UBC-SFU TEI Partnership

Wednesday May 13, 2026

From 2:00pm to 2:15pm

Digital Heritage

This presentation will introduce the cross-institutional partnership between SFU Library’s Digital Humanities Innovation Lab (DHIL) and UBC's Digital Scholarship in the Arts Initiative (DiSA). Launched at the end of 2024, this partnership grew out of collaborative discussions and communities of practice in the hopes of providing extended consultation, training, and support for digital scholarship across UBC and SFU. Focused currently on the creation, support, and maintenance of TEI-encoded projects across the two institutions, this partnership has brought together teaching faculty, librarians, developers, and graduate students in a concerted effort to share experience, expertise, and capacity to develop robust infrastructures for fostering a community of digital scholarship in the region. 

Our paper will outline the successes and challenges that we have encountered throughout the partnership. We will describe the structural and administrative make-up of this collaboration, discussing the pragmatics of bringing together researchers across institutions, faculties, expertise, and institutional hierarchies. We will also feature the flagship projects at the core of this partnership, including The Adaptive TEI Network, a PhD-student led cluster of projects that seeks to implement antiracist, decolonial, and inclusive encoding practices as well as challenge the stigma of multi-authorship and collaboration that persists within much humanities scholarship. Featuring members of the collaboration from across the academic hierarchy—librarians, faculty, developers, and graduate students—this paper ultimately stresses the significant potential, but also administrative hurdles, that cross-institutional collaboration entails. 