Deb Verhoeven

Area of Study / Keywords

Digital Humanities Feminist Studies Interdisciplinary Film Studies Production Studies Cultural Studies Gender Equity Policy Queer Studies

About

Before taking her current position as a professor jointly appointed to the University of Alberta’s Digital Humanities and Women’s and Gender Studies Departments, Deb Verhoeven held many high-level academic and non-profit roles. Born in Australia, she attended the University of Melbourne and graduated with a PhD in cinema studies in 2005. Many of her positions and appointments involve either, or both, research into inequality in the film industries and the development of innovative digital research platforms. 

In 2008, the Australian Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts appointed Verhoeven the inaugural deputy chair of the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA), a position she held until 2011. Between 2009 and 2012, she was chair of Senses of Cinema, a widely read scholarly online film journal. Among her many other positions and honours, she was awarded the title of Australia’s most innovative academic in 2012 for pioneering crowdfunding research platforms. 

In 2019, Verhoeven was appointed the Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and Cultural Informatics at the U of A. She currently teaches several masters-level courses, and concurrently holds a variety of governance positions in Canada. She is a board member of CANARIE the organization that runs Canada's national high-bandwidth network for research & education. She was appointed as an inaugural board member of NDRIO (now the Digital Research Alliance), an national organization that deploys advanced research computing systems, storage, and software solutions to Canadian researchers. She currently serves on the boards of several peer-reviewed, open-access publications including The Journal of Cultural Analytics, dedicated to the computational study of culture and KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies, a journal intended to encourage the formation of a multidisciplinary community of scholars studying human knowledge processes.

Verhoeven’s film research spans many topics, extending the scope of conventional cinema studies through collaboration with economists, cultural policy theorists, information managers, data scientists, social scientists, visual artists as well as government policymakers and advocacy organizations. Her pioneering development of large-scale cultural datasets and archival research platforms,  such as the Humanities Networked Infrastructure, the Workplace Inclusion Diversity and Gender Equity Tool (WIDGET)  underpins and extends much of her research. She is the author of more than 150 academic articles and book chapters. Her book, Jane Campion published by Routledge, is a detailed case study of the commercial and cultural role of the auteur in the contemporary film industry. And her work can also be found in non-traditional outlets as gallery exhibitions, on-stage musical performances of research data and a wide variety of media publications and appearances.

Research

Selected Publications since 2020

• Jones, P., Verhoeven, D., Dadlani A., Zemaityte, V. She Must Be Seeing Things! Gender disparity in camera department networks. Social Networks 76: 120-134.

• Coate, B., Eltham, B., & Verhoeven, D. (2023). By a long shot: Power, devaluation and discrimination in a toxic cultural workforce. Australian Journal of Management, 48(4), 732-753. 

• Burrows, T., & Verhoeven, D. (2023). Serendipity and Knowledge Organisation. In Serendipity Science: An Emerging Field and its Methods (pp. 31-48). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

• Estill, L., Guiliano, J., Ortega, É., Terras, M., Verhoeven, D., & Layne-Worthey, G. (2022). The circus we deserve? A front row look at the organization of the annual academic conference for the Digital Humanities. DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 16(4).

• Mendell, M., Hogan, M., & Verhoeven, D. (2022). Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world. The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien, 66(1), 37-47.

• Verhoeven, D. (2022). Scholarship in a Clopen World. Pop! Public, Open, Participatory (4).

• Verhoeven, D., Musial, K., Hambusch, G., Ghannam, S., & Shashnov, M. (2022). Net effects: examining strategies for women’s inclusion and influence in ASX200 company boards. Applied Network Science, 7(1), 1-26. 

• Gregory, S., & Verhoeven, D. (2021). Inequality, invisibility, and inflexibility. In S. Liddy & A. O’Brien (Eds.), Media Work, Mothers and Motherhood. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003082552

• Hogan, M. & Verhoeven, D. (2021). Sustainable DNA. In C. Miya, O. Rossier, & G. Rockwell (Eds.), Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers. DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0213

• Verhoeven, D., Moore, P.S., Coles, A., Coate, B., Zemaityte, V., Musial, K., Prommer, E.,  Mantsio, M., Taylor, S., Eltham, B., Loist, S., & Davidson, A. (2020). Disciplinary itineraries and digital methods: Examining the Kinomatics collaboration networks. NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Special issue on Method). DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/15320

• Verhoeven D, Musial K, Palmer S, Taylor S, Abidi S, Zemaityte V, et al. (2020) Controlling for openness in the male-dominated collaborative networks of the global film industry. PLoS ONE 15(6): e0234460. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234460

• Phillips, S., & Verhoeven, D. (2020) “How Do We Live Together Without Killing Each Other” – Indigenous and Feminist Perspectives on Relationality, Journal of Communication, Culture, and Critique, 13(2),  249–253
  

• Eltham, B., & Verhoeven, D. (2020). A ‘natural experiment’in Australian cultural policy: Australian Government funding cuts disproportionately affect companies that produce more new work and have larger audiences. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26(1), 81-94. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2018.1436167

Selected Online Articles since 2020

• Coate, B., Eltham, B., Verhoeven, D. (2023) Film camera departments operate on a system of who you know, so what happens when you’re not a member of the in-group? The Conversation. August 8, 2023.

• Eltham, B., Verhoeven, D. (2023). PwC scandal only the tip of a chummy, collusive consultancy iceberg. Crikey. May 26, 2023.

• Jones, M., Verhoeven, D. (2022) Trove’s funding runs out in July 2023 – and the National Library is threatening to pull the plug. It’s time for a radical overhaul. The Conversation. December 22, 2022.

• Verhoeven, D. (2023) ‘Just add women and stir’: why gender equity numbers don’t always add up. Crikey. August 11, 2022. 

• Sanderman, E., Verhoeven, D., Mandell, L. (2021) The 21º3’N of separation of the Journal of Cultural Analytics: Mapping the first five years. September 21, 2021