Who we are

Blanka Stepankova, Student Assistant

Blanka Stepankova is an Undergraduate student in Anthropology and French. In addition to creating artsy things with the Cricut and Fabool, Blanka enjoys experimenting with archaeology-related 3D printing and academic illustration with software like Procreate.

Evan Kuznetsov, Student Assistant

Xuege Wu, Student Assistant

Xuege Wu is a Master’s student researching early modern English drama. She enjoys using the FABOOL laser cutter at the DSC, especially for the scent of engraved wood. Skilled in graphic design and digital painting, Xuege is proficient in software like Photoshop, Illustrator, Clip Studio Paint, and Procreate.

Ameer Hamza, Student Assistant

Milamem Gabbar, Digital Scholarship Specialist

  • Making hardware and software
  • Research reference

Milamem is a graduate of the Library and Information Technology program at MacEwan University. She started her library career at NorQuest Library and then moved to Hebert T. Coutts Library for a year, after a month-long practicum experience at the Rutherford and J.A. Weir Law Libraries. Milamem has broad experience in public and community service from various past jobs and as a volunteer for the Edmonton Public Library to date. She comes from a family of educators and is excited to work in this teaching, learning and research environment in order to support students and faculty in their academic pursuits.

milamem.gabbar@ualberta.ca

Hanne Pearce, Digital Scholarship Specialist

  • Photography and photo editing
  • Video production
  • Graphic design, publication design
  • Social media research (Instagram)
  • Visual research methods
  • 3D Modelling for printing and virtual reality

Hanne has worked at the University of Alberta Library since 2004 in a number of roles. She has an academic background in comparative literature, library studies, communications and technology. Hanne is passionate about photography and her core skills are based in media production, 2D and 3D design. Her research interests include visual methods, digital literacy pedagogy and communication theory. As a digital ‘creative’ she enjoys helping members of the University community explore new ways of learning, creating and conducting research.

hanne.pearce@ualberta.ca
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Peter Binkley, Digital Scholarship Technologies Librarian

  • Research methods and tools
  • Research data management
  • Digital preservation

Peter is a librarian with the University of Alberta Library, where he works to support researchers with problems and methods of digital scholarship. He has worked in digitization, digital librarianship and digital preservation since the early years of this century. His academic background is in textual studies in the Latin Middle Ages, and he has a Ph.D. in Medieval Studies. His interest is in determining the best path to the solution of a digital research problem.

peter.binkley@ualberta.ca
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Lydia Zvyagintseva, Head, Digital Scholarship Services

  • Services and programs
  • Workshop development
  • Assignment design and teaching with tech
  • Research methods and tools
  • Makerspaces

Lydia is responsible for the operations and service design of the Digital Scholarship Centre. She holds degrees in Library and Information Studies, Digital Humanities, and French Language and Literature. She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at the Universities of Alberta, Toronto, and MacEwan, and has worked in both public and academic libraries. With Mary Greenshields, she is the co-editor of Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education with Library Juice Press, and has published on open data, digital exhibits, labour, and refusal.

lydiaz@ualberta.ca
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Harvey Quamen, Academic Director

  • Grant assistance
  • Scripting | Programming (Python, PHP, Javascript, R)
  • Database creation and management
  • Data visualization (R, Python, Gephi, D3)
  • Pedagogy and teaching

Harvey is an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities, teaching interdisciplinary courses on Digital Humanities, cyberculture, posthumanism, and 19th- and 20th-century literature. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London, and has participated in several large collaborative research teams, including Editing Modernism in Canada, the Canadian Writers Research Collaboratory, and the Implementing New Knowledge Environments Project. He also teaches annually at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria. His research interests include “big data” humanities, including text mining, social network analysis, and humanistic data visualization. Recent publications include essays in Making Canada New, Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada, and the “Databases” entry in Doing Digital Humanities, published by Routledge. He and collaborator Jon Bath will soon be publishing Relational Databases for Humanists as part of the “Programming for Humanists” series from Texas A&M Press

harvey.quamen@ualberta.ca
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Sonya Betz, Administrative Director

Sonya is Acting Associate University Librarian and Administrative Director of the Digital Scholarship Centre at the University of Alberta, and formerly managed the Library’s non-commercial, scholar-led publishing program, which supports the publication of open access journals and open textbooks. She is deeply interested in seeking ways to promote and sustain not-for-profit approaches to scholarly publishing and open access. She currently sits on the Board of the Library Publishing Coalition, is Chair of the Public Knowledge Project’s Members Committee, and co-chairs the new Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) Library Publishing Community Engagement Team.