and performance. Chris has recently launched “US” Poets Foreign Poets,a computationally-assembled poetry anthology in algorithmic translation.
Travis White
Research Assistant
Travis White completed a degree in English in 2015. He served as the project manager of the LGLC project for three years and undertook the migration of the text from TEI via XSLT to a Neo4j database and the development of the LGLC web app.
Nadine Boulay
Research Assistant
Nadine is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Her dissertation research uses oral history interviewing to document histories of LGBTQ activism in rural B.C. from the 1970s to present day. She has worked on the LGLC project since 2015, researching supplementary materials to add to the prosopography. She is passionate about queer history and activism.
Cole Mash
Research Assistant
Cole Mash (he/him) is a poet, scholar, writer, teacher and community arts organizer who lives on unceded Syilx-Okanagan territory in Kelowna, BC. His work often blends poetry and nonfiction, drawing on his working-class roots, personal stories, and pop-culture to explore themes of masculinity, memory, ecology, and family. He holds a PhD in English from Simon Fraser University. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of Kelowna non-profit arts organization Inspired Word Café, teaches at UBC Okanagan and Okanagan College.
Caitlin Voth
Research Assistant
Caitlin is Master’s student in English with a research focus in print culture and Canadian small and private presses. She is was both a research assistant and a project manager for the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project, and is currently co-managing the lab with Stephen. In her spare time she works in her own letterpress print shop.
Nikita Gush
Research Assistant
Nikita Gush is from Vernon, BC and completed a Political Science major with a minor in English. She is wrote a Devonshire Manuscript webscraper in python for the INKE project. She is currently attending law school.
Reba Ouimet
Research Assistant
Reba Ouimet completed an English major and Psychology minor at UBCO, and is now an MLIS student at UBC in Vancouver. Her research interests lie in the areas of Victorian literature, children’s literature, Gothic and fantasy, and digital humanities. She is worked as the digital dissemination and outreach coordinator for the Victorian Review.
Seamus Riordan-Short
Research Assistant
Seamus is passionate about developing and using technology to make new discoveries about old things. This interest has guided him in his work at both the Digital Humanities laboratory as well as in the field of analytical chemistry, where he also works as an RA.
Raymon Sandhu
Research Assistant
Raymon Sandhu is a former project manager of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project. His interests lie in the fields of Statistical Learning and Natural Language Processing.
Sabrina Schoch
Research Assistant
Sabrina Schoch is a Faculty of Arts student who worked on the Victorian Review. She is majoring in History and plans to go in to law.
Maggie Shirley
Research Assistant
Maggie Shirley is a polymedia artist who completed a MFA at UBCO. She worked on the migration of Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript project to Iter Community, a social publication platform for Early Modern and Renaissance scholarship housed at the University of Toronto.
Juawana Grant
Research Assistant
Juawana’s research interests lie at the intersection of feminism and critical animal studies. A former Kelowna Tech History RA, she is always seeking out moments of resistance in popular media. She both appreciates and despises the “cat lady” trope.
Rebecca Desjarlais
Research Assistant
Rebecca is a fourth year dual major student in English and Art History, who left a long career in finance to pursue her true passions; books, humour, and french fries. Rebecca is excited about library sciences, and finding ways to use technology to connect people with texts and forms of visual culture.
Elisa Mayeur (elle)
Elisa Mayeur est une étudiante en Humanités Numériques à l’Université Lyon 2 et diplômée d’un master en Histoire de l’Art et Cultures Visuelles. Elle rejoint l’équipe du LGLC en tant qu’Étudiante-Chercheuse Invitée à l’Université d’Ottawa au printemps 2025 et contribue à l’exploitation d’archives lesbiennes francophones issues des Archives Gaies du Québec (Montréal) et des Archives et collections spéciales (ARCS) de l’Université Ottawa, à l’encodage TEI et à la cartographie des données du projet. Elle est également professeure de danse et s’intéresse aux archives de la danse ainsi qu’aux enjeux d’exploitation et de pérennisation des archives numériques.
