Centre for Digital Scholarship

Across the River to Freedom lets you visit the town of Sandwich, either in person or online, and learn about its fascinating history. The project is committed to moving forward by looking back at Sandwich’s rich and diverse history. Across the River to Freedom features three short documentary films, historical articles, a gallery of archival images, classroom activities and curriculum, as well as walking and biking tours of historic Sandwich.

Breaking the Colour Barrier: tells the story of Wilfred "Boomer" Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, who in 1934 became the first Black baseball team to win a provincial Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship.

Dr. Queenie Halford Shirley is believed to be the first Canadian woman to hold a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952. After a brief career in research and teaching, she sadly died in Windsor on February 2, 1955.

The IAINBAXTER&raisonnE is an experimental electronic collection, virtual exhibition platform and research environment devoted to the life's work of internationally-active Canadian conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& that seeks to expand and transform the catalogue raisonné format into a collaborative scholarly communications and learning zone. Developed by Adam Lauder in partnership with IAIN BAXTER&, Louise Chance Baxter, and an interdisciplinary team of scholars.

Jack Calder at War: A Canadian Mother's WWII Scrapbook is a hybrid creative and historical project based on an authentic Second World War scrapbook that documents the wartime career of Canadian journalist Jack Calder (1915-1944) during his time as a navigator with the Royal Canadian Air Force. The project not only makes the scrapbook’s contents digitally available for the first time, but also augments them with fictional imaginings of his mother’s wartime experiences. Using the scrapbook her grandmother Agnes Calder assembled as both creative inspiration and documentary source, writer Patricia Calder weaves together two vivid narratives: the story of a young man at war and the equally compelling homefront story of his mother waiting anxiously for news.

These archival "scrapbooks" render the life of the Metropolitan School of Nursing from its founding in 1954 until the transition that saw all hospital-based Ontario nursing education moved to the community colleges in the early 1970s.

Michael Chekhov: The Actor is the Theatre is a digital exhibition featuring an archive of approximately 3,600 typewritten pages documenting Michael Chekhov’s work with the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

Rampike was a literary, arts and theory magazine founded, published and edited by Dr. Karl Jirgens (1979-2016). Rampike featured numerous prize-winning and ground-breaking artists, writers and theorists, including nominees and winners of awards such as the Booker, Commonwealth, Pulitzer, Giller, and Governor General’s Award.

The Spanish Republic of Letters project is a nascent catalog of the correspondence and private library collections of 16th century Spanish humanists.

Telling the Stories of Race and Sports in Canada is a three-part project dedicated to exploring the past, present, and future of race and sport in Canada. This web portal features interviews and information about Windsor-Essex County athletes of colour, an archive of papers presented at our September, 2018, symposium, and includes a range of documents, images, and resources related to understanding the Canadian experiences in sport in the context of a racialized world.

This site is dedicated to the hundreds of Nisei who worked as farm labourers while separated from their families.

The North Was Our Canaan takes us along the banks of the Detroit River, through the streets of Sandwich, to end up at Sandwich First Baptist Church, a congregation whose roots extend back to the 1820s.

Welcome to the McDougall Street Corridor in downtown Windsor, Ontario. Though only a few traces of this once vibrant, bustling Black neighbourhood remain, the community’s legacy remains strong. The story of the McDougall Street Corridor showcases this city’s rich Black history but also demonstrates the devastating impacts of city planning and urban renewal efforts on a historic neighbourhood. We Were Here offers a collection of essays, images, maps, artifacts, and documents that depict this community, and invites you to learn more about a vital chapter in Canadian history. The We Were Here: Recovering the Stories of Windsor's McDougall Street Corridor digital exhibit is a collaboration between the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, the University of Windsor’s Leddy Library, their Archives and Special Collections and their Centre for Digital Scholarship.

In this Canada150 project, Windsor-Essex's rich and complex history will be explored through images – photographic and geophysical – collected with and through our communities, and then curated and displayed on UWindsor’s Digital History Project website.

From about 1885-1913, Windsor and neighbouring Sandwich became a haven for couples from the United States looking for quick and discreet weddings. They came by ferry from Detroit and places further afield, e.g. Toledo and Cleveland, purchased a license, were directed to the clergyman of their choice, who then married them in short order, with few questions asked. Windsor and Essex County became known as Ontario’s Gretna Green.