We offer access to digital research tools, storage, expertise and ongoing support, and skills development to humanities, arts and social sciences researchers and their teams in Atlantic Canada.

Funded federally and by the provinces, our resources are free of charge to researchers at post-secondary institutions in Canada. Your data stays in Canada, and we don’t look at, touch or use it for any purpose whatsoever.

ACENET has a dedicated Digital Research Consultant with a background in social sciences to address the needs of our humanities, arts and social sciences communities. 

Meghan Landry joined us from St. Francis Xavier University where she was a ScholarlyCommunications Librarian. In that role, she was very involved with the university's strategic efforts in research data management and open access. She was responsible for implementing St. FX's first institutional repository, StFX Scholar. Previously, she worked as a Digital Initiatives Librarian and managed the University of Prince Edward Island Library's Virtual Research Environments (VREs) and Islandora repositories, which showcase digital collections and research related to PEI history. Meghan has an MLIS from McGill University and a BA in English Literature from UPEI. She is based at St. FX University, but serves all of Atlantic Canada and is active in national humanities and social sciences initiatives.

Contact Meghan

We can help you:

• Determine the most appropriate digital resources for your project and/or grant applications
• Obtain an Alliance federation account and establish a cloud project
• Get set up in the cloud, create your virtual machine and install your software 
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• Get started using the high performance computing clusters
• Get started with Globus, our secure data transfer software
• Research data management and sensitive data guidance
• Develop the technical specifications, budget and RFP
• Provide letters of support to granting agencies
• Establish a partnership with in-kind contributions attached to usage

Cloud Computing & Development Space

The Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance) federation manages over 43,000 virtual CPUs across the country, with a team of system administrators ensuring that your data remains in Canada within a managed, secure environment.  Attributes include a centralized software stack and specialized data portals such as Jupyter Hub. Humanities, arts and social science communities use our cloud environments for a variety of applications.  

• Create a tool or platform to enable data mining and analysis, visual analytics, integrate different data sets
• Create interactive maps
• Create a MediaWiki, a community database or a repository on any subject matter
• Gather data from the web (web scraping)
• Develop a mobile application hosted in the cloud

High Performance Computing

With 300,000 CPUs and 120 PBs of storage across six national systems, plus an extensive range of software, humanities, arts and social sciences researchers can carry out a variety of activities.

• Data processing 
• Data mining
• Machine learning

Globus

Use the high-speed, fire-and-forget, secure and easy to use Globus platform to access your data from anywhere, or to securely share TBs of data with national or international collaborators. 

Globus maximizes bandwidth usage, manages security configurations, provides automatic fault recovery and notifies you of completion or any difficulties along the way. 

More information

Database as a Service

The Alliance provides Databases as a Service (DBaaS), with access to MySQL and Postgres database servers for researchers on both Cedar and Graham. This offers several advantages for researchers, including professional database management, secure backups and easy simultaneous access by you and your collaborators. Currently, the Alliance does not provide a web interface for databases as a service; they are accessed via the Command Line. If your database requires a web interface, you can make use of the Alliance cloud to host it, but you will be in charge of the building and management of your project. 

More information. 

Research Data Management

Please consult our Research Data Management page for information on these tools.

Our training includes novice to advanced levels, both scheduled events and custom training for groups, online and in-person.

We teach people who’ve never used digital research tools how to get up and running. 

A variety of topics are available, both specific to humanities and social sciences, and more general. 

Some of our courses have slide decks and videos available, and we have an extensive Wiki.

This group meets regularly to discuss ways in which access to digital tools can be improved for the humanities, arts and social sciences community. It also advocates for the community within the Alliance federation. It is also a forum whereby researchers can request help on their project. Contact.

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) is an annual digital scholarship training institute that takes place at the Université de Montréal. Approximately 800-900 participants attend DHSI, and its extended pedagogical partnership includes some 30 institutions and academic organizations, plus an expanding international training network. DHSI is a community-based environment for discussing and learning about new technologies and how they influence teaching, research, creation, and preservation in different disciplines. DHSI is a Canadian Social Knowledge Institute (C-SKI; c-ski.ca) training institute.

DHSI-East is part of the international DH Training Network and takes its name from DHSI, the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. Its purpose is to provide a forum that is more geographically accessible to humanities and social sciences researchers on the east coast. 

The St. Francis Xavier University Digital Humanities Centre is located in 408 Nicholson Tower and supports faculty and student digital humanities research. The space is available to be booked for teleconferencing and collaborative projects. There are tablets and laptops available for check out. Contact them at digitalhumanities@stfx.ca to book space or equipment.

A joint effort among a number of partner organizations, the Canadian Certificate in Digital Humanities/Certificat canadien en Humanités Numériques (cc:DH/HN) is open to anyone regardless of citizenship or country of residence, and recognizes people who have taken 100 hours of eligible digital humanities workshops over a five-year period.

To find out more about the certificate, including eligibility and how to apply, visit https://ccdhhn.ca/.

If you are a Canadian organization offering digital humanities training and would like to have your workshops listed as eligible and/or become a partner organization, please contact us at digitalhumanities@stfx.ca. 

If you would like to incorporate supercomputing into one of your courses but don't have sufficient compute resources, you can reserve an ACENET training cluster by completing this form.

The Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences promotes research and teaching for the advancement of an inclusive, democratic and prosperous society. With a membership now comprising over 160 universities, colleges and scholarly associations, the Federation represents a diverse community of 91,000 researchers and graduate students across Canada. The Federation organizes Canada’s largest academic gathering, the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, bringing together more than 8000 participants each year.