Hi I’m Mark

Artist, Craftsman, Designer, Heutagogue, Connectivist, Adult Educationist & Technologian Also a digital storytelling & storymapping facilitator

A lifelong learner, former art and scientific glassblower, sociologist, and critical digital humanist: I glean meaning from experiences & tell stories.

I am the 3rd person to achieve the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities

The Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities / Certificat canadien en humanités numériques (cc:DH/HN) requires 100 hours of eligible digital humanities workshops completed within five years: at least 60 from in-depth workshops of 20 hours or more, at least 60 from Canadian institutions, and no more than 30 asynchronous. It is open to anyone regardless of institutional affiliation or citizenship, and carries no grades, assessments, or capstone project. In 2023, the inaugural year, I was one of three recipients.

I took eight courses at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, University of Victoria, British Columbia, across four summers, totaling 143 hours: Critical Pedagogy and Digital Praxis in the Humanities with Jesse Stommel and Chris Friend; Digital Preservation Basics for Digital Humanities, a three-hour workshop; Beyond TEI: Metadata for Digital Humanities with Carolyn Hansen and Sean Crowe; Open Access and Open Social Scholarship with Alyssa Arbuckle; Text Processing with John Maxwell; Text Mapping as Modelling with Øyvind Eide; Developing a Digital Project (With Omeka) with Markus Wust and Brian Norberg; and Endings: How to End (and Archive) Your Digital Project, coordinated by Martin Holmes.

I attended three Digital Pedagogy Labs I didn’t submit. Two were at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, VA: Audrey Watters's Action track, then a one-day cryptoparty on privacy with Bill Fitzgerald and four days of Data, Code, Action with Kris Shaffer and Fitzgerald. The third was Open Pedagogy with Maha Bali and Mia Zamora, online through CU Denver.

Only my last four DHSI courses fell inside the five-year window. I submitted those, plus a 54-hour community college GIS course, for 134 hours. They declined my petition to reopen the window for pandemic travel bans but admitted the GIS course because by their rules its credit could not count toward any degree.

Featured Work - double click to enlarge all artifacts

After learning to blow glass and studying art and design, I worked thirty years as a professional craftsman, twenty in Santa Clara, California. I don’t call it “Silicon Valley”, I prefer the earlier “Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

I returned to college in 2010 (all designs and images by MCW).

After I graduated, I decided to study Digital Humanities & I began with the U of Mary Washington’s #ds106 (once a digital storytelling course) to learn to use FOSS (free & open source software) digital tools to make my own media.