OCAD University researchers are among the recipients of funding from two programs administered by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), announced today by the Hon. Mélanie Joly, Minister of Industry and Minister responsible for Canada Economic Development for Quebec Regions.
The funding announcement highlights the Government of Canada’s commitment to fostering collaboration and excellence in social sciences and humanities research, which is vital for understanding complex societal challenges and developing solutions for a more resilient and equitable future.
“From Weimar to Nazi Germany: A Digital Humanities Investigation of Music-Theatre Censorship,” led by OCAD University Associate Professor and musicologist Dr. Helmut Reichenbächer, received an Insight Grant of $118,730 over four years. The research team includes Co-Investigators Isabel Meirelles, OCAD U professor and information visualization expert, and Dr. Susan Brown, University of Guelph professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Collaborative Digital Scholarship.
The second OCAD U research project, “Crafting Memory: Toward a Theory of Grief and Nostalgia through Embodied Material Practices,” is being led by OCAD U Professor Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat. This two-year project, which received an Insight Development Grant of $38,855, will produce a clearly articulated conceptual framework that advances theory by explaining craft practice as an embodied, material mode of living with grief, loss and nostalgia.
“From Weimar to Nazi Germany: A Digital Humanities Investigation of Music-Theatre Censorship” will investigate how Nazi ideology reshaped what German stages performed, using artificial intelligence to transform thousands of pages of historical theatre listings into open data.
“Nearly half the operetta performances on German stages in the final Weimar years were of works by composers the Nazi regime would soon defame and silence. Behind every title that vanished from the playbills is a career destroyed or a life in danger. Our data makes that loss visible at scale and our archival research will recover the personal stories behind the numbers," says Dr. Reichenbächer.
The team will analyze over 500,000 performance records from more than 900 German-language stages, drawn from printed sources such as the Deutscher Bühnenspielplan and the Deutsches Bühnenjahrbuch.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: “FROM WEIMAR TO NAZI GERMANY: A DIGITAL HUMANITIES INVESTIGATION OF MUSIC-THEATRE CENSORSHIP”
Combining digital humanities, musicology, theatre studies and archival research, this project will examine how music-theatre programming in Germany was reshaped from the diverse, often provocative repertoire of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) to the ideologically constrained performances of the Nazi era (1933–1945).
A key innovation is an automated data aggregation pipeline that will use advanced Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and artificial intelligence (AI) to extract and structure performance data from historical print sources.
The pipeline will enable large-scale, efficient data processing and lays the foundation for a digital discovery tool. To ensure discoverability and connectivity, the data will be enriched with metadata on the repertoire and its performances. Using both scholarly and Nazi-era sources, the team will trace defamed composers and tag each theatre with its geographic location, size, resources, and leadership.
The project's interactive discovery tool will support both micro- and macro-level analysis of repertoire shifts under political pressure. The tool, to be permanently housed on OCAD University's website, will visualize geographical and temporal patterns in programming, making the data accessible to scholars, artistic directors, and interested lay audiences alike.
The tool will also serve as a searchlight for the project's archival research: where the visualizations reveal an anomaly – a work that vanishes overnight, a theatre that resists a nation-wide trend, a composer whose music lingers longer than the regime permitted – they will direct the team to the archival files where individual case studies await. In this way, the aggregate data guides the search for the personal stories behind the numbers.
To trace decision-making processes and individual acts of resistance, the team will consult the files of the Propaganda Ministry's censorship offices, now held at the German Federal Archives in Berlin.
This archival research will uncover the personal stories of theatre professionals who evaded censorship, stories that will be featured in Narrativizing Data, a web-based exhibition hosted at OCAD U. Curated with the support of a graduate student from OCAD U's Criticism and Curatorial Practice MFA program, the exhibition will highlight the human dimension of cultural resistance and offer a compelling narrative of artistic resilience.
The data will be published and permanently maintained on the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) platform at the University of Guelph. A mirror site, hosted by musiconn.performance at the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) in Dresden under the direction of project collaborator Dr. Christian Kämpf, will ensure discoverability and long-term accessibility to researchers across the globe through integration with Linked Open Data and international authority identifiers.
ABOUT THE PROJECT: “CRAFTING MEMORY: TOWARD A THEORY OF GRIEF AND NOSTALGIA THROUGH EMBODIED MATERIAL PRACTICES”
This two-year project will develop a theoretically grounded account of how grief, loss, and nostalgia may be lived with – rather than resolved – through embodied craft practice.
While existing research on grief has increasingly moved away from stage-based or resolution-oriented models, little attention has been paid to how material practices contribute to living with absence over time. Similarly, research in craft studies and material culture has demonstrated the epistemic value of making, yet has rarely been integrated with contemporary grief theory.
This project will address this theoretical opportunity through a critical, interdisciplinary synthesis supported by a small exploratory pilot study designed to test and refine emerging theoretical concepts.
Situated at the intersection of four research domains of (1) grief, loss, and absence, (2) craft and practice-led research, (3) material engagement and embodied cognition, and (4) memory, material culture, and nostalgia, the project will undertake a systematic analysis of existing scholarship to articulate craft practice as an embodied, attentive mode of coping.
The focus will not be on therapeutic intervention or autobiographical narration, but on how repetitive, materially engaged practices sustain memory, regulate affect, and support continuity in the presence of loss.
This project will be driven by the central research problem: How can craft practice be theorized as an embodied, affective mode of coping with loss and nostalgia, distinct from therapeutic, pathological, or purely representational models of grief?
By reframing grief as an ongoing, lived condition rather than a problem to be resolved, the project will contribute to enhanced public and cultural discourse around loss, memory, and remembrance.
