Witness statement to the Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR), November 28, 2024
Here is the text of my opening statement to the Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR), from the sitting on November 28, 2024. You can find video of the session here. A transcript is usually made available shortly after the meeting date.
My invitation was to speak to the motion (from October 30, 2024):
That the Committee undertake a study on the impact that the various criteria for awarding federal funding have on research excellence in Canada; that the Committee evaluate whether the criteria used are still appropriate within the evaluation committees, allow for the achievement of program objectives, strengthen the development of knowledge, and contribute to innovation, research, and science in Canada; that the Committee assess whether modifications should be made to these criteria. Furthermore, that the Committee devote at least four meetings to this study and report its findings to the House.
Statement (reading text)
Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs.
Je m’appelle Dan O’Donnell et je suis professeur d’anglais médiéval et d’humanités numériques à Iniskim, c’est-à-dire l’Université de Lethbridge, en Alberta. Je suis ravi d’être ici devant le Comité de la science et de la recherche pour vous présenter mon témoignage.
Étant donné que c’est ma première fois devant un comité parlementaire, je poursuivrai mon intervention en anglais après ces remarques.
——
Just over a decade ago, Italian researcher Domenico Fiormonte published an article in the journal Historical Social Research focussing on the “Anglo-American hegemony” that he believed controlled access to the most prominent journals, conferences, and standards in the then fast-growing discipline of the Digital Humanities.
The Digital Humanities was—and remains today—a key driver in applying computation to cultural, social, and political problems. It is the field that first modelled Michelangelo’s David in 3D; contributed to some of the most important mechanisms for processing text with computers; and helped develop the standardised 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 AI, big data, and the critical examination of how infrastructure shapes the questions we ask about ourselves. If it is the job of scientists to solve problems, and the job of humanists to problematise solutions, then researchers in the Digital Humanities do both. They develop cutting-edge tools and 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, these people were neither British nor American: they were Canadian. In fact, there were as many Francophone Canadians on Fiormonte’s list as there were scholars from the UK.
Just as importantly, these Canadians were not based at the “usual suspects”—our big U-15s such as the University of Toronto, McGill, UBC, or the University of Alberta. Instead, they came from smaller or Francophone U-15s like McMaster and the Université de Montréal, and—especially—from smaller comprehensive research universities such as Victoria, Guelph, and my own university, Iniskim, also known as the University of Lethbridge.
I flag this moment because, as the Bouchard Report suggests, Canadian researchers, especially from smaller comprehensive research universities, have lost considerable ground since Fiormonte wrote his article. At that time, Canada was second only to the United States in its number of Digital Humanities centres. Today, we are nowhere near the top, particularly when compared to the European Union.
Our researchers, too, have moved. The U-15 now dominate Canadian Digital Humanities, largely because they have the resources to attract talent from smaller universities. Of the eight Canadians on Fiormonte’s list in 2012, at least six were recruited by U-15 institutions, while the other two (who no doubt also received offers) held Canada Research Chairs at their smaller institutions. I was also recruited, having been offered a job at the University of Saskatchewan, though I had to turn it down for personal reasons.
I stayed in part because the University of Lethbridge once supported my SSHRC-funded research on scanning early medieval crosses in 3D and my work as Chair of the Text Encoding Initiative, a major international computing standard. Today, however, I am in discussions about moving a major SSHRC-funded textual project and associated graduate students to a U-15 because we lack the resources 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 LaRiviere of the Université de Montréal and Dena McMartin, Vice President Research at the University of Lethbridge. Both emphasised the importance of understanding research “excellence” in the broadest sense—as a question of “capacity” rather than competition. In “Excellence R Us: University research and the fetishisation of excellence,” a highly cited article I coauthored for Nature’s Palgrave Communications, my colleagues and I 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 building the kind of knowledge reservoir the Bouchard Report describes as having been critical in the global response to COVID—and, I would argue, underpins our societal consensus on marriage equality, gender equity, and understanding systemic bias.
Much of this reservoir is filled at global universities like Harvard or my almae matres, Toronto and Yale. But universities like Lethbridge, Guelph, and Victoria also play a critical role. Canada’s post-secondary system has historically done well at fostering research across the country, rather than concentrating it in a few elite locations—a perhaps uniquely Canadian form of research excellence. As the case of the Digital Humanities over the last decade demonstrates, however, this broad capacity—and the global leadership it produced—are now under threat.
My focus has been on what I see as the central challenge to “excellence” in the Canadian research ecosystem: not the way research is evaluated, but the increasing concentration of research resources in a few large universities at the expense of our previously diverse, multi-layered ecosystem. At the U of L, we can compete with the best in the quality of our funding proposals. But without proper resourcing, we cannot compete with larger institutions on the economies of scale required to sustain such research in the face of the financial headwinds that all universities face from time to time—especially here in Alberta, where the headwinds are both financial and, as anyone who’s walked across campus in January knows, distinctly non-metaphorical.
I have not discussed the specifics of evaluation criteria, although it is an area in which I have considerable experience both as a researcher and as a member of many adjudication committees. I would be happy to address these or any other topics during our discussion.
Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your comments and questions.
