Dr. Ralph McLean is the curator of 18th-century manuscripts at the National Library of Scotland.
Team Lyon in Mourning
National Library of Scotland Partnership Representative
Digital Humanities Innovation Lab Collaborator
Joey Takeda is the main collaborator from the DHIL, where he works as User Interface Developer. Joey has worked as a programmer for a number of DH projects, including The Map of Early Modern London, Landscapes of Injustice, Linked Early Modern Drama Online, and The Winnifred Eaton Archive. He is also in the final throes of an MA in English (Science and Technology Research Stream) from the University of British Columbia, where his research focuses on Indigenous and diasporic literature, textual and editorial approaches, queer theory, and ecocriticism.
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS (SFU)
Taylor Breckles is currently pursuing her MA in English at SFU. Her research interests include Indigenous studies, media history, humour studies, and sociolinguistics.
Jasmyn Bojakli recently completed her MA in English at McGill University, and is currently working toward her PhD in English. Her research focuses on the representation of the eighteenth-century bawd in literature and media.
Alyssa Bridgman recently completed an English MA at Simon Fraser University. Her interests are 19th-century American, Canadian, and Scottish literatures, as well as contemporary poetry. She is the 2020-21 recipient of the David and Mary Macaree Graduate Fellowship in Scottish Studies.
Kaitlyn MacInnis completed her MA in History at SFU in 2019, and is currently working on her PhD in History. Her research will turn from human to non-human animal history, centering the experiences of sheep in Scotland from 1700.
Shauna Judith Irani is currently pursuing her Master’s degree at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include trauma studies, feminist spatial theory and print culture studies. She also has an interest in 18th- and 19th-century advertisements in the form of handbills and trade cards, informed by her own experience as a copywriter in the world of advertising.
Emma Trotter is currently finishing up her Undergraduate BA at Simon Fraser University in English and completing her Certificate in Writing & Rhetoric. Her research interests include 17th-century American and Puritan literature, as well as late 18th-century feminist literary criticism.
Julianna Wagar has recently completed her BA at Simon Fraser University in English and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She is currently working towards her MA in English at SFU. Her research interests include eighteenth-century Scottish literature, women’s literature, and Scottish women’s travel writing.
RESEARCH ASSISTANTS (EDINBURGH)
Harry Lewis is a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh working on an dissertation on "Jacobitism and the British Caribbean: a study of Catholicism, Sedition and Otherness, 1688-1745"
Dr Georgia Vullinghs (active on the project Dec., 2021 to Feb., 2022) is a historian based in Edinburgh. Her PhD thesis was titled ‘Loyal Exchange: the material and visual culture of Jacobite exile, c.1716 – c.1760’ (University of Edinburgh, 2021). It explored the presence of the Stuart court in Rome, and the role of objects in the relationship between the exiled royals and their supporters. In addition to the history of Jacobite material culture, Georgia’s research interests are in Scottish cultural history, material culture and emotions, and women’s histories. Georgia is currently working as Curator of Modern and Contemporary History at National Museums Scotland.
Other Digital Humanities Innovation Lab Team Members

Rémi Castonguay received his Masters in Library and Information Studies from McGill University in 2000 and an M.A. in musicology from Hunter College in 2008. His varied experience in New York City took him from the Frick Collection to Columbia University and the City University of New York. He was Public Services and Project Librarian at Yale University's Gilmore Music Library from 2008 to 2015. In British Columbia he worked at Lucidea, an ILS software company based in Richmond, as a project management librarian until May 2019. He now starts at SFU as the new Digital Scholarship Librarian. In recent years his work has focused on online streaming services, film preservation, social media, and the digital humanities. He has presented numerous times at the International Association of Music Library (IAML) and the Music Library Association (MLA) conferences and his articles have appeared in Fontes Artis Musicae, Music Reference Services Quarterly, the Journal of Web Librarianship, and other publications. Remi plays the piano, harpsichord, accordion, guitar, recorder and a little bit of ukulele! Remi’s mother tongue is French but besides that and English he also speaks decent Italian and can read Spanish. He also has rudimentary knowledge of American Sign Language (ASL). He likes to write poetry, plays, novels and compose music in his free time. One of his ancestors was a man named Charles Pearson who was abducted by traders in England and put on a ship. He travelled the world until he escaped the ship while stationed on the Saint-Laurent River. In the Gaspesian peninsula in Quebec, he married a French-Canadian girl and the rest is history!
Rebecca Dowson is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and Library Collaborator at the DHIL. In her role, Rebecca supports researchers at all levels who are engaged with digital humanities through project consultations, digital skill development workshops, and coordinating the Library's resources in digitization and project hosting. Her research interests include the intersection of libraries and digital humanities, with a particular interest in digital cultural heritage projects, digital skill building, and new forms of scholarly publishing.Rebecca is on leave until 2021
Michael Joyce enjoys writing software that talks to other software because he’s bad at talking to people and doesn’t understand apostrophes. He brings 15 years of digital humanities and web application development to the DHIL, including working as Web and Data Services Developer for the Bennett Library, a Programmer Analyst for UBC Mathematics, and a Web Developer at the Electronic Textual Culture Lab at UVic. He hates spreadsheets and loves highly structured databases.
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