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For a couple of years I have been working on outfitting the History Department at Western University with a new digital lab and classroom, funded by a very generous grant from our provost. The spaces are now open and mostly set up, and our graduate students and faculty have started to form working groups to teach themselves how to use the hardware and software and to share what they know with others. There is tremendous excitement about the potential of our lab, which is understandable. I believe that it is the best-equipped such space in the world: historians at Western now have their own complete Fab Lab.

In provisioning the lab and classroom, I wanted to strike a balance between supporting the kinds of activities that are typically undertaken in digital history and digital humanities projects right now, while also enabling our students and faculty to engage in the kind of “making in public” that many people argue will characterize the humanities and social sciences in the next decade.

Here is a high-level sketch of our facilities, organized by activity. The lab inventory actually runs to thousands of items, so this just an overview.

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To date, the facilities have been used most fully by Devon Elliott, a PhD student who is working with Rob MacDougall and I. Devon’s dissertation is on the technology and culture of stage magic. In his work, he designs electronics, programs computers, does 3D scanning, modeling and printing, builds illusions and installations and leads workshops all over the place. You can learn more about his practice in a recent edition of the Canadian Journal of Communication and in the forthcoming #pastplay book edited by Kevin Kee. (Neither of these publications are open access yet, but you can email me for preprints.) Devon and I are also teaching a course on fabrication and physical computing at DHSI this summer with Jentery Sayers and Shaun Macpherson.

Past students in my interactive exhibit design course have also used the lab equipment to build dozens of projects, including a robot that plays a tabletop hockey game, a suitcase that tells the stories of immigrants, a batting helmet to immerse the user in baseball history, a device that lets the Prime Ministers on Canadian money tell you about themselves, a stuffed penguin in search of the South Pole, and many others. This year, students in the same class have begun to imagine drumming robots, print 3D replicas of museum artifacts, and make the things around them responsive to people.

In the long run, of course, the real measure of the space will be what kind of work comes out of it. While I don’t really subscribe to the motto “if you build it, they will come”, I do believe that historians who want to work with their hands as well as their heads have very few opportunities to do so. We welcome you! We’re very interested in taking student and post-doc makers and in collaborating with colleagues who are dying to build something tangible. Get excited and make things!