Carling Marshall-Luymes

Tartan Roots?: Part 3

2007-12-01T20:27:00.000-05:00

Feeling pretty confident that the town's roots were firmly Scottish, I was surprised by the 1911 Census of Canada results for the Kincardine sub-district [28] of Bruce North [left] that revealed a larger percentage of the town's population claimed an Irish heritage than a Scottish heritage [1]. While 169 respondents noted their heritage as Scottish, 224 claimed their "racial origin" as Irish. This compared to 82 English, 33 German, and 5 Dutch responses.

My theory that the Irish comprised a larger population of the town than surrounding township proved false for the 1851 census, but may prove true for the 1911 population. This census data took into account a much smaller geographical area than the 1851 census.

Other census sub-districts took into account, for example, Bervie village, and even other areas of the town of Kincardine itself, which were included all on the same census in 1851. Is sub-district 28 representative of the entire town and township? Without being able to locate which area of town sub-district 28 has collected data from or without counting responses from at least 9 more census sub-districts, I'm not sure I'll find out.

[1] after tallying census column 14 "Racial or tribal origin"

Tartan Roots?: Part 2

2007-12-01T19:38:00.000-05:00

With Kincardine's town founders being half Scottish (i.e. Cameron but not Withers), did the ethnicity of the village follow suit? One of the town's most notable early settlers - businessman, politician and innkeeper Francis "Paddy" Walker - arrived in Kincardine in 1850 with his large Irish Protestant family, and I've always wondered how large Kincardine's Irish population was in the beginning.

The 1851 census of Kincardine village and township noted 352 settlers stating their place of birth as Scotland, and a mere 140 settlers born in Ireland. After reading that unlike the English and Scots, many Irish immigrants in the early 19th century took paying jobs rather than working the land as farmers [1], I wondered if Kincardine's Irish population was concentrated in the village, where Walker and his family built their Inn [above], while Scottish farmers dominated the township's farmland.

The non-farming population revealed on the 1851 census disproved this theory: only 32 of the 140 Irish settlers weren't farmers (23%), while 139 of the 352 Scots had non-farming jobs (40%). While Scots made up a large proportion of farmers in the township, it seems that they dominated the village population as well.

[1]Peter Toner, "Ethnic Groups: Irish" The Canadian Encyclopedia

How much tartan is in those roots?

2007-11-24T23:46:00.000-05:00

I've recently been compiling educational activities on the history of my fair home town, Kincardine. A town that not only marks its water tower with a piper, posts Gaelic inscriptions in its public parks, and boasts to tourists a phantom piper piping down the sun every summer's eve, but a town that, on a weekly basis every summer, shuts down its main street for a pipe band parade.

So I've been wondering about how Scottish our town's roots really are and wanted to confirm the Scottish heritage of our town founders. William Withers and Allan Cameron were dropped off on what is now Kincardine's Station beach, in the spring of 1848 - the first settler's in what became Kincardine and in the whole county of Bruce.

This task proved more challenging than I anticipated. While William Withers remained in the village, and recorded his birthplace on both the 1851 and 1871 census, Allan Cameron is nowhere to be found.

Looking for other sources who may make note of Cameron, I found Wib. McLeod's 1948 article "Lest We Forget" (published in the Kincardine News): "Allan Cameron had followed his chosen career as a business man and merchant and took a keen and active interest in the growth of the community he had helped found." It seems likely then that Cameron, known as "The Black Prince" because of his dark complexion*, stayed in the community (then called Penetangore) yet evaded the 1851 census takers.

I was excited to conclude that the town founders were half-Scot, when McLeod notes that "the dour and doughty Scot, Cameron" provided refuge and hospitality and the home and tavern he shared with Withers.

* Norman Robertson, History of the County of Bruce, 1906: 26.

Semi-public? - The Hoag Hanging, Walkerton - 1868

2007-08-11T21:33:00.000-04:00

As legislation mandating that executions move behind gaol walls came into effect 1 January 1870, I was researching under the assumption that most hangings before this date were outside gaol walls. I was interested to find The Globe article describing the 1868 hanging of John Hoag at the Walkerton gaol (Bruce County had only recently separated from Huron County, therefore this execution wasn't in Goderich), where the scaffold seems to have been built higher than the walls, but not allowing to see the convicted after he had dropped:

The Sheriff then examined the fatal apparatus; the masked executioner did his work; and the body dropped within the gaol wall, depriving the gaping and motley crowd, some of them women with children in their arms, of the awful spectacle of the body quivering on the rope for a few minutes, perhaps five of six. A number of people were inside the wall and saw the whole [The Globe, 16 December 1868].

At this point I was concerned that perhaps a the Melady hanging at our Huron County gaol may have also only been 'semi-public' and maybe not the last officially public hanging. I was found The Globe article on the Melady hanging [though blurry to read], which states that Melady was taken from " the northern exit of the prison, ascended a temporary staircase, and took his position on the scaffold, which was on a level with the prison wall" and suggests that the hanging was entirely public.

However, there is always the possibility that though Melady ascended the stairs to the gallows publicly, because the scaffold was level with the prison wall, the trap could have been on the opposite side of the wall, and he could have dropped out of public view. It seems unlikely however that, as I mentioned in a previous post, both the Seaforth Expositor and The Globe would have made reference to it as the last public hanging if it was only 'semi-public' like the Hoag hanging.

Capital punishment: Huron County opinion in 1869

2007-08-11T20:57:00.000-04:00

Jesse Imeson was formally charged yesterday at the Goderich courthouse, about a two blocks away from where I was working at the Historic Gaol. By my lunch break, which I took at a shady picnic table on the courthouse grounds, the media circus had died down. Later, listening to the news, I was surprised to hear not that a crowd had gathered that morning by the courthouse, but that they had shouted at him and called out to reinstate the death penalty.

While researching the exhibit on public hanging, I was curious about what Huron County residents felt about the death penalty then, and I was surprised by a 11 Dec 1869 editorial in the Seaforth Expositor we had in our archives. The editor argued that public execution wasn't an effective deterrent against crime, and crude and rowdy crowds had become hardened by watching public executions.

On the Melady hanging, he wrote:

We hope in the name of God - in the name of humanity - that capital punishment may soon be abolished in this 'our Canada,' and placed where it ought to be, with the grim relics of barbarous times.

I was hoping for a variety of letters to the editor in response, but as they were uncommon in this paper at the time, there was only one that seems to favour the death penalty:

The man that violates the law is a criminal, and is a scoundrel of whom we should get rid of in the most available way.

Why did Canada abolish public hanging?

2007-07-20T12:38:00.000-04:00

Between the years of 1850 and 1870, public executions ended in countries such as the German states, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, as well as England and Canada.

The end of public hangings in Canada under Act 32-33 Victoria chapter 29 brought relief to the general public but I was surprised to find that this was not because they disagreed with the death penalty (though some did), but largely because of the crowds that came to watch the executions.

(above: The public hangings of Samuel Lount and Peter Mathews, King and Toronto Streets, Toronto, 1838 [from: James Edmund Jones, Pioneer Crimes and Punishment, Toronto: George N. Morang, 1924])

People argued that public hangings should end for many reasons, and the 'hanging crowd' was a significant reason. People complained about rowdy crowds that showed up to watch hangings. When public hangings ended in England, the Times of London reported:

We shall not in the future have to read how, the night before the execution, thousands of the worst characters in England, abandoned women and brutal men, met beneath the gallows to pass the night in drinking in buffoonery, in ruffianly swagger and obscene jest.

Many polite Victorians felt that ending public hangings would advance civilization and they themselves felt uncomfortable watching hangings; at the same time they found the rowdy crowds' fascination with death, obscene language and gestures, and disrespect for authority embarrassing.

Many also felt that death wasn't solemn enough: the carnival-like atmosphere among the crowds that watched the executions prevented people from being dettered to commit crimes. It was also argued that by watching hangings, people were familiar with death and would no longer value human life or feel compassion towards others.

What I was most surprised to find that was by ending public hangings, the perpetuation of the death penalty was actually ensured. If people did not have to deal with the crowd, they would no longer have a reason to protest hangings. By making the hangings private, the death penalty could continue.

Legislating the End to Public Hanging...A Clarification

2007-07-05T22:37:00.002-04:00

A clarification on the legislation abolishing public hanging in Canada... I initially made the same error that John Melady makes in Double Trapped and attributed the move of hangings behind prison walls to Order-in-Council 1021. Upon a careful reading of the Order-In-Council, which, after I came to understand the nature of Orders-In-Council more clearly, was in accordance with an act of Parliament, "Act 32-33 Victoria c. 29," I realized that the Order-In-Council was only supplementing the legislation by creating additional rules and regulations related to hanging, including:

Executions were to be carried out within the walls oft he prison in which the offender was confined at the time of execution
Executions should take place at 8 am
Hanging should continue to be the mode of execution
A black flag was to be raised after an execution and remain up for one hour
The prison bell (or the bell of a neighbouring church) was to ring for 15 minutes before and 15 minutes after an execution

After receiving a copy of "Act 32-33 Victoria c. 29" from the Library of Parliament it's clear that Section 109 of the Act, which went into effect 1 January 1870, is actually the legislation ending public hanging, declaring:

"Judgment of death to be executed on any prisoner after the coming into force of this Act, shall be carried into effect within the walls of the prison in which the offender is confined at the time of execution."

Canada's Last Public Hanging?

2007-06-21T22:17:00.000-04:00

Where was Canada's last public hanging? This is a question I've been trying to answer for our upcoming exhibit; but the answer has proven less straight forward than I anticipated. Yesterday, I was excited to find an An Order-in-Council, signed by John A MacDonald legislating the end of public hangings in Canada. Though hangings continued behind prison walls until 1962, was Canada's last public hanging at our Huron County Gaol?

The hanging of Patrick Whelan at the Carleton County Jail on February 11 1869 for the assassination of MP and Father of Confederation D'Arcy McGee [left] is mistakenly claimed to be the last public hanging in Canada. Ten months later, on December 7, 1869, Nicholas Melady was hanged in Goderich at the Huron District Gaol for the murder of his father and step-mother. A recently published book detailing the crime and hanging, by Melady's descendant John Melady, is titled Double Trapped: Canada's Last Public Hanging.

However - in 1869, Canada only included the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Hangings continued in public in areas that had not yet entered Confederation, such as the prairie provinces and BC.

While hangings were performed behind prison walls, the public was often still able to watch.

The Sheriff could and often did invite interested spectators and newspaper reporters.
Spectators were known to climb any nearby structure that would allow them to see into the yard. At the Montreal execution of Timothy Candy in 1910, dozens of people viewed the hanging from the roofs of adjoining houses. In this photo of the 1904 execution of Stanislau Lacroix in Hull, you can see the crowds on the nearby rooftops and telephone poles.

Crowds of excited spectators were hard to stop. In March 1899, 2,000 uninvited guests stormed a Montreal gaol to witness a hanging, joining the 200 witnesses already inside the prison yard.

The law was not always followed.

The hanging scaffold was sometimes built taller than the prison walls to allow for public viewing.

An elderly museum patron noted several years earlier that he recalls watching gallows being built in public in Hamilton while riding the streetcar. Was this a case where the gallows were built higher than the prison walls to allow curious spectators a view? or was the law simply ignored? I'm not sure I can claim for certain that the hanging of Melady in Dec. 1869 was the last public hanging even in the provinces within Confederation at the time.

The executioner

2007-06-07T22:13:00.000-04:00

I've begun my internship at the Huron County Museum and Historic Gaol and I'm currently researching public hangings in (Upper and Lower) Canada for an upcoming exhibit. Three men were hanged at the Gaol in Goderich (1861, 1861 and 1911), all for murder; the first two were public hangings. I've set out to answer, among other things, why people were hanged, why such large crowds of spectators came out to watch hangings and why public hangings. These began as easy questions, to which I expected to find straight forward answers, but their answers are proving less simple than I had anticipated and I intend to shift the nature of my blog by writing about my research.

I work where Steven Truscott was incarcerated at age 14 during his 1959 trial for the rape and murder of schoolmate, 12 year old Lynne Harper, and became the youngest Canadian sentenced to death before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Thinking about Steven Truscott everyday and seeing the emotional response visitors have to his case, my assumption was that capital punishment (both public and behind prison walls) was abolished on the basis of humanity towards the convicted; but my research as opened my eyes to a lot of arguments for the abolishment of capital punishment.

John Radclive, Canada's first professional hangman was appointed in 1892 after carrying out several successful hangings for various Ontario sheriffs. Most career hangmen were destroyed by their profession and Radclive was no exception. During his career Radclive began a ritual of finishing a full bottle of brandy after each execution; he drank excessively both before and after hangings. In a Star interview in Dec. 1906, Radclive spoke of himself: "I am a sick man, too sick to talk," he said. "I have been sick a long time, very sick." He died in February 1911, at 55, of cirrhosis of the liver at home in Toronto.

There seems to be some similarity between Radclive and the hangman hired by the Huron District gaol governor Robertson - alcoholism. In a telegram discussing the hangman's journey from Toronto to Goderich, Robertson is warned that the hangman is an unreliable drunkard, and a turn-key is thus being sent with him.

In an interview with psychologist Rachel MacNair, Radclive described his internal torment:
"Now at night when I lie down," he said, "I start up with a roar as victim after victim comes up before me. I can see them on the trap, waiting a second before they meet their Maker. They haunt me and taunt me until I am nearly crazy with an unearthly fear."

Public attitudes towards the hangman must have furthered his torment. In 1900 the Star wrote of Radclive: "If he were a man of delicate sensibilities he would not be the hangman. He is a necessity in our system, but he should be treated as if he is the hole in the floor of the gallows." At the same time, a 1910 Globe editorial wrote on the role of the hangman: "It is an unpleasant subject, but it is a public question, and it is a public function for which all are reposnsible." At a time when the population supported capital punishment I find it ironic that the they were so repulsed by the man carrying out their will. Countless people have to be involved in an execution by the state, directly or indirectly and in addition to the hangman, and I've realized the significance of acknowledging the psychological stress on these men and women as part of the case against capital punishment.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - -- - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - -

The agony of the executioner; How a Parkdale man became our first official hangman and was destroyed by it. By Patrick Cain; [ONT Edition]
PATRICK CAIN Patrick Cain. Toronto Star. Toronto, Ont.: May 20, 2007. pg. D.4

Capital Punishment in Canada. Department of Justice http://www.justice.gc.ca/en/news/fs/2003/doc_30896.html

Visiting the Canadian War Museum

2007-05-01T14:23:00.000-04:00

My weekend Ottawa trip also included my first visit to the Canadian War Museum. I really enjoyed my visit, even though it was rushed, and I learned a lot, but there was something that I found consistently problematic from exhibit to exhibit.

While one of the "big ideas" conveyed throughout the museum was the significant cost of war. What I found interesting was that this wasn't balanced with much detailed description on the causes of each war and really detracted from the overall effectiveness of the exhibits. The temporary exhibit is currently on the war in Afghanistan, which had - from what I saw - the largest amount of exhibit space devoted to the reason for the war, as it dealt with the terrorist attacks of September 11th before dealing with the role of Canada in Afghanistan. [The exhibit includes a military jeep damaged by an improvised explosive device: right]

While I understand that exploring the deep roots of the causation of wars is both complex and would require a lot of space, it seems overly simplistic not to discuss much of Afghanistan's history before 2001; more disappointingly was the even smaller discussion of the causes of the first and second World Wars which, if it was more than a sentence or two, I didn't find. In the end, this situation meant that the museum's message that is being conveyed is that war is costly and also pointless.

I did enjoy my visit, but my other disappointment was the treatment of the air war. My grandfather's brother flew with 6 Group in Bomber Command before being shot down and killed over Berlin, and I was looking forward to exhibit material on the subject. I was surprised that there was very little discussion of it at all, and while I realize that the role of Bomber Command is controversial, the best way of dealing with doesn't seem like ignoring it - this send a message that 6 Group's contribution was not only of little importance, but also that we should be ashamed of it. [Above: this cartoon story of a WW1 pilot's role in the war I found out of place - it was unlike the rest of the exhibit in glorifying a pilot like a comic book superhero]

de(re)construction

2007-05-01T13:46:00.000-04:00

I travelled to Ottawa with my family this past weekend to see the contemporary conceptual art exhibit, de(re)construction, that my sister's graduating visual art class at the University of Ottawa put on [I've posted images of some of the work in her installation]. I felt like that any minute the building's "boring and conservative historian" radar might identify me and kick me out onto the street (my disappointment at the lack of interpretive text might have given me away).

The exhibit's paintings, photographs, scuptures, installations and interdisciplinary media works addressed issues of gender and cultural roles, human responsibility for natural and urban environments, and the relationship of the individual to society - and often did so in graphic and shocking ways (my invitation came with a long parental advisory warning).

While I think there's a thing or two that the contemporary art exhibit could borrow from a history exhibit (while asking for interpretive text might be too much, but I think if every artist at least provided an artist's statement, the concept of conceptual art could at least be more widely understood), the same applies the other way around. Like de(re)construction, our history exhibits seek to convey an idea, tell a story, and often interact with its audience. And, like visual art, historians and museum staff are faced with limited budgets, shrinking funding, and small staff. What I took from the exhibit was that as historians, if our exhibits are going to focus not on telling stories but act as (borrowing Molly's term) weapons of mass enlightenment, we need to be bolder, even shocking, and passionate in the exhibits that we mount. (But we can add interpretive text.) Why spend so much time and effort at something for so little money if we're not going to be bold and passionate about our subject material? Let's get people talking.

Fun With Dead People

2007-05-01T11:35:00.000-04:00

About a week before I moved from London I took an afternoon walk through Mt. Pleasant Cemetery, not far from where I had lived for the past 8 months. I was really stricken by the sense of the history of London that I got from the visit. The various inscriptions, the notation of birth place, life span, family size, and occasional note on the causation of death illustrated a lot about life in London in the past. I wished that before working on so much local history over the past year - from inventions and innovations in London, to early schooling in the area for Fanshawe Pioneer Village, to the history of Storybook Gardens and Springbank Park - that I had made this visit back in September.

Two summers ago, working at a heritage house in Kincardine, one of the programs I developed was a walking tour at the oldest section of the Kincardine cemetery, and we (mostly children, and I in costume) visited the resting places of some of Kincardine's most famous citizens of the past. [Yes, there are several famous citizens of Kincardine - see Sir Alexander Mackenzie] It was an interesting, and I think overall successful way of getting young people interested in the town's history. But now that I think about it, what would have made a better tour (or a series of tours) would have been just to visit various regular tombstones (as opposed to the fancy monuments of more famous citizens) and use them to illustrate a tour of Kincardine's history.

It ended up being a successful day and I think that there's perhaps a bigger market for both kinds of these cemetery tours. At the same time, I realize that there are some problems with running programming in such a sacred space (especially as in some cases much older tombstones were not too far from much more recent tombstones and the program could have been dropped the morning of if a funeral ended up being booked at the last minute; there was also a push that I resisted to increase the program's publicity by calling it "Fun with Dead People"); but I think there's something to be said for a good tour that respects the space (and has a respectful audience) and uses various memorials to illustrate the history of a community.

History At Storybook

2007-05-01T10:50:00.001-04:00

While I was researching the history of London's Storybook Gardens for its upcoming 50th anniversary, I was really excited to find out that Storybook is part of the history of a much larger trend in park development. After WW2, the tourism industry responded to the baby boom by developing attractions for children [1]. Old fairytales were not copyrighted and from approximately the mid-1950s to the early 1960s over 25 fairytale-themed children’s parks were constructed as family tourist destinations across the United States (and also in Canada) [I've mapped many that I found below - the red markers indicate parks that are still running or parks that I don't know if they're still running; blue marks parks that have closed; green marks parks that opened before WW2].

Many fairytale parks developed similar exhibits and attractions as those of London’s Storybook Gardens, including petting zoos, indigenous animals, pumpkin shaped concession stands, large Old Woman’s Shoes, Humpty Dumpty and other fairytale sculptured figures, whale slides and castle-front entrances [below are photos of Oakland California's Children's Fairyland, which served as inspiration to London's Storybook Gardens - many of the attractions are strikingly similar].

After researching some of Storybook's more recent past, I discovered that many patrons were nostalgic for the old attractions of Storybook and disappointed when visiting the newly redeveloped Storybook (after 2003). Given these two points (other fairytale parks and nostalgia for the old Storybook), the significance of conducting local history research and/or corporate history of Storybook is really highlighted.

First, as many fairytale parks were developed around the same time, they each shared similar problems beginning in the late 1970s when they all struggled to remain relevant and attractive in an age where patrons expected something bigger and better after bigger themeparks became more accessible. Each park had to struggle to adapt on its own, when it was likely unaware that there were many other places having exactly the same problems - while London's Storybook has done relatively well in adapting, I think there was a real opportunity here to network, connect, and share resources and ideas, between all of these parks. I think had more research on the history of the development of these parks been done, they may have been more aware of the existence of so many other similar attractions.

A second realization has been that given the nostalgia for the old Storybook Gardens at a time when the park has been almost entirely redeveloped, there's a market to attract visitors to the park with the park's history - hopefully an exhibit. Not only will the exhibit on Storybook's history commemorate it's 50th anniversary, but it will be a good attraction itself to the park, especially among older generations who recall visiting the park in their youth and visitors who are nostalgic for the Storybook that's no longer there [below: c. 1960s Storybook Gardens].

[1] Tim Hollis, Dixie Before Disney: 100 Years of Roadside Fun (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 89-90 - Hollis' chapter on “Fantasy Lands” is the only source I've been able to find on the trend of develping fairytale themed children's parks; he introduces the reader to fantasy-lands that developed in the 1950s and 1960s, including fairytale parks like Storybook Gardens. What tipped me off to this trend in park development was Debra Jane Seltzer's website "Roadside Architecture" and it's extensive collection of fairytale amusement park photographs: http://www.agilitynut.com/fairyparks/main.html

Bass Pro Mills Drive

2007-04-11T18:49:00.000-04:00

I drove past Bass Pro Mills Drive on the 400 over the weekend, en route to Easter with my grandparents, and have been thinking again about Bryan's presentation that expressed concern over corporate street names such as Tartan Drive and Kellogg Lane in London (after the 3M Corporation and Kelloggs), and Bass Pro Mills Drive (after Outdoor World, run by the Bass Pro Mills company, in Vaughan). How do I feel about it? I think what's important is that there's a difference between Kellogg Lane and Bass Pro Mills Drive. While the Kellogg's factory is an important part of the history of east London's manufacturing industry and our Invention2Innovation exhibit highlights the significance of 3M in London, Outdoor World is has arguably no historical significance and is regular run-of-the-mill chain store. "Bass Pro Mills Drive" is inappropriate corporate advertising, no different than, say, a Walmart Boulevard, Canadian Tire Road, or Wendy's Way.

In many cases, streets are named after those, such as veterans, who have had less of a direct impact on their community than companies or factories in that community. In Newmarket, Haines Road is named after my grandmother's great grandfather, Israel Haines, a pioneer farmer, whose family farm was located near where the current Haines Road is. Although he was an early member of the community, his historical significance seems less that that of, for example, a business that operated in the community for many years and had a greater impact on the community. In this sense, it would be hypocritical to protest to names such as Tartan Drive and Kellogg Lane, but it's also important to prevent "Bass Pro Mills Drives" of the future, where street signage has inappropriately become corporate advertising.

The rough endoplasmic retiulum?

2007-04-11T17:33:00.000-04:00

It has concerned me recently to hear secondary school history teachers and their curriculum coming under attack for producing a generation of young people uninformed about Canada's history. There's a couple of reasons that this has rubbed me the wrong way. I'm a graduate history student and I'll admit that I don't remember very much of what I learned in high school history class. Louis Riel, the response of the federal government to the 1930s depression, the GATT? It's all a bit fuzzy by now.

That being said, I was fortunate in highschool and had great history teachers. Did they fail because I don't remember the significance of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade? My high school history teachers fostered my interest in history in general, taught critical thinking skills and effective writing techniques. And these skills that we hopefully take away from secondary school are ultimately what's more important. While I can't remember much about Riel, I know how where to look and how to think critically about what I'm looking at (thanks Mr. Carver and Ms. Knox).

Historical knowledge seems to be deemed of importance to remember from high school above other subjects, and while this seems obvious to expect from historians, the expectations aren't limited just to us; nobody cares if we can't remember cellular mitosis from biology class or trigonometry from calculus class (though it's arguable that I didn't know very much about trigonometry even when I was in calculus class).

But history is still one of many subjects busy secondary school students take at one time, and though we'd like to think, as historians, that it's the most important, lets be realistic about what we expect from our history teachers. How much do you remember about a cell's rough endoplasmic retiulum?

In many cases students don't need to think much about history, or many of the subjects they've studied in school, after graduation. I've already mentioned the importance of the skills they take away as well, but what's more important, where we should be concerned and go to work as public historians, is making a change in the world students encounter after highschool, making people think about history after Grade 10.

Ontario's high school Canada and World Studies curriculum is available from: http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/canworld910curr.pdf

Top 10 Rejected Storybook Themes and History Highlights for Exhibit

2007-03-31T22:11:00.000-04:00

Part of my prepatory work for an exhibit on Storybook Gardens has been to identify important themes and highlights in the park's history. The child-friendly exhibit will be installed in the Children's Chapel at Storybook Gardens. The commemmorative nature of the exhibit and its audience will largely influence its content. The top 10 rejected exhibit themes and historical highlights to date:

- Springbank park was a popular destination for Londoners by riverboat until the 1881 sinking of the “Victoria” killed 182 people

- intruders club Storybook rabbit to death

- sea otter attacks London boy

- vandals kill Storybook deer in the night

- sea otters disappeared into thin air: reports PUC parks director

- rejected Storybook Gardens names include Puck’s Forest (given Storybook’s history of vandalism, probably a wise choice by the PUC)

- sea lion autopsy reveals several dollars in loose change

- Air Canada flight suffocates sea lions en route to Storybook: arrive at Toronto airport dead

- vandals bludgeon Storybook flamingo to death with rocks

- romantic tryst at Storybook playground after-hours starts fire: teenagers’ candle causes $600 000 damage

Lessons and Inspiration from the Heart of Africa

2007-03-31T21:27:00.000-04:00

ROM founder Charles Currelly’s African collection, including art and textiles donated by Canadian missionaries who had worked in Africa, was in the museum’s basement prior to being removed from the public view during extensive renovations in the late 1970s [158]. In 1987, Jeanne Cannizzo learned of the collection and developed the controversial Into the Heart of Africa exhibit for the ROM. The exhibit’s original intention was to be a meditation on the circulation of cultural artefacts and illustrate how the meaning of artefacts was acquired, changed and altered. Her exhibit began with the unique intent of being partly about the exhibition of artefacts. [1] Motivated by a desire to show these hidden-away pieces of the ROM collection, Cannizzo’s exhibit has had me reflecting on the relationship museum exhibits and museum collections.

Cannizzo had an idea that she wanted to convey and a story that she wanted to tell using the ROM collection. The Storybook Gardens exhibit that I’m working on for my public history essay, however, has a story in mind, and a collection will be acquired accordingly. This has left me wondering how often museums are in the ideal situation where an idea inspires an exhibit and the artefacts are acquired as necessary; or is it more common for the planning to work the other way around – a museum is forced to develop and present an idea based on artefacts they have to work with?

It seems obvious that this is a matter of money; museums with bigger budgets can afford to convey a broader range of messages and tell a larger number of stories because they can borrow artefacts as necessary. This potential seems diminished for smaller institutions, who, in displaying limited collections, have to take on more of a role as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ more than they would wish. In addition to the importance of community consultation, large interpretive text and a clear exhibit focus, smaller museums can be inspired by Cannizzo’s unique intent with the Into the Heart of Africa exhibit to be innovative while working within the confines of a defined collection .

[1]Robyn Gillam, “Fear and Loathing at Bloor and Avenue Road”
Hall of Mirrors: Museums and the Canadian Public (Banff: Banff Centre Press, 2001), pp.155-201.

Lessons from National Geographic

2007-03-28T19:48:00.000-04:00

Growing up I didn't have cable TV and my sisters and I watched a lot of TVO, and I recall watching a fair bit of National Geographic. I still get excited when I here all of the percussion in National Geographic's opening music. Last night I watched a National Geographic single [episode], Hippo: Africa's River Beast, and in addition to learning a lot about really amazing research on the hippopotamus, there's a few things that we as public historians can borrow from National Geographic.

The first thing that I found interesting, aside from the hippos themselves, was that the episode wasn't about hippos, but it was about current scientific research being done on hippos. This extra layer of information was what partly what made the episode so interesting. I think there's room here for history programming to develop similarly, to create programming that's not just another biography of an important person or a chronology of an important event, but an episode about what and how and why research is being done on the topic. I'm not certain that this isn't something that the History Channel already does (I don't have the channel myself), but it isn't the sort of historical programming I've seen before.

Did you know that the hippopotamus may be the only animal that can communicate both underwater and on land? Something else that struck me while I was watching the program was how upfront the episode was about what scientists were currently investigating and didn't know for sure. There were a lot of things that were being hypothesized but weren't proven for certainty and the episode was really upfront about this. The result that this had for me was that I became interested in following the research that is currently being done and I'll be interested in the future on hearing more about the hippopotamus. I think that if more history programming on television, and even in text books, could be more clear about where the research on a subject currently is, where it's going, and controversy that exists that this would ultimately result in people developing more genuine and engaged interest in historical topics.

[the next National Geographic single, Gorilla Wild, is next Tuesday at 10, on TVO, Rogers Channel 2 ]

Douglas Point on Display

2007-03-04T16:07:00.000-05:00

This coming week it's my turn to put together a display on a historical topic in the history display case. The topic I chose was the Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station and I have been thinking for a few days about how effective the display will be. I had fun putting the display together and while I was planning the display I had some key concerns on my mind: the text should be succinct and easy to understand, the display should be visually appealing and the display should be interesting.

The text: I tried in such a small space to only communicate the most important points of history and my interpretive text focuses largely on the historical significance of the station and includes only a very basic chronology of its history. Each interpretive block of text and photo can stand on its own, so that you don't have to read the previous labels or interpretive text to understand the later ones.

Also, I tried and found it difficult to convey the significance of the station without being too technical. I hope that the significance is clear, but to someone interested in more technical aspects of the station can glean from the photo labels some more detail. In this sense, I was hoping the display could be educational on three levels: the history of the site, the significance of the site, and how it made electricity- without being too much to read. I put it to what I felt would be the ulitmate test, my mother, who really doesn't like reading much at museums and she gave it a thumbs up. I think that the photo labels maybe should have been in a bigger font, but I really wanted to have the labels be informative, and then contain a little extra detail if someone was interested.

Is it visually appealing? I tried to keep the display at eye level, attain a good balance of colour and black and white photos, and graphics that weren't photos. While I had a lot of photos, I only had a visitors centre pamphlet from the 1960s and commemorative stamp to display, but I felt the photos told a more important story. If I had a larger display space I would have kept the interpretive text largely the same (except for some additional detail on the uniqueness of the CANDU reactors) and made the photos larger. The 1960s visitors centre pamphlet was a last minute addition because I had the space; I'm glad I got to display it because I think it's really cool, but I don't want it to deter people from the display because it has a lot of text - it's important as an artefact and not as a document that needs to be read for the display.

Is the display interesting? Of course I think it is, but if people aren't interested in nuclear history I hope the photos grab people's attention, and I added some 'human interest' photos to increase the display's general appeal, including the worker in the radiation suit, and Trudeau touring the site.

There isn't a peer review component to the assignment, but I'd like any feedback/suggestions that people have about the display.

Invitation to Invention to Innovation

2007-02-28T23:45:00.000-05:00

The Invention to Innovation: Alive in London exhibit, produced in partnership between Museum London and UWO's Public History programme is now open and on display until August at Museum London! Check out some strange inventions, such as the permanent wave machine [left], and learn more about the spirit of ingenuity that has been embraced by Londoners of today and yesterday. Find out more about the artefacts on display at our online exhibit.

History and Film

2007-02-28T23:40:00.000-05:00

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen argue that history professionals need to do a better job “listening to and recognizing the many ways popular history makers traverse the terrain of the past.” [1] Not often do I finish reading and feel refreshed, but I really found this refreshing. I like the idea of finishing our public history year feeling confident in how to communicate history to the public with different mediums and not just knowing how to criticize how other people communicate history, so I enjoyed Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film. Historical film isn’t just a form of practicing history but is also history itself and Hughes-Warrington calls for an expanded and more historically embedded notion of ‘history on film.’ What I liked (and found refreshing) was her refute of many of the criticisms made against filmic history - such as its emotionality, false historicity, simplicity, and small information load- by written history and the notion of looking at film and criticizing it as film, not as one would criticize written history.[2]

It was her conclusion, though, left me feeling really invigorated, excited about all of the creative possibilities to communicate history with the public: “…I believe there is no ‘history’ apart from historical practices. Nor, in consequence, is there any logical, universal or unchanging reason to talk of one practice as ‘more historical’ than another.” At a time where we’re starting to feel bogged down as public history students thinking about internships and employment, compiling resumes and composing cover letters on top of our schoolwork, Hughes-Warrington gave me a bit of energy to think creatively about future job and employment opportunities; hopefully she inspired you in the same way.

[1] as quoted in Marnie Hughes-Warrington, “Introduction” History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2007) p. 1
[2] Hughes-Warrington, “Words and Images, Images and Words” Hughes-Warrington, “Introduction” History Goes to the Movies: Studying History on Film (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
[3] Ibid, p. 32

The historian and the genealogist..

2007-02-28T22:13:00.000-05:00

While some historians confess that indulging in historical fiction is a guilty pleasure, I’ll confess that mine is genealogical research. And I’ve confessed to this publicly for some time now (as I’m sure my archives classmates know). But my real confession is that it’s never been something that I’ve felt guilty about until recently. (Like reading historical fiction, genealogy seems to be regarded as a frivolous pastime for historian by their peers). Really, it always felt complimentary to my interests as a historian and I hadn’t really considered that it would be scoffed at by fellow historians. I’m okay with being scoffed at – I put up with scoffing and a lot of people put up with listening to how excited I get when I find out great great great great great aunt so-and-so was half Delaware Indian, or find by grandmother's uncle's Boer war service file, or that I suspect a genealogical connection to a rebellious Mayflower passenger.**

As Margaret Atwood mentions in her 1996 Bronfman lecture, the lure of time travel and great fun in snooping [1]. It’s a great hobby, and I enjoy the hunt for interesting tidbits, missing facts, sorting out siblings, looking for connections and putting all of the pieces together as a detective of sorts. Anyway, back to the complimentary relationship between history and genealogy. It may be obvious, but connecting family back to different times and different places fuels my interest in related historical periods and events. To be honest I’ve really never been interested in what was going on in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the 19th century. Or what was happening in the Greenock swamp in the middle of the 19th century, or who was fighting where in South Africa at the turn of the century. Not until I found someone that I’m connected to someone that was there.

While I think that people’s interests in different historical subjects can come about in a lot of ways, a family connection is probably the easiest way to make a connection. In describing the lure of the past, Atwood also discusses today’s culture and the demographic significance of the baby-boomer – whose interests make a substantial impact on the economy. As public historians we would be doing ourselves a disservice by scoffing at the genealogist in front of us in line at the archives, someone who is developing an interest in the field that we’re employed by, maybe someone who will attend our public lectures, buy our books, check out our blogs or read our articles.

[1] Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” American Historical Review 103 no.5 (Dec. 1998), pp.1513

** my grandmother's paternal relatives seem to have descended from Mayflower passenger Stephen Hopkins, although I haven't been able to verify it. Hopkins was one of only a few passengers on the Mayflower to have made a prior trip to America. He came in 1609 on the Sea Venture headed for Jamestown, Virginia. But instead, they were marooned on an island following a hurricane, and the 150 passengers were stranded for nine months. Hopkins led an uprising, challenging the governor's authority, and was sentenced to death. But he begged and moaned about the ruin of his wife and children, and so was pardoned out of sympathy. The company eventually managed to build a ship, and escaped the island.... who wouldn't want to know that about their family?

History and Fiction

2007-02-28T21:57:00.000-05:00

Is there room for fiction in communicating history with the public? Undoubtedly yes: it’s popular and powerful, so even if, as public historians, we believe there isn’t room, it wouldn’t matter, because the public disagrees. So I think a more important and more difficult question is how to communicate history with the public through literature the most effectively. The readings on history and fiction left us with important suggestions to consider in improving our writing as public historians. First, John Demos raises two significant points: historians can benefit from the same “how to store parsnips” attention to detail that novelists do to give stories from the past texture, and, historians need to aspire to a similar range of emotions – love, forgiveness, charity, suffering etc. – that novelists do [1].

Two books of historical non-fiction which borrow a style of narrative from fiction and also pay attention to detail and human nature are Robert Massie’s Nicholas and Alexandra (about the Tsar Nicholas II of Russia) and Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. They’re popular books, easy to read but also informative, and I feel that they serve as a good model for historians trying to reach to wider audiences in their writing. More importantly, they illustrate to us as public historians that writing non-fiction can compel audiences, convey emotion, and tell detailed and interesting stories as well as fiction.

In Margaret Atwood’s 1996 Bronfman Lecture In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction one thought that has stuck with me, that I also took away from the reading with a commitment to as a public historian, was her talk about paper: “The past is made of paper … Sometimes, there’s a building or a picture or a grave, but mostly it’s paper. Paper must be taken care of [2].” For background or for inspiration of both fiction and non-fiction we have a duty to take care of paper records- stories from the past- for writers of the future, as there are just as many interesting stories to write from history as can be conceived of by fiction authors.

[1] John Demos, “In Search of Reasons for Historians to Read Novels….” American Historical Review 103 no.5 (Dec. 1998), pp.1526-9.

[2]Margaret Atwood, “In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction,” American Historical Review 103 no.5 (Dec. 1998), pp.1503-16.

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

2007-02-09T19:31:00.000-05:00

Something caught my eye on the back of my dad's Princess Auto car parts catalogue. It caught my eye not just because it wasn't anything related to auto parts, but because it was truely one of the most unique, elaborately modern and really just cool looking buildings I'd ever seen. And this is when I found out that Canada, Winnipeg more specifically, is getting a museum for human rights. The catalogue described the museum as a "beacon for the world" and as having the goal to protect and promote human rights to create a world of tolerance and inclusion. (I think it would fit well with Molly's 'weapons of mass enlightenment' series). It's projected that the proposed national museum will open in 2010 (although the construction is projected to begin only in the last half of 2007).

I was intrigued and went online to find out more about what the museum will really entail and was disappointed to find a lot of grand visions, purposes and goals, and not a lot of substance about what the museum's content will be. There is a lot of info available, however, on the museum's architecture and the surrounding design contest. So I was left a little irritated, a bit about the lack of information available on what the museum would actually exhibit, but mostly about how ridiculously elaborate and modern the building's architecture will be, and I was left asking why? The architect's website explains the design and begins:

The abstract ephemeral wings of a white dove embrace a mythic stone mountain of 450 million year old Tyndall limestone in the creation of a unifying and timeless landmark for all nations and cultures of the world. The Journey through the museum parallels an epic journey through life...The journey begins with a descent into the earth, a symbolic recognition of the earth as the spiritual center for many indigenous cultures.

Give me a break. I understand that a museum environment should be conducive to learning and strive to make the experience memorable, but shouldn't what people take away from the experience be about what they actually learned and not about how cool the building was? And I'm doubtful that many people really consider and learn from what the museum's architecture is supposed to represent and think beyond, "that's cool" or "that must have been expensive to build" or "I'm glad I don't have to pay that heating bill." How many kids will return from a class trip to the Canadian Museum of Human Rights and write in their journals, "The archaeologically rich void of the Great Hall really evoked the memory of ancient gatherings at the Forks of First Nations peoples, settlers and immigrants." I don't think the meager message that people will walk away with from the museum's architecture will justify its enormous cost.

Wouldn't that money, time and energy be better spent planning its content or something else that's really more worthwhile (at the museum or elsewhere in society) than just the building's appearance. I thought maybe there would be a lesson learned from the Museum of Civilization, that no matter how cool the building looks, if it costs too much the rest of the museum's budget will shrink and it will ultimately take away from the quality of whatever is on the museum's insides. I think as public historians we should be concerned that the big deal about museums should be what they teach, exhibit, preserve and promote - and not about how they look.

Read more about the proposed Canadian Museum for Human Rights:

Canadian Museum for Human Rights

http://www.canadianmuseumforhumanrights.com/index.cfm?pageID=24

The architectural designer's webpage about their winning design http://www.predock.com/NEWSCANADA.html

Wikipedia's article

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Museum_for_Human_Rights

Dear Canada...

2007-01-29T00:04:00.000-05:00

This blog entry is inspired partly out of jealousy towards my youngest sister. Not because she got birthday parties at Storybook Gardens and I didn’t, but because there’s some pretty good historical fiction for kids on the market right now. I’m was also partly inspired to write because I’ve been working on my museum studies novel review, on the children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about two children who run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and set about solving a mystery once they’re there. I wish I could say that some special experience in my childhood, maybe like reading From the Mixed-Up Files, inspired me to study history, and then public history – but I can’t. (One of my childhood friends did remind me over the holidays that I tried to start a small natural history museum in my attic, though). I hated history in elementary school, I thought New France was the least interesting thing imaginable and I was far more interested in cloning dinosaurs, and it wasn’t until I had some really good high school history teachers that the interest developed.

Anyway, my point is that it’s exciting that there are popular books out there, at least for the junior and intermediate reader, about history and getting kids interested in history – Canadian and otherwise. My sister has devoured two series in particular (Dear Canada, and Royal Diaries), both series of fictional diaries of young girls in historical settings with titles like Dear Canada: If I Die Before I Wake: The Flu Epidemic Diary Of Fiona Macgregor, Dear Canada: Footsteps in the Snow -- The Red River Diary of Isobel Scott, Rupert's Land, 1815, and Royal Diaries: Catherine, The Great Journey, Russia, 1743. And she knows an awful lot more history than I did when I was 12.

Our public history class guest speakers have got me thinking about new avenues where we could practice public history and this seems like a valuable one. It’s also interesting to note that both series are written about and geared towards young girls, and I’m unaware of parallel series’ with male characters, there’s certainly opportunity to develop something there.

Museum as Social Experience

2007-01-27T11:06:00.000-05:00

Occasionally I pick up in the news some debate on the Internet and its effects on society as a whole. While one side makes the claim that the Internet brings people together and creates a greater sense of global community, the opposite claim, that the Internet is atomizing society by isolating individuals, is also made.

This week in Museum Studies we discussed recent digital trends in the museum environment, including downloadable museum audio-tours and museum pod-casts to listen to, both on self-directed mp3 tours. (Molly just posted an excellent entry on the same topic: Weapons of Mass Enlightenment – The Audioguide). Here’s where I’m concerned. I’m excited by the number of opportunities that a downloadable museum tour or pod-casts would create – tours could be personalized to your interests, customized to the timing of your visit, focused on different themes within the museum, in your own language – and provide richer and more meaningful and unique museum (or heritage plaque or heritage house) visits for patrons. (I sense that there could possibly be a digital history internship here somewhere).

At the same time, these strengths come at the cost of the museum as a social experience. Patrons would be isolated in their experience by their earphones and cut-off from the shared experiences of other patrons. The museum visit is often a family trip (like my family trip here to the historic Mackenzie King estate), a trip with visitors from out of town, or a visit with friends, but rarely (for me anyway) a solitary experience. I’ve always found the visits with others the most enjoyable, (although probably not as educational as if I’d gone on my own).

So I think that ultimately the strengths of a customized downloadable museum audio-tour wouldn’t outweigh museum as a social experience, unless the nature of a museum visit changes with society and becomes more of a solitary and less of a social activity. This seems unlikely. In Molly’s blog, she predicts that they’ll lose relevancy in the future and I agree. She also raises both hope and concern about the Multimedia Tour Pilot (MMT).

So how can we play to the strengths of a digital medium in public history if not directly in our museum tours? I think with technology today the greatest strength of computer technology for public history is to create a strong online presence outside of museums. I feel that the museum experience will remain largely a social one and that computer technology should enhance the museum’s ability to educate and promote online but not attempt at radically altering the physical museum experience away from a social experience.

Springtime for Hitler

2007-01-26T22:59:00.000-05:00

I have a bit of a history dilemma, maybe an ethics and history dilemma. I’ve recently been returning to some of my public history roots. Hunting for a public history essay topic has had me thinking about why I wanted to go in to public history, what I was passionate about. I had a fantastic professor in undergrad and I took a lot of his history courses related to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and I felt (and still feel) passionate about Holocaust education.

Also, from time to time, I get the lyrics for ‘Springtime for Hitler’ stuck in my head. Here’s my problem. I enjoyed The Producers (I watched the 2005 film). I even watched it more than once. (And as I mentioned I also know a fair amount of the lyrics to ‘Springtime for Hitler’). But I also feel quite guilty about this and I’m afraid that it’s incompatible with my public history interest of Holocaust education.

Sure, The Producers is funny because it’s making fun of Hitler and his 3rd Reich. But I’m not comfortable with the thought of making light of Germany’s history and getting laughs at the Nazi invasion of European countries (that preceded the mass deportations of Jews to concentration and death camps).

Mel Brooks, who created the original film The Producers and then developped it into a Broadway show (2001), on which the 2005 film was based, became well known for his ‘spoofs,’justifies the humour as a method of truly defeating Hitler: “But if you ridicule them [dictators], bring them down with laughter--they can't win. You show how crazy they are. [1]" The film's 'Springtime for Hitler' number features dancing stormtroopers, choreographed swastikas, and memorable lyrics:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany / Deutschland is happy and gay/We're marching to a faster pace/Look out, here comes the Master Race/ Springtime for Hitler and Germany/ Winter for Poland and France/ Springtime for Hitler and Germany/ Come on Germans, go into your dance

The original Broadway film received 13 Tony awards, and the film was nominated for an Oscar.

But controversy arose in Germany early this month over the release of a fictional full-length feature film 'Mein Fuhrer', a comedy about Hitler hiring a Jewish actor from a concentration camp to teach him how to make uplifting speeches near the end of war. According to Andrew Purvis’ Time magazine article on the film, while Anglophone films have been comfortable (and for some time) making Hitler the subject of gags, Hitler hasn’t received the same treatment in German film [21]. The German public is in debate over the subject and polls suggest that the majority of Germans disapproved of Germany making a comedy about Hitler. Purvis quotes Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany: "It makes me feel queasy if someone is making fun of Hitler and the Holocaust."

Considering that Mel Brooks’ film was originally released in 1968, less than 25 years after the fall of the 3rd Reich, and in light of the controversy over Mein Fuhrer, how can it be right for outsiders to decide that it’s time to make light of Germany’s history when it’s obvious that Germany's not (yet?) at ease with making a spoof of this dark time in its history? I think it’s time I get some new Mel Brooks lyrics stuck in my head…I heard Robin Hood: Men in Tights was good.

[1] Shute, Nancy. U.S. News.com: "20 Mel Brooks." 8/20/01. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/010820/archive_038235.htm

[2] Purvis, Andrew. Time.com: "Springtime for Hitler?" 12/01/07.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1577614,00.html

Reviewing the Canadian Museum of Civilization

2007-01-12T12:21:00.000-05:00

I visited the Canadian Museum of Civilization last April for a second time. I finished the visit with the same feeling I left with when I first visited the CMC when I was 14: fatigue. After walking around the enormous museum, carrying countless bagged lunches, cameras, water bottles, and brochures, my feet hurt and I was ready for a nap; but both times I remember feeling disappointed that after spending the day I still hadn’t gotten to see and read and take in everything that I wanted. Within the CMC there’s an additional Canadian Children’s Museum (where my sister has dressed up), and the Canadian Postal Museum, in addition to an Imax/Omnimax theatre with full length educational features. I was frustrated that my admission was only valid for one day!

The CMC even offers a discounted ‘double-ticket’ to see both the CMC and the Canadian War Museum, but all on one day? I’d be much happier to pay for a ticket that’s a bit more expensive but I could use over 2 or 3 days than try to cram everything into one visit. I suppose that a one-day ticket fits the tourist market and maximizes profit, but I think if they really valued the educational experience they could extend their admission ticket’s lifespan.

After my visit this past spring I left disappointed at the lack of text and information in the Canada Hall and also the museum’s focus on pre-Confederation history (which, I’ll admit my bias, I’ve always found less interesting that post-Confederation history). Overall, it was the temporary and special exhibits that I enjoyed the most and which left a lasting memory. The four temporary exhibits I visited with my sisters were PETRA: The Lost City of Stone (right), Lace Up: Canada’s Passion for Skating (both are still on exhibition), and an exhibit on Canadian nurses and African beading, which are no longer on display. Although I was disappointed with the nursing exhibit’s exclusion of the 1918 flu pandemic, I enjoyed these exhibits that the CMC had done in a more 'traditional' way than the rest of the museum (although some embraced technology and had interactive aspects), with old artefacts, labels and glass cases, narrative and interpretive text, and lots of photos. I found it interesting that the CMC had backed off it’s bolder, more modern approach of MacDonald, although is probably attributed to new curatorship.

Taking into consideration the disappointing lack of interpretive text and information at the CMC and the large number of replicas (and, as Rider points to, mentifacts[1]), especially within the CMC’s Canada Hall, the CMC provokes the question: what defines a museum? is there anything a museum must have? Tuesday in Museum Studies we discussed the centrality of collections in defining what a museum is, yet the idea of a ‘collection’ is so broad that the definition isn’t very defining: the Canadian Museums Association definition of a museum suggests a collection can include “objects and specimens of cultural value, including artistic, scientific (whether animate of inanimate) historical and technological material. The CMA also describes Canadian museums as including science centres, aquaria, sports halls-of-fame, and zoos. I’m left feeling like a museum is anything that’s described as being a museum: it can be a museum if you call it a museum.

What museums and the Toronto Metro Zoo, for example, have in common, is an educational nature, and, as a public historian I’d like to insist that by definition, collection + interpretation is what makes a museum a museum. Interpretation, at the Metro Zoo's African Pavilion of at the ROM, is what makes a museum different from my fish tank or my grandma’s attic (not to mention interpretation provides jobs for us historians). I can’t think of a good example of a museum without interpretation (although I’m sure somebody could) but I’d like to take back the term museum and insist on the necessity of both a collection and interpretation.

[1] Peter E Rider, “Presenting the Public’s History to the Public: The Case of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” Studies in History and Museums, ed. Peter E Rider (Hull, Quebec: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), pp.77-102.

Invention to Innovation: Online

2007-01-12T12:05:00.000-05:00

Heather Goodall’s review of the “Lifelines” exhibit and “Great Hall” at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in The Public Historian [1] made some general criticisms that I think we can use to the advantage of our Invention to Innovation: Alive in London! online exhibit. First, a general criticism that Goodall had was on the lack of information available, and although she found good web resources on the exhibits, there was no onsite access to these resources. While our "Invention to Innovation" exhibit certainly won’t lack information, I think it would be a great asset if we could have some sort of onsite access to the online exhibit. Although we haven’t decided for certain what to include with the exhibit, it’s likely to include more in-depth information on certain inventions or inventors, and likely some multimedia that we were unable to include in the exhibit. The argument could be made that many patrons would access the online exhibit from home anyway and wouldn’t need the online access at the actual exhibit. But I think there’s some good reasons to have onsite access: first, it’s a great advertisement for the website; second, it’s important to remember that there’s a lot of people without internet access at home; third, people may be more inclined to check out the online exhibit while they’re in the “invention to innovation” mood and it’s fresh in their mind - they may explore the online exhibit further when they get home, but this seems like a better way to get people interested than expecting patrons to check it out for the first time once their home and outside the learning atmosphere.

Another of Goodall’s criticisms of the “Lifelines” exhibit is that it didn’t use technology to convey the exhibit’s strengths. One of our exhibit’s strengths and something that makes it unique, and also part of our ‘big idea’ is the London connection.

One idea that I had about the online exhibit is that we could use it to play up the London connection (like the Bovie), more so than we were able to do with the physical exhibit, which included artefacts that we had difficulty tying to London. If the content of the online exhibit were the London-related case studies and other London-related content, this may be a good way to hit home the big idea we had about the spirit of ingenuity alive in London.

Another strength of our exhibit is the hard work that we put into research, including our oral history interviews and I think that with all the work we put into them (including the transcripts), clips from the interviews would be a strong addition to our online exhibit (accompanied by transcripts of the clip).

[1] Heather Goodall, review of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, The Public Historian vol.24 no.1 (Winter 2002), pp.55-64.

The Historian's Commentary

2006-12-09T14:10:00.000-05:00

I’m pretty excited about this idea. I love watching DVD extra features, including the director’s commentary, and sometimes they talk about the historical context of the film, but not enough – imagine 2 hours of historians’ commentary instead of a director’s commentary! It wouldn’t be a commentary about giving the film a ‘historical accuracy’ thumbs up/thumbs down ranking, but talking about the historical event, environment, ideas and persons of the context of the film and how the film relates. And so many films revolve around certain historical events of contexts! I also think this would be a great way to bridge the professional historian/media gap that Gerald Herman discusses in Creating the 21st Century ‘Historian for All Seasons.’ [1] Herman’s concerned that in media historians are only allowed to present historical controversy as a personal view, and professional historians don’t view media as a capable of conveying serious historical discourse.

I’m not sure I’ve got a very good entrepreneurial spirit. The uncertainty’s what I’d have a hard time with, and even if Shelley Bookspan [2] describes it as a desirable ally, that’s something I have a hard time with. But then maybe my entrepreneurial spirit is still growing, and I can launch my Historians Commentary company - that works as an intermediary between production companies and academic historians matching the right historian(s) to the right film - and make my public history millions.

[1]Gerald Herman, “Creating the Twenty-First Century ‘Historian for All Seasons,’” The Public Historian vol.25 no.3 (Summer 2003), pp.93-102.

[2]Shelley Bookspan, “Something Ventured, Many Things Gained: Reflections on Being a Historian-Entrepreneur,” The Public Historian vol.28 no.1 (Winter 2006), pp.67-74.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

2006-12-09T14:01:00.000-05:00

I have mixed feelings about the MJT. And this isn’t because I was let down when the museum wasn’t about dinosaurs. The MJT struck me as a sort of permanent art installation, a term used to describe the use of sculptural materials and other media to modify the way we experience a particular space. In this case, David Hildebrand Wilson has modified the way patrons experience the museum space contrary to the traditional authoritarian nature of public museums. Weschler describes the original sense of the term ‘museum’ as a location dedicated to the muses, where “one’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs.” [1] Wilson’s MJT is a space determined to re-attain this mental mood of aloofness from the every-day and he does it with a mix of unique art and science exhibits full of factual errors.

One issue that makes me uncomfortable with MJT is the largely fictitious nature of Wilson’s exhibits. Should a museum not be synonymous with non-fiction or some attempt at an objective truth? I think that it should and there are better ways to have patrons think critically about what they read and experience. A museum that presents fiction runs the risk of deterring patrons who don’t ‘get it’ from learning during other museum experiences.

While I liked the idea that MJT encourages patrons to think critically about their museum experiences and have an experience of mental aloofness from the everyday, it is certainly within a museum’s capability to achieve these objectives with non-fictional exhibits. MJT above all spoke to me as a call for other museums to strive further at encouraging patrons to think critically and question history, creating exhibits which take patrons mental moods away from the everyday, and instill in patrons a sense of wonder about what’s possible and impossible in their World.

[1]Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (Pantheon, 1995).

Timelines

2006-12-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

After failing at putting together an interactive timeline for our Museum London exhibit, I moved on to Cabinet Magazine’s article on timelines. I was disappointed the images weren’t available larger for closer examination, it would have been interesting to read the labels on the timelines, but the different timelines still said a lot about how people perceive history.

The seven concentric circles of the 1492 The Nuremburg Chronicle of the World tells the story of the creation of the Earth; the circles of the Nuremburg Chronicle convey a strong message about history longer than human history but back to the Earth’s creation by the hand of God. As a circular representation of the past, compared to a more common linear timeline, the Nuremburg Chronicle influences our perception of the past by conveying a message of the influence of a higher power on Earth’s history, and conveys an image of the global connectedness of everything on Earth.

Arthur Estabrook and Charles Davenport eugenics diagram presents history in a way I hadn’t thought about before – in the opposite way of the Nuremburg Chronicle of the World. It conveys all history as originating from a single event (in this case the reproduction of a ‘degenerate.’)

Joseph Mede's 1627 Key of the Revelation combines cyclical and linear political and religious trends that lead to the apocalypse. As an alternative representation of a timeline, Mede’s Revelation changes our perception of the past by conveying historical influences as being cyclical in nature. Unlike a simpler linear timeline, Mede’s figure conveys ideas that the causation of particular events cannot be attributed to directly to one specific event or thought, but that there are multiple influences. Interestingly, it also relates the fact that in the 17th century, the apocalypse was seen as an imminent event.

Jacques Barbeu-Duborg 1753 Carte chronologique, a tremendous 54 foot timeline, and Joseph Priestley’s 1765 "A Chart of Biography" builds on the concept of a simple linear timeline by adding many co-occurring horizontal (and thematic? It’s hard to tell) ‘timelines.’ This representation of a timeline conveys the message of a very clean history, that while histories of different themes or topics may be co-occurring, there’s a single or easily identifiable source of causation for historical events.

Florence Nightengale’s 1857 "Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East" conveys a more familiar cyclical timeline that depicts all the months in the year; this representation conveys will a brief period of history – events of a year- but obviously presents some difficulty in depicting events from a span longer than a year unless it expanded into a spiral.

I had a hard time with Charles Renouvier's chart from Uchronie that depicts the theoretical relationship between the course of history and possible alternative paths. While I think that a simple linear representation of history often fails to convey history’s complexities, I think a linear representation [whether horizontal or vertical] necessarily suggests the passage of time. While I found Renouvier’s diagram confusing at first, I haven’t been able to grasp the symbolic systems prepared for the US government nuclear waste storage facility at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (they certainly didn’t have anything like that at Douglas Point!). I see the stars (the Big Dipper clued me in to that), but the faces? I’m not sure why it looks like everyone has Bell’s Palsy.

I have Microsoft’s Encarta Reference Library on my computer and while I’ll check Wikipedia before I check Encarta, the library has a lot of interesting and interactive features, including timelines. I’m not really wild about the timelines in general; they’ve color coded them by themes, such as ‘politics’ and ‘religion,’ but for the large part, like most traditional timelines, events seem to occur in isolation and spontaneously, without being impacted by other people, ideas or events.

Personally I like the idea of the History Flow Visualization Application’s interpretation of timeline – you can trace an ‘event’ over the course of history, see it’s many influences, and at the same time the linear representation still conveys the idea of time progressing.

As an aside, as much as I like FeedReader, I think I'm finished reading people's blog entries from within FeedReader. All the blogs and posts look the same, and there's something about reading an entry in the digital environment that the author created that's more interesting and says more about the author (and I'm not saying this just because I'm excited about my new Christmas blog template).

Everyday Information Architecture and Butchering Your Own Meat

2006-12-08T18:13:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Fischer’s Flickr pool of photos on everyday information architecture showcases personal design solutions for organizing and structuring everyday life and environment: people have posted photos of their bookshelves, tape collections, mind-maps, refrigerators, etc.

I’ll admit I was looking forward to a slideshow of photos of people’s different ‘organizations.’ I like to organize stuff, so I was looking forward to the slideshow to some good new ideas, while I listen to my Frank Sinatra Christmas CD and try not to think about how I’m every going to get out of my driveway [I mean, the driveway’s fine, but it’s the road that’s the problem!].

Unfortunately, I found that a lot of the photos were ‘design’ related, more than ‘personal design solutions for organizing,’ – maybe people didn’t read past ‘design’ [I did get a laugh out of the sign reminding pool patrons where to wash though].

Anyway, the relevant photos spoke a lot to how people organize their lives and environment. Most of the photos showed organizations of people’s book collections. It surprised me that there weren’t a lot of photos of other everyday items that people regularly organize – like movie/DVD collections, closets, refrigerators, pantry shelves and coat racks, and I’m not sure why. Maybe a closet is more personal than a book collection, but a book collection is certainly just as personal (or more so) than your DVD collection or pantry. I figure that one’s book collection is just something more impressive to show off than someone’s pantry shelves or sock drawer.

How do people organize material things? For the most part, people’s organization tends to be practical. Material things are organized in ways so that the items that need to be used the most (or used first, in the case of medical tools) are easiest to get at.

There’s a few occasions of organizations that just seem to be only for aesthetic purposes and not practical, which surprised me; for example, small book shelves that stack vertically and books organized by color! However, books (and other items such as tapes) are largely organized (very practically) by subject, and many people have posted photos of books organized by subject: cookbooks, books on programming, books on Tokyo, books on orchids etc.

People’s organization of books by subject, although this is similar to the practice of a librarian more than an archivist, largely falls naturally into an archivally based organization. The collection of, for example, John’s books, is like the John Smith fonds, and, as John has organized his books by subject and publishers, is divided into series’ (for example, John’s books on birds, John’s books on pastry, John’s books on Java). John’s series are again organized by more specific sub-series’: books on penguins, books on parrots, and books on blue jays, within the ‘books on birds’ series.

Exceptions to this system would be bookshelves that were organized alphabetically and magazine collections ordered chronologically. A different archivally based organization would be groups the number of bookshelves with books grouped by publisher (provenance), which was seen in personal collections but largely in bookstores.

Museum curators organize in many ways, but largely to tell a story or convey a message. This is for the most part different from people’s organizations of everyday items, but not entirely. Personal photograph collections often tell a story often of a special person or event.

How are these information architectures different from digital ones? Theodor Holm Nelson’s article “Way out of the box” is critical of computers today, including their GUI (the icon-window view), their ‘paper model’: the construct of a ‘desk-top,’ and other metaphors of familiar office objects (wastebaskets, pages, files). In this sense, people’s day-to-day organization is similar to that of a computer (which were designed in this matter to be more familiar), but with more importance placed on the aesthetics of the design.

As an aside, I enjoyed Nelson’s article and found it interesting, even though I have a hard time imagining different GUIs or a different construct than a ‘desk-top.’ While I might enjoy one of these different approaches, I think that the intuitive and metaphorical ‘paper model’ is well suited for getting people familiar with using computers and their organization, and I have few complaints.

Nelson focuses his criticisms of today’s computers on the fact that they’ve taken away our ‘right’ to program, and it’s no longer relatively easy to build programs to work with your machine. I think he makes a good point – this is something that would be nice if we were able to do it – but to agree, I feel that I’d be a hypocrit. I’m comfortable leaving my programming needs in the hands of others in the same sense that I have others fix my car’s transmission, butcher my meat, and cut my hair (this I’ve tried, and it’s just for the best that I don’t). I’m not going to learn how to butcher my own cow (or deer), and in the same sense I’ll probably not learn how to program for myself. It would be nice, and also practical, to learn how to do all these things myself. Realistically though, we don’t have all the time in the world and we live in a society where people’s work is so specialized that we’re not expected to learn how to do almost anything anymore.

Everything, Everywhere...

2006-12-02T14:15:00.000-05:00

The implications of ubiquitous computing on historical practice provide researchers of the future with a massive, if not overwhelming, amount of data. Declan Butler’s '2020 Computing: Everything Everywhere'[1] describes a future of scientific research – particularly earth science research – where computers become our field operators, taking the form of networks with multitudes of censors with data processing so scientists can acquire real-time data from the world for the first time on such a large scale. While the creation of censor webs at present requires extensive (and expensive ) customization, the rapid evolution of technology means that this may and probably will not be the case in the future. First, however, the development of new standards and operating systems that allow all networks to understand each other needs to take place, a challenge that’s already slowing down the field.

While the implications of ubiquitous computing are obvious in the realm of science, its benefit to historians is less obvious and more frightening. A world where computers could identify any object, anywhere, instantly – an Internet of Things [2] – provides consumers with a wealth of information about the products they purchase. But it seems unwise to ignore the possibility of a future where this sort of technology would remain used for these harmless purposes.

Radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) are the global successor to the barcode[3]. A future of ubiquitous RFIDS, beyond the end of inventory counts or lost merchandise shipments, would have widespread advantages: monitoring the location of children and pets would keep them save, government officials – like Mexico’s attorney general [4] – could be held accountable, shoplifting could be eradicated, prison populations could be closely watched; the possibilities are endless.

But the move to tagging individual products -or even people- is a possibility with very few barriers. Tagging individual products could provide historians of the future with an enormous amount of material from which to study trends in consumerism and material culture. And tagging a population would obviously also provide a wealth of resources related to societal trends of every sort.

A future with the common presence of RFIDs appears not too distant. Walmart has already notified its top supplier that RFID tags for inventory tracking must be attached to all cases and pallets [5].Tesco supermarket in Great Britain has implemented smart shelves to take pictures of patrons who remove (frequently stolen) razors from their Gillette shelves but asserts that products are tagged with RFIDs, not people [6].

Dodson raises a very important question: will industry police itself or is outside regulation needed? With the potential for privacy invasion that RFIDs pose, and the lack of regulation surrounding there use it seems dangerous to allow the industry to regulate itself. At the same time, there already appears a lag in government legislation related to the Internet and other technology advances. Laws related to Internet crime are and have been slow in coming about and in many cases remain inadequate. With trends like these it seems obvious that while outside regulation is necessary it’s going to be slow, if not too late in developing, while industry remains free to place RFIDS where they want.

[1] the article has become gated since I first read it
[2] Dodson, Sean. “The Internet of Things,” The Guardian (9 Oct 2003).
[3] Dodson, Sean. “The Internet of Things,” The Guardian (9 Oct 2003).
[4] Sterling, Bruce. “Dumbing Down Smart Objects,” Wired 12, no. 10 (Oct 2004).[5] Meloan, Steve. “Toward a Global ‘Internet of Things’,” Sun Developer Network (11 Nov 2003).
[6] Dodson, Sean. “The Internet of Things,” The Guardian (9 Oct 2003).

** I've come to regret switching to Blogger Beta, and it seems I can't switch back. There's some sort of page error message this weekend and I don't have the toolbar of options that allow me to insert hyperlinks or see the html version of the blog entry, so I apologize for using footnotes.

Criticizing Commemoration

2006-11-25T11:14:00.000-05:00

Patricia Wood’s article “The Historic Site as Cultural Text: A Geography of Heritage in Calgary” [1] is quick to criticize Heritage Park Historical Village and Fort Calgary Historic Park for commercially selling themselves out and reducing history to another tourist commodity. The history they present, criticizes Wood, isn’t specific to the site, racial and socioeconomic issues aren’t addressed, and these sites present ‘the past’ as a place to be visited and thus distance it from the present, while giving no distance from historical actors in the park for debate or doubt. At Heritage Park Historical Village, Wood criticizes, a visitor can have an experience in the park unrelated to history as the park also has an amusement park aspect.

Wood recognizes that a dependence on private and corporate gifts is increasing at locations like Heritage Park Historical Village and Fort Calgary Historic Park as public funding gets tighter. She also states that this leads to an increased pressure just to stay open let alone be popular. While she recognizes the realities of the difficult times facing many museums and heritage sites she merely states that these problems exist and fails to recommend how these heritage sites could realistically improve while staying open.

As I read I became increasingly interested in Wood’s conclusion, anticipating some sort of solution from her on these widespread problems. Instead, her simply states that “ museums and historic sites need the assistance of a strong system of formal education in history and curators need the support of politicians and citizens to pursue free a rigorous interpretation of history” [2]. It’s an easy and simple case to make, to attack heritage sites for not presenting perfect history while stating you’re aware of the problems they face but then not addressing them. There are serious funding problems that I know I and others in our class have experienced while working, and we could use suggestions and recommendations that address the reality of problems facing museums and heritage sites instead of just being criticized for the failures of the work we've done.

[I couldn't find any pictures of my purple polyester dress, but this pink one was my favourite]

[1] Patricia K Wood, “The Historic Site as a Cultural Text: A Geography of Heritage in Calgary, Alberta,” Material History Review (Fall 2000), pp.33-43.
[2] Wood, 10

History and Mapping

2006-11-24T11:38:00.000-05:00

I like maps, so I especially enjoyed this week’s lab exercises, although it took me a while to settle on what I wanted to work on. First, I wanted to explore The David Rumsey Map Collection but my interest was in European maps, and I was disappointed that Rumsey’s collection focuses predominantly on North and South American maps. I was impressed, however, with the quality of the map images: I could zoom in quite far without the image becoming blurry and I really liked this.

What I was interested in doing with maps was overlaying some maps from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with present-day maps of Europe. Particularly, I was interested in overlaying maps of the camp system and maps of the railway systems from the 1940’s onto a map of Germany and Poland because I wanted a better sense of (particularly concentration) camps' proximity to urban centres, to see if it looked realistic for Germany’s city-dwellers to deny knowing about the treatment of Jews in these camps. My interest in the railway system was just to see where camps ended up being in relation to the railway system, if it appeared as I suspected that they were established along the rail system.

Somewhere on Map Builder, I saw the word ‘mash-up’ and thought that maybe I could try to do this on Map Builder; when it became apparent that that wasn’t what Map Builder did I moved to experimenting with Google Earth. Here I could overlay the maps I wanted to use.

It was pretty cool although a bit difficult to make the maps fit on top of each other; part of this was due to not being able to remove a lot of detail that was cluttering up the maps and making it hard to overlay them, but at the same time keep some of the detail as reference points for the map that I was trying to overlay. I also got frustrated for some other reasons. First, after I finished fitting my map on top of the Google Earth map I can’t go back and change it (and I realized I don’t have Switzerland quite in the right spot!). Second, I can’t figure out how to remove the maps that I added on top to start fresh (therefore I have a Google Earth map with an overlaid map of the Nazi camp system, and also a map of locations of the Death Marches, which I was experimenting with before using the rail system map – which I never got to because I couldn’t remove the marches map). My frustrations with Google Earth could (and quite likely are) related to user error/incompetence however.

Now that I knew what Map Builder could do (and not do) I went back to my account there and geocoded a map related to (you guessed it) some of my family history research. More specifically, I plotted the daily operations of Canadian 6 Group as part of RAF Bomber Command in January 1944. This month’s activities were of particular interest to me because my grandfather’s brother flew with this group and he was shot down over Berlin and killed January 27th 1944. I wanted to get a better understanding through the maps of what the operations for that month had been like and I plotted markers and operation information on cities that 6 Group bombed that month [red markers for high explosives and incendiaries, green markers for mining operations].

One thing that I really liked about Map Builder was that it made it easy to add the map you built into your own website, and I’m pretty excited about adding my map to my family history section of my genealogy website (click on the 'my maps' icon).

There were a few things that also frustrated me about the program. My biggest dislike (and again for these it could be just user-error) was that I could only search for locations in the USA. Even if I changed the country setting in the search options it only brought me results from the states. This made it difficult plotting the locations of my cities and I ended up looking them up on Google Maps and then searching for them on the Map Builder map which was time consuming.

The second thing that I didn’t like was that the markers were very exact and you couldn’t, for example, put a marker just on a city in general, because you could zoom in so far markers went on different streets and different areas of the city but there was no way to convey that I wanted to mark just the city in general and not a very specific spot within the city. I ran into this problem because most of the bombing campaigns targeted Berlin, and I wanted to be able to indicate that they struck Berlin but not specific locations within Berlin where I ended up having markers.

Learning some more HTML...and a little CSS

2006-11-19T16:45:00.000-05:00

I've finally gotten back to going through W3Schools online tutorials. After working through the 'basic' HTML tutorial a few weeks ago I decided to move on to the advanced tutorial. In the end, my website isn't too different in terms of content, just in terms of style and format.

This tutorial included layout and I added some fancy columns to my Jurassic Park Page. The tutorial also included html font tags which are deprecated and to be removed in a future version of html. Although a lot of webpages use font tags, W3 schools advises avoiding it (in HTML 4.0 all formatting can be removed and stored in a separate style sheet, whereas the original HTML was never intended to do formatting). W3Schools advocates doing it the right way, with styles. So it became evident that the next tutorial I will be doing will be on CSS (cascading style sheets). The advanced html tutorial began to introduce CSS and I began formatting some (a little bit) of style information into my html document. In doing so, I can see the advantage of CSS over traditional formatting tags in HTML: it's a time-saver and ensures consistency. Instead of having to add the formatting (like what colour I want) to all of my headers it's just stated once - in the style sheet- at the beginning of the document.

Since September I've certainly become much more adventurous using the Internet. Website and on-line Christmas shopping aside, from Bryan's advice I've also been spending some time playing with Google SketchUP (beta) and building a 3-D model of our exhibit; take a look:

History and Nation Building

2006-11-18T23:40:00.000-05:00

According to Benedict Anderson, the nation is an “imagined political community” [1] and nationalism is a cultural artifact created towards the end of the 19th century. My initial reaction to these assertions that our ‘Canadian nation’ is fictitious and imagined was protest: but of course there’s a Canadian nation! But I’m beginning to think Anderson is correct; aside from a common history as a nation, the connection do I feel to Inuit residents of Nunavut or Francophones in Quebec or prairie farmers in Saskatchewan is quite limited. This realization is really kind of saddening and I think the relationship between ‘history’ and ‘nation’ is, in a way, cyclical: history creates nationalism, defining us as a nation; we therefore share a common history which perpetuates our emotions of nationalism, and is reinforced by on-going additions to our ‘national history.’

Anderson discusses 3 paradoxes that the theory of nationalism has run into which bolstered my agreement with his take on nationalism: one paradox was the fact that historian sees the creation of nations as modern phenomenon, whereas nationalists subjectively see the antiquity of their nation [2]. I think I see the irony of what Anderson’s pointing to – in the post-World War Two era there’s been a large increase in the number of nations established whereas nationalists see ‘their nation’ as having quite a long history. If I understand Anderson’s paradox correctly, I think this may be the paradox that’s easiest to contradict: I think it would be relatively easy for a nationalist to argue that their ‘nation’ has existed for a very long time but couldn’t exist as a nation itself due to a long history of invasion, repression or colonization.

The second paradox that Anderson discusses is the immense political power of nationalism compared to its philosophical poverty [3]. Again, I see Anderson’s point and I think this is a much more difficult argument for nationalists to refute. The political power that nationalism holds is immense and frightening yet beyond emotion, the theory of nationalism is difficult to substantiate.

The census, the map and the museum are three institutions of power that Anderson argues have profoundly shaped the way colonial powers have thought of their colonies. The museum, according to Anderson is profoundly political and in history has made colonial powers look like guardians of their colony’s historical traditions [4].

While colonies are much a thing of the past, the museum continues to be profoundly political in the sense that they often conjure nationalist emotions and in this sense history is very much involved with nation building. I often leave an exhibit with a feeling of “Go Canada!!”… for example I was at the Museum of Civilization in Hull this past spring and they had 2 temporary exhibitions, one on the role of nurses in Canada and the other on ice skating – including hockey and figure skating – and I certainly left with a feeling of how great our country is (with our dedicated nurses, and Olympic figure skating and hockey medals).

Working on the Douglas Point exhibit this past summer, I’ll admit that I didn’t explicitly work from a ‘big idea’ and it ended up being along the lines of ‘nuclear power was important to Kincardine and Douglas Point played a significant role in developing commercial nuclear power in Canada.’ ‘The big picture’ that I talked about on my tour and also while doing interviews on the radio and with the newspaper was that the Canadian CANDU design of Douglas Point was important by placing Canada on the nuclear power map internationally and that it was significant in the development by Canada of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Similar to the Museum of Civilization exhibits, I think visitors were left with a sense of “Go Canada! Canada’s Great!” and that’s certainly what I felt after doing tours and advertising.

With the proliferation of museums, historic sites and historic houses it seems that the museum is increasingly important in building feelings of regionalism, or local-ism. Our Museum London exhibit will leave visitors, after visiting the displays of contemporary London companies developing inventions, a feeling of being pride in being a Londoner. I certainly got this feeling meeting with Lac-Mac and discussing the significance of their innovations to the health care industry in Canada, and meeting with TMI and discussing not only their impact on health care internationally but also a sense of pride as being a fellow-Londoner in their upcoming work with the UN (distributing measles vaccines in Africa).

[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991 [1983]), 6
[2] Ibid, 5
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid, 178

Being Reflective

2006-11-18T11:20:00.000-05:00

I’d like to take Jeremy’s challenge and reflect on our Museum London exhibit (and build some excitement about the exhibit's opening with some pictures of what's up-coming).

We’ve certainly made great strides this week in becoming much more intentional, by means of nailing down our ‘Big Idea’ – what the exhibit’s all about: Londoners have embraced innovation, resulting in the city’s spirit of ingenuity. [Somehow ‘Big Idea’ has stuck and Nicks’ ‘Core Idea’ terminology has been forgotten, not that it matters as they both convey the same idea.]

Ironically our reading from Beverley Serrell’s Exhibit Labels was entitled “Behind it All: A Big Idea;” [1] but our exhibit has been more, “In the Middle of it All: A Big Idea.” However, that’s not to say that we haven’t operated from the beginning with a series of larger ideas and buzz words: from the get-go we’ve spoken of themes (from the wiki: how did Londoners receive and use 19th/20th/21st century inventions?....how did it affect their lives? ...what innovation has emerged from London? and from what context did these inventions emerge from?), and words like automation, mechanization, ingenuity, and social impact have arisen continuously.

Our situation has been different from the typical job of a curator in an exhibit, as Serrell describes that exhibit developers use their big idea to decide what to include and what to exclude in their exhibit. As a class, instead we’ve adapted to a situation in which we’ve been given the artefacts, a url, and early proposals of the exhibit to decide the ‘big idea’ from. So, perhaps it’s fair that our big idea has really been ‘in the middle of it all’, (although it’s still unfortunately closer to the ‘end of it all’).

Serrell lists some flawed big ideas: big ideas that are too detailed, too many big ideas for one exhibit, and a big idea that’s too big. As a class I think we’ve all felt at times that we’re facing an exhibit that was conceptually too big: a range of artefacts from quite old (Kris’ daguerrotypes from the 1840s) and quite new (modern inventions coming out of 3M, Lac-Mac, TMI), and on top of that, artefacts that were invented here in London, and artefacts that are difficult to attach to a solid London connection. This was an issue that made focusing a ‘big idea’ difficult and in that sense our big idea has to encompass 2 themes within the artefacts – new and old, London and not London. The decision to highlight in the large panels the London connection of each group of artefacts (sound, print, visual) seems like the optimum way to deal with these challenges. In a sense our exhibit is a collection of stories about how London has interact/ed with inventions.

When I was thinking of title ideas, I proposed “Invention and Innovation: Alive in London, Then and Now” and it’s the ‘alive in London’ part that I like the most and thinks works the best, because it is a term that’s so broad. While the title doesn’t explicitly convey our big idea, I think it comes as close as we may get taking into account that we’re somewhat stuck with the ‘Innovation to Invention’ phrase and we have such broad themes. A concern that I have with ‘invention to innovation’ is that our artefacts represent both innovation and invention across a broad spectrum of time, and not showing a chronological progression from innovations to inventions. My other concern is more of a reflection: that this too was backward, I jumped right to brain-storming exhibit titles before ‘big ideas’ and I know this is the result of which thought process I find more fun.

Kelly and I spend yesterday afternoon, creative juices flowing, working on the introductory panels [one to go at each entrance] for the exhibit. Our goal was to convey early on what our ‘take home message’ is, what they’re going to be seeing and how it fits, and as they explore our exhibit, (building on Lauren’s ideas about prompting our visitors to do some thinking) some questions to ask to themselves. After reviewing Serrell’s guidelines on ‘introductory labels’, to introduce the exhibit’s theme she recommends a 20-300 word count and I think it may be wise to edit some of ours down (and I’d like to invite the class to edit and improve what we’ve posted to the wiki).

I feel much more optimistic, and hope that Jeremy does too, that now that we have a strong big idea, and our efforts, as Serrell describes, will be unified and are arguments decreased [2], although it’s late in the game. The next challenge facing the class will be interpretive labels (panels)– telling our stories [3]. Their purpose, as described by Serrell, is to contribute to the overall visitor experience in a provocative, positive, meaningful and enlightening way.

Our decision to focus on the London connection in our interpretive labels hits on these ideas; I’ve been fortunate that working on the labels for the Bovie electro-surgery unit, the London connection is strong and easy to convey, as I know it isn’t always so for my classmates. As we’re composing our labels, lets all keep in mind Tilden’s 6 principle’s from Interpreting our Heritage: relate to what’s being displayed (or else it’s sterile!); information isn’t interpretation, but all interpretation contains information; interpretation is an art; the chief aim of interpretation is provocation; present a whole not a part; interpretation for children shouldn’t be a dumb-ed down version but follow a different approach.

John Nicks, in Curatorship in the Exhibit Planning Process outlines 2 types of curatorial research that we’re undertaking: thematic research (providing a base of contextual information and develops the framework and substance of the exhibit) and object research (documenting the artefacts in the exhibit). We’ve already determined to use our thematic research for the larger panels and tell how the artefacts are connected to London and [and our artefact labels obviously are the object research]. I raised this question in our Thursday meeting, but for artefacts where the researcher is having exceeding difficulty establishing the London connection (thematic research) is it within our curatorial power to remove the artefact from the exhibit? As it was decided, it’s best to wait until we’ve laid out a tentative floor-plan before making those decisions, but it’s certainly a relatively small space for so many artefacts, in addition to so much show-case by London companies, so it looks like we may end up removing artefacts anyway.

(On the note of the floor-plan: thanks to Bryan I’ve had a fun-time building a 3-D model of our exhibit space to plot our layout on; what better way to illustrate and sell our concept?).

[1] Beverley Serrell, selections from Exhibit Labels (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 1996), 1
[2] Ibid, 7
[3] Ibid, 9
[4] John Nicks, “Curatorship in the Exhbiition Planning Process,” The Manual of Museum Exhibitions, Barry Lord and Gail Dexter Lord, eds. (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2002), pp.347

Web 2.0 and the Digital Historian

2006-11-14T07:58:00.000-05:00

I’ve already mentioned in class the digital adeptness of my youngest sister. While in her grade 7 ‘tech’ class she did exercises with DreamWeaver, my grade 8 tech class (I didn’t even have a tech class in grade 7) was in the woodshop: I made a cheese-cutting board that my mom keeps in the kitchen. The digital history readings over the last few weeks have made it apparent that Web 2.0 will (hopefully) make her Internet and educational experience significantly different from mine.

Paul Miller’s “Web 2.0: Building the New Library” highlighted key characteristics of what Web 2.0 is about, including: freeing of data, permitting the building of virtual applications, being participative, sharing, communicating and remixing.

"Back to School with Web 2.0" illustrates the participative nature of Web 2.0 with the increasing use of blogs and wikis and networking of students. In addition to the more networked and connected class, collaborative online writing tools like Writely and more online tools facilitating the completion of school-work, like e-tutor Graphing Calculator and Create a Graph will mean that the assignments given out by teachers will ultimately have to change and adapt.

History students in the future, like my sister, will increasingly be able to pose, investigate and answer different historical questions than posed before. Cohen and Rosenzweig discuss in "No Computer Left Behind" the idea that modern technology is on the verge of making the format of standardized multiple choice Scantron tests “as quaint as the slide rule” [1] with tools like H-Bot, which allows students to quickly search the Internet for answers to simple history questions, like those posed on standardized multiple choice exams. Cohen and Rosenzweig compare the ‘invention’ of H-Bot for history students to the invention of calculators for math students, allowing them to answer more complex and important questions.

Miller states in Web 2.0: Building the New Library: “Web 1.0 brought people to information, Web 2.0 will bring information to the people” and this will partly be through interoperable and open data, APIs for the humanities, and data mining of massive and (hopefully) open digital databases. Data mining (extracting implicit previously unknown and potentially useful information from data) by historians to do complex analysis of digital material to find meaningful trends will be an increasingly popular new method of historical research with the Internet has an unprecedented ability to store, scan and interrelate documents creating new investigative tactics and resources for historians. [2]

Web 2.0’s freeing of information will hopefully include more interoperable data, data shared in a machine retrievable and readable format, ensuring that systems, procedures and culture of an organization “are managed in a way to maximize opportunities for the exchange and reuse of information.” And this interoperable data should come hand-in-hand with APIs, which are unforunately much more common in the sciences and with commercial applications, but would provide robust, direct access to databases. [3] I’m optimistic that the future will also hold an increase in non-commercial APIs for educational use, of which Dan Cohen currently laments their small numbers. These will allow digital historians to create historical ‘mash-ups,’ like Cohen’s “Mapping What Americans Did on September 11th”.

As part of Web 2.0, reusing software and web content will increasingly be a method of research.
Cohen’s mapping of what Americans did on September 11th clarified terms for me ideas that I was feeling a little uncomfortable with like API, mash-up, interoperability (and Web 2.0). I experimented with the Google Maps API, and in combination with Cohen’s mapping article, a little light-bulb turned on in my head as I more-fully realized the potential that mash-ups, API, and interoperable data really held for historians.

I kept my project basic, and I tracked the birth-places of my grandfather’s paternal ancestors (his father, then his father, etc.) to put on my genealogy webpage (I plan on adding and color-coding the lineage of different lines, and I’m curious to see if trends emerge - this is on my Christmas holiday to-do list, but for this week I kept it simple). I was excited to find out that the genealogy program I use can export my entire database of family members as tab-delimited text, but also realized that the genealogy program I use doesn’t have an entry for birthplace, so I’ll unfortunately have to go through and add this column manually. But realizing that this whole database was easily translatable (and interoperable) into an API, as an example, was what turned the light-on for me as I realized the research potential of interoperable data, API’s and mash-ups for Web 2.0 for digital historians now and in the future; more importantly I also understood the emphasis that needs to be placed on creating APIs for digital collections and having resources like databases free to use and interoperable.

[1] Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “No Computer Left Behind,” Chronicle of Higher Education (24 Feb 2006).
[2] Cohen, Daniel J. “History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Rethinking History (Jun 2004).Cohen, Daniel J. “From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections,” D-Lib Magazine 12, no. 3 (Mar 2006).

[3]Miller, Paul. “Interoperability: What Is It and Why Should I Want It?” Ariadne Magazine 24 (Jun 2000); Cohen, Daniel J. “Do APIs Have a Place in the Digital Humanities?” dancohen.org (21 Nov 2005).

[4]Cohen, Daniel J. “History and the Second Decade of the Web,” Rethinking History (Jun 2004).

Career Services Workshop

2006-11-06T23:17:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to post that it's been confirmed with Career Services that the

Career Services Workshop will be held Tuesday December 5th from 3.30 - 5.30 in SSC 9420

Back to The Basics...

2006-11-02T15:22:00.000-05:00

This week I've worked through W3Schools html tutorial for beginners. Although I've experimented with making webpages in Microsoft Publisher and published the one I created in DreamWeaver, I felt I didn't have a good grasp at all of html and was thinking ahead to the Museum London online exhibit. W3Schools says, "if you want to be a skillful Web developer, we strongly recommend that you use a plain text editor to learn your primer HTML," and that's what I did. I worked through their different modules and experimented with the different 'mini-lessons' in WordPad, and in the end created a very basic webpage.

I wanted my focus not to be on the website's content (I'd focused on content on my DreamWeaver site) but on the code itself, so the content isn't creative, and a lot of it comes from the Jurassic Park screen-play (surprisingly, there's a lot of screenplays online - there's a good use for OCR!). Anyway, I really had a lot of fun with the tutorial and highly recommend it; in the end I was about as proud of my Jurassic Park page as I was my DreamWeaver page because I did the code myself and understand what it all means and does. I'm looking forward to doing more of their tutorials, and, as so much of the digital history class emphasizes the need for open access scholarship, I was excited that W3Schools has so many excellent tutorials available free online.

What's happening to print?

2006-11-02T15:08:00.000-05:00

Nigel Lees asks an interesting question, one that reminds me not only of some of our earlier (disturbing!) readings on problems related to digital preservation but also Archival Mangement discussion of the Nicholson Baker-Richard Cox 'Great Paper Debate' over using microfilm to preserve newspapers and resulting in destruction of the physical newspaper copies themselves. While I think that a 2nd round of the Baker-Cox debate may be in the works, I also realized that the issue could also be looked at from outside humanities/social science as an environmental issue. It seems embarassing to me now that I hadn't thought about this as an environmental issue before, when it seems so obvious. Less paper and therefore more trees is an issue that has recurred with print-on-demand, Media Commons, digital preservation and more. I'm going to steer back to Lees' article, but I just thought that the notion of the environmental impact of these issues is also important to consider.

Lees, a manager of a large chemistry research library, asks whether it's really safe to get rid of print copies of journals as they 'go digital.' I think that, from previous readings on problems facing digital preservation both from Digital History and Archive Management, and also from plain common sense it's obvious not to get rid of all of them. Lees' writes that it's not uncommon to send "emails to various listservs asking if anyone wants back sets of journals they are disposing of" and asks if this system and using informal contacts is good enough. I think he asks more importantly: "Should we develop a national print disposal and retention policy, setting up some sort of ‘clearing house’ so that valuable material is not accidentally thrown away? Hence we could avoid ‘…but I thought you were keeping it…!’ To prevent a 2nd round of the Baker-Cox debate, a nation print disposal/retention policy seems like a necessary idea - and perhaps WorldCat or something similar could incorporate an online network system for librarians and archivists to monitor the disposal and retention of library material.

WorldCat Searching

2006-11-02T14:20:00.000-05:00

To reach users outside the library environment, Online Community Library Centre's (OCLC) WorldCat is launching a destination site to make library resources more visible. Although one may argue that WorldCat eliminates the hunt for historical sources that's necessary to get good results, WorldCat brings a tremendous resource not just to university students and academics but also to users of smaller public libraries and researchers in small and/or rural areas.

While it's not difficult for me as a student to search Western's library, the TUG system, and look even further through the RACER library system, this wasn't the case this past summer when I was trying to research an exhibit in a small rural town. I knew the book that I wanted, but not having university library access I needed to search public libraries, as my small hometown library (and the Bruce County library system) didn't have this book. My solution was to methodically search online through different Ontario county library systems - one by one - to try to find this book; in the end, I had no success. Unforunately, using WorldCat I couldn't find it either, but I think this example illustrates the need for a system like WorldCat to assist researchers and students in rural areas or areas without large library collections who are just as deserving of access to scholarship.

Experimenting with WorldCat, I found that it wasn't a useful resource for me (aside from already having access to searches through Western libraries) because local libraries, at least in south-western Ontario, aren't involved. If I want to read Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, it suggests the University of Guelph's library, although a copy is available at the London Public library branch across the street from my apartment. It's my hope that WorldCat, while launching a destination site, will also work with smaller local libraries and facilitate their participation, so that everyone can find books, whether they're for research, study or just pleasure: this would truely increase access to scholarship.

StatCounter and My New Genealogy Website

2006-10-31T00:21:00.000-05:00

I’ve recently discovered how many really cool tools our Stat Counter accounts have. For example, I can look at referring links (mine include, aside from the digital history and public history pages at Western, Google searches for soccer/football sponsorship by Carling, Carling festival jobs, Granatstein; a MSN search on Digital Maoism; a 21 year old college instructor’s self-help blog; and a Technorati search on ‘nuclear power Iran Korea’ that brought up my entries on Douglas Point). I can also look at a recent visitor map (below) and visit lengths (67% last less than 5 seconds, 17.4% last longer than an hour).

Where I really found I could learn a lot of information, was from recent visitor activity and visitor paths. In some cases I found more information than I needed to know: from knowing the towns where our classmates live I can infer from these stats how long some spend reading my blog and how frequently, if they have a unique IP address (i.e. one that’s not in London ON). That made me really feel a little creepy (not in the good way) about how much information websites can really know about their users.

It also had an real impact on me realizing the exposure that we’re getting from our blogs. From my Stat Counter account I can tell that somebody came to read my blog after being at my genealogy page (which excites me that somebody’s actually looking at my genealogy page), one of my visitors has been the Federal Communications Commission in Washington DC, and somebody in Montreal has visited my blog 6 times, and that somebody with a Dutch ISP Google searched Diana, and ended up at my blog.

I’ve been trying to figure out what all this information can mean to digital historians. I think that it comes down to the fact that sites like Stat Counter give digital historians a great opportunity to monitor and learn about the behavior of their users and hopefully use this information to make improvements. From the features that are available, the most information that’s provided is about how users come to your site and from where, with which a digital historian could apply to marketing and advertising strategies. I’m sure that any serious digital historian who invested in a ‘professional’ Stat Counter account (i.e. not a free account) could learn an incredible amount more.

Part of the reason I was looking into Stat Counter was that I‘ve added my new genealogy page to my Stat Counter account. After learning some of the basics of Dreamweaver and solving some of my early problems (linking my pages together, my biggest problem, ended up being ridiculously easy to do), I’ve finally got it up and with some new links, and a ‘my family history’ section so that I can share my family research with my family. I’m happy that I’ve gotten down some of the basics of Dreamweaver, but still want to understand html better, so I think I’ll work through the W3 schools tutorials on html and JavaScript.

History and Career Services...

2006-10-25T12:55:00.000-04:00

If anyone's interested, Career Services posts a schedule of upcoming employer campus visits on their website; just click on the title 'Schedule and Registration.' It's mostly employers recruiting engineers from what I've seen but I'm optimistic something history related may come up. I've also contacted them about when their next date is for the history careers workshop and if it would be suitable for students in the public history program.

Tony Bennett and The Birth of the Museum

2006-10-25T00:37:00.000-04:00

After reading Tony Bennett’s The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory and Politics I got a very different feel for what a museum is and does, an opposite view, from what I got reading Young’s The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1996. From Bennett, I as the reader got the idea that the museum’s purpose starting in the late 18th and into the 19th century was that it was “useful for governing” [p. 19] and “exhibitions met needs for..ideological requirements” [p.80]. Governments, it appears, use museums and other institutions of ‘high culture’ to influence and control the emerging middle class, ultimately by using high culture “to alter their forms of life and behavior” [p. 20] and turn them into “active bearers and practitioners of capacity for self improvement” [p. 23]. Museums and other institutions were used to impress on the masses ‘civilized’ behavior and values (like manners and how to behave in public) and were used to ‘rehabilitate’ women. Exhibitions meet needs for shorter term ideological requirements [p. 80] and museums used Darwimism to prove European superiority, and male dominance over female. Also important: the museum was a place to demonstrate national power and authority as acting as the State’s face to the populace.

Young, however, discussed the juxtaposition of the McCord, and it’s collection of “dresses, dishes and paintings” against McGill, driven by male values such as science, sports, war and industry, and suggests that the McCord’s focus on social and women’s history was an embarrassment to them.

Bennett asks, ‘does the museum continue to play a significant role in differentiating the elite from popular social classes?’ With the proliferation of social history, women’s history, and ethnic histories over the more traditional political and military histories, Bennett’s argument struck me as out-of-touch with modern reality, and (particularly from his comparisons of penal reform and prisons to museums, detailing them both as teaching/learning tools) a little paranoid of the goals of the state and institution – and left me feeling a little like we’re all being manipulated by ‘Big Brother.’ Bennett also touched on the priority of funding museums by the State to fulfill their goals goals, and, especially as Young illustrates in The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum, museum funding certainly isn’t a national budget priority of the state in today’s world.

Tony Bennett, “History and Theory,” The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, and Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), pp.1-105.

Brian Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1976 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000)

History Flow

2006-10-24T00:40:00.000-04:00

This week’s digital history theme is pattern matching and visualization. While visualization is a computer based technique to explore large sets of data and present findings in a way that can be easily grasped by people, I’m still a little unclear on the dot-plot visualization technique; IBM’s History Flow, however, I found a lot easier to grasp and really interesting. I made my own History Flow diagram to illustrate all the exciting activity on my Wikipedia article, on Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station. (I’ve also been disappointed that edit wars and debate haven’t occurred, and my contribution [in pinkabove] has been untouched except for the addition of a reference link at the bottom, and a re-wording of the introduction; I made my own History Flow diagram in Paint, before realizing that you could download History Flow, and that it's even one of the lab exercises for the week, so I've added that image below - unfortunately it only includes October, and I made my edits all in September)

Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Dave Kushal’s Studying Cooperation and Conflict Between Authors with History Flow Visualization, explains the scope and nature of vandalism on the Wikipedia site, reassuring us that members watch each other, talk about each others contributions and address that they must reach consensus. They also point to what they call ‘first mover advantage,’ of which I think I get to take advantage of, describing that the initial text in an article tends to survive longer and suffer fewer modifications. In the end, I feel reassured that vandalism won’t sticking around long, but I’m a little uncomfortable still with Wikipedia. Our earlier readings highlighted its accuracy and compared its accuracy to encyclopedias like Britannica, and this made me sure that people would immediately jump all over my article making corrections and modifications to make it perfect - apparently I overestimated how exciting Canadian nuclear history is. When this didn’t happen, I’m left wondering to myself if I should really be Wikipedia’s authority on Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station.

History Flow can reveal a lot about historical consciousness, assisted by History Flow’s multiple visualizations: community view, individual author view, recent changes view and age view. From Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg and Dave Kushal’s Studying Cooperation and Conflict Between Authors with History Flow Visualization it’s obvious that History Flow can reveal edit wars in any visualization with a zig-zag pattern, indicating controversial topics (although the authors illustrate that edit wars don’t occur only over controversial topics). Individual author view highlights the contributions of a single author and it depicts the persistence of these contributions over time – if the author is contributing an edit war this is a good way to follow it.

Recent Changes View highlights the new content in each version of the Wiki page independent of authorship and allows one to see portions of the text have been edited the most over time. Recent changes view provides a good indicator of what issues may be controversial, i.e. being changed a lot, and what topics may pertain to current events, indicted by new content added all around a certain date (for example, there’s been updates on the North Korea site on its nuclear capacity since its recent confirmed nuclear test).

Community view shows all contributions from different authors, color-coding the text to indicate the author of each sentence and reveals (by the number of different colours) how many authors have contributed to the article - either a whole community or just a few devoted contributors - indicating a level of interest in the topic and possibly revealing its level of historical consciousness in the general Internet community. A possible pitfall of making these kinds of assumptions is that while a topic may be of interest to Wikipedia users, this doesn’t mean that this same interest level is replicated in the general community, and while a topic may be of interest to Wikipedia users, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily historically significant (there’s been a lot of steady interest in the Wikipedia articles on ‘pudding’ ‘parrot’, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and very little on my Douglas Point article, and even less its related Nuclear Power Demonstrator article, even though these are arguably far more historically significant topics than pudding and parrots).

Overall History Flow does a good job illustrating what topics people are interested in and how many people are interested in them and cam possibly suggest what’s controversial, what’s of general interest and what’s a topic pertinent to current events. In the end, I also think it’s important to keep the pudding example in mind – researchers have to exercise caution while inferring generalizations about historical consciousness from History Flow results.

Young's The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum

2006-10-22T12:45:00.000-04:00

(first, I apologize for posting so much at the same time, but I've had difficulty opening Blogger the past few days)

I think that I got off easy reading Brian Young’s The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum [1] which is really disheartening to any young intellectual interested in pursuing museum work. Young’s The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum follows the story of the institutional McGill University and its relationship with the intellectual McCord museum, which ends with McGill’s transfer of custodial responsibility to the McCord’s new corporate board, focused on audience size, marketing, entertainment and big flashy borrowed exhibits, which leads to the collapse of the museum’s focus on research, support to researchers and conservation.

The book left me, and other readers I’m sure, concerned about a widespread anti-intellectualism among North American administrators of cultural institutions like the McCord. I’d already become disillusioned to the modern nature of museums, so The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum wasn’t the kick in the head that it could have been. In fact, I’d discussed this topic at Thanksgiving with one of my sisters, two years younger than me and soon to be a fine art and arts administration graduate from the University of Ottawa, was informed right off the bat from her program coordinators that if she or her classmates wanted to get into museum work, they’d be better off getting an MBA.

Although it was disheartening, I enjoyed reading The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum, but I was disappointed in its conclusion. While Young claims that “research, popular education and civic identity aren’t mutually exclusive and can be richly complementary within a museum” [2] I think I’d be more convinced if he’d been more illustrative and provided an example or even a proposal instead of just concluding with the statement.

What intrigued me most by The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum was the question that Young posed near the end: “As the pressure grows on universities to teach skills to prepare students for marketable jobs, is the intellectual depth that pursuing a particular discipline can bring being sacrificed?” [3] This would suggest that Western’s public history program is sacrificing intellectual depth at the cost of preparing us for the job-market. I certainly don’t feel like I’m being intellectually ripped off, but maybe that’s because ‘teaching skills to prepare students for marketable jobs’ was part of what made the program appeal to me. Sure we could look at more theory instead of actually ‘doing’ history, but wouldn’t a public history program being doing its students a disservice by not at least beginning to prepare them for the job-market?

[1] Brian Young, The Making and Unmaking of a University Museum: The McCord, 1921-1976 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000).
[2] Young, 175
[3] Young, 174

Oral History and On-Power Fuelling

2006-10-22T12:33:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in class on Wednesday, I would have maybe been better off doing these readings last spring, before I embarked on about 20 interviews with former Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station employees to help me put the text together for the exhibit. I was disappointed with trying to put the text together based solely on the official AECL history, Nucleus: The History of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, which largely regarded the station as a failure, and The Douglas Point Story (AECL’s history of the station released after its retirement in 1984), which wrote the stations history from a largely engineering and managerial stand-point. These two official histories from ‘higher-up’ weren’t going to appeal to the former employees, their families and friends in town, or to the town – the large proportion of which works in the nuclear industry- in general. I organized interviews because I wanted a more well-rounded narrative, to fill in gaps in my research, and to find a story with less focus on failure. [all the photos I've inserted are of Douglas Point's calandria]

Portelli’s The Peculiarities of Oral History [1] points to the uniqueness of oral history that I felt rang so true when I was putting together exhibit text after my interviews. Portelli highlights that oral history is less about events as such than about their meaning and that the unique and precious element of oral sources is the speaker’s subjectivity, what people wanted to do, believed they did and what they think now they did.

The interviews that I did ended up being quite interesting (and I heard quite the stories ‘off the record’). In the end what I didn’t end up with was an objective narrative of the history of D.P, or even very many gaps in my research filled in (I had to go elsewhere for that), but I was left with an overwhelming sense of what the worker’s felt was the significance of their work, the greater significance of the station. It came across not only in their words but in the enthusiasm in their voices, their gestures, and the excitement in their eyes: they were proud of the camaraderie of the staff, the hard work and long hours that it took to get the station up and running; they put Canada into the world nuclear power scene along with the United Kingdom and the United States and putting Canada in the export field internationally, when a duplicate station at Rajasthan India was committed in 1963; and most importantly they proved that a full-scale nuclear power plant was viable for commercial use in Ontario.

Portelli indicates the importance of oral testimony may lie not in its adherence to facts, but in its divergence. At first I found this frustrating doing the interviews, that I wasn’t getting facts to fill in my research gaps and some areas of my research were becoming more clouded with discrepancies between interviews and official histories; but as Portelli discusses, there mistakes said a lot.

The example I brought up in class (with less detail) involved on-power re-fuelling of the reactor. A source of pride among several interviewees was that Douglas Point proved the concept of on-power fuelling (i.e. putting new fuel into the reactor and taking old fuel out without having to shut the reactor down). The problem was that Douglas achieved on-power refueling for the first time on March 1 1970, but NPD (Nuclear Power Demonstrator, near Rolphton ON) had first achieved on-power re-fuelling 7 years earlier, on November 23 1963.

I still wanted to convey the significance of this achievement that people clearly felt, but needed to present objectively that NPD had done it first: in the end, I explained that NPD achieved it first but that it was a source of pride at Douglas Point, who proved it was successful in full-scale commercial power use (NPD was only a demonstrator). I fear that I may have mis-conveyed in class that I ended up distorting the truth in favor of the retirees I interviewed.

The biggest controversy I felt I faced was that the official AECL history portrayed Douglas Point as very much a failure, whereas from the interviews I conducted I got a sense of the retirees’ pride for Douglas Point’s successes. So, what to write? I had to present the truth of the matter, but I didn’t want to anger anyone, so I told it like it was but took a ‘glass is half full’ standpoint. In addition to the exhibit text:

Douglas Point attracted criticism in the beginning as repairs were costly in both finances and time and more than half of the time between 1968 and 1971, the generating station was ‘down.’ The system was delicate, shutting down frequently and easily

(which was objective), I placed a greater emphasis on the successes (discussed in paragraph 3). Did I do bad public history? Like Lauren mentioned in class, it feels bad to take someone’s memories and present them publicly as misinformed, so I tried to get around this by incorporating their thoughts into my text but not put down exactly what they said, so that I didn’t have to say it wasn’t true. It will be interesting to see, in the course of our Museum London interviews, how people’s oral testimony will diverge from the facts and what that will tell us, and how we’ll deal with it.

Just in conclusion, and briefly as this has come to be quite a long post, I’d like to point out again from Frisch’s “Memory, History and Cultural Authority” [2] that many assume oral history is a way to bypassing historical interpretation. From my digital history lab exercise this week, on disadvantages in using digital moving picture images, I also mentioned that with only snippets its possible to tell almost any story one wants. With using oral history either for the exhibit or its website, I think this will be important to have in mind, that people will often take oral history as definitive historical interpretation and that they might be wary that any sort of ‘clips’ are being used to tell the story the way we want it.

[1] Alessandro Portelli, “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” History Workshop Journal 12 (Autumn 1981), pp.96-107.
[2] Michael Frisch, “Introduction” and “Memory, History, and Cultural Authority,” A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), pp.xv-xxiv and 1-28

A Disappointing Post...

2006-10-20T20:56:00.000-04:00

After creating and publishing my website, which I thought would be an exercise in learning .html, I was disappointed that I had learned virtually none. I was able to build my webpage in Microsoft Publisher, which was quite user friendly and allowed me to build, what I thought, was a relatively useful and attractive site, but made it so easy that I really learned only Microsoft Publisher, and much html. Unfortunately, as Brian Downey commented, the html code also looks like "googli-moogli." After spending a large part of my day exploring Dreamweaver I've at least become a little more familiar with html as I'm working to republish my site with this program (and hopefully this will be useful later for our Museum London page). I was hoping tonight to be able to present a link to a new and beautiful page, but Dreamweaver isn't quite as easily navigable as Publisher, and I'm still having some problems to work out. For example, I have a really lovely home page, and a really lovely separate page with my military links, but I have yet to figure out how to attach them. So, for now, everyone will just have to wait in anticipation.

Digital Preservation

2006-10-20T12:34:00.000-04:00

At first I was disappointed in Brian Lavoie and Lorcan Dempsey's 13 Ways of Looking at: Digital Preservation with the solutions posed to describing digital preservation as an economically sustainable activity. According to the article economic sustainability could be attained by having an institutional budget for digital preservation or in terms of cost-recovery, by making the digitized records profitable by having some sort of fee system.

I found this contradictory to their description of digital preservation as a public good, that digital preservation made the records part of the permanent scholarly, cultural record and because they increased access by diminishing the notion of physical custody. I was disappointed the article didn’t provide (what I realized would be) a magical solution on how to make digital preservation economically sustainable without diminishing access, which I thought it was proposing. The more I thought about it, I realized that I had really been hoping for the impossible, and I think that Lavoie and Dempseymake a strong point (even if I feel it was a little misleading) by addressing the need for permanent on-going funding within institutions for digital preservation. This fit well with Lavoie and Dempsey's first point, that digital preservation is an on-going activity that it needs to be not an event but a continuing process.

It was interesting this week to see so many of our classes this week tie together: in digital history, the discussion of what is lost when historical sources are digitized; in public history, what is lost when oral history is transcribed; and in archives (at least for those of us who wrote our essays on the Nicholson Baker-Richard Cox newspapers to microfilm debate) what’s lost in preserving newspapers in microfilm format. In this weeks readings, Cohen pointed out in The Future of Preserving the Past that instead of worrying about long-term preservation historians should focus on acquiring the materials in jeopardy in the first place and think of shorter term preservation. However, in DeRuyver and Evans’ article Digital Junction, we see a somewhat different argument – that the amount of information online is overwhelming and although easier access to information is fine, methods and strategies for filtering, sorting, managing and synthesizing need to be developed as well. I found this article addressed more realistically than others digital preservation issues, as it it didn’t call for a stop to digitzing sources but it recognized the reality that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find sources online because there’s so much there, and that to make digitizing all of these sources really useful and accessible, that methods for filtering, sorting, managing etc. are going to become increasingly important, as important than digitizing the sources themselves.

It's clear from this week's readings that companies and institutions need to recognize the necessity for consistently budgeting for the digital preservation of historical material fit nicely with their first point and while digital preservation is ongoing, there's an equally significant need to develop program snd methods for filtering, sorting, managing and synthesizing digitzed sources to really make them accessible.

Digital Moving Images

2006-10-19T22:22:00.000-04:00

I’ll admit that the moving images lab assignment took me a while because I quickly became captivated by the historical clips that had been digitized, but even more so by the stunning quality of the high definition show-reels of Africa, the Amazon and the Andes on the BBC Moving Images site – I was really blown away by the high quality video that was available (this may have been partially due to the fact that I’m used to watching TV on a grainy 13” black and white set).

Anyway, moving images and digital history. I was familiar with using the CBC archives website , which I used a number of times as a jumping-off point to start research in undergrad (their Somalia Affair collection, for example ), and more recently, I used their ‘CANDU: The Canadian Nuclear Reactor’ collection for some background on the editorial I wrote for last week’s public history class. I am also interested in Holocaust research and was really surprised looking at the BBC website, who had film clips digitized of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945, that such clips existed as I had only been familiar with the photographic records.

Digital images are a great way to bring life to early historical topics – for example, the American Memory website’s collection of moving digital image clips on the Spanish-American Civil War, such as clips on the burial of the sailors from the Maine, the US Battleship Indiana, and war correspondents. These clips really brought alive for me a subject that seems so in past that it’s hard to imagine as real, and also made available clips for everyone from the Edison collection, that would have never been accessible to so many before the age of the Internet. Furthermore, nothing brought home to me more the tension of the Oka crisis than watching the uncensored clips, part of the CBC archive, so I believe that digital moving image clips not only have a great ability to breathe life into history but also an ability to aid understanding of some aspects of history.

Looking into this exercise, it was interesting the problems of working with digital images that occurred to me. First, digital moving images that are being ‘streamed’ can pose a problem related to internet speed – even with, what I thought was a decent internet connection, some of the videos were choppy and skipped; this could be avoided by having the files available to download (for example, the BBC and Prelinger do, but not the CBC). Download or streaming speed may pose as a barrier of accessibility, limiting the access of those who can’t afford the fastest internet connections.

Also, the file types that digital moving images are formatted in and presented online must constantly keep up with advances in technology, and may have to be reformatted over time to keep with the times. Or, in reverse, digital moving images are created and presented in the latest technology, and their viewers have to play catch-up – for example, to view some of the clips in QuickTime I had to download a more recent version, and I couldn’t view the clips in full screen because I would have needed to pay for a full version of QuickTime. It may be difficult for users and their computers to keep up with the software needs that the digital moving images require. Despite my best attempts, I still couldn’t get the clips on the Prelinger site to play on my computer.

Finally, digital moving images are large files and expensive to digitize. The result is that much of digital moving images available free online are only brief clips, ‘snippets’ of history. Or, like in the case of the BBC, the brief clips were previews of your purchase - to view the longer clips they must be paid for. For free, the historical clips the BBC had available were incredibly short: viewing the clips of September 11 2001, most of them were between 5 and 10 seconds, the longest at 45 seconds.

My concern about using digital moving image clips to tell digital history is that with the clips being short, and inherently lacking a lot of background, context and multiple opinions – by really only being a snippet – it’s easy to piece snippets together to tell whatever history someone may want, and could use clips to illustrate a history that had a significant bias or was even inaccurate.

Wikipedia in the News...

2006-10-17T21:29:00.000-04:00

This afternoon Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger announced the launch of an alternative online encyclopedia: Citizendium. Citizendium will replicate all of the articles on Wikipedia, and then evolve into a new encyclopedia when expert participants post their material. I think this is an exciting announcement, and builds on a lot of criticisms of Wikipedia that were discussed in our digital history class discussions (no role for the expert, reliability, accountability), and retains Wikipedia's strengths (free, open source), and it will be interesting to see what happens to the articles that we've created.

Housekeeping...

2006-10-16T23:05:00.000-04:00

Tonight I've been doing a little housekeeping in regards to my website, like setting up a StatCounter account, correcting spelling mistakes (how embarassing is it to spell genealogy wrong on your genealogy website?), giving it a title (somehow it was 'related links') etc. Being a beginner, this all took me an embarassingly long time (I know John Bonnet calls for historians to expand their repertoires to include the 3-D environment, but I've got a lot of ground to cover before I get there).

I also worked on a little advertising. Now, I'm doing this more as an experiment and knowing full well that my website's not exactly the best thing since sliced bread, but knowing how Google works, I'm working on having other more prominent and/or well established genealogy websites link to mine and I've done a few so far.

Thinking about genealogy and reflecting on this weeks digital history readings, I got pretty excited about the potential of OCR (optical character recognition) technology for family history researchers. It's tremendously costly and slow to transcribe data such as censuses to make it available and searchable online, and as a result most censuses online aren't searchable by name (yet) making them difficult to use (and much of the work of those that are have been done by volunteers). OCR technology, especially if improved, has huge potential for making genealogy records availalbe, such as military service files, censuses, ships passenger lists, voting lists, etc. I realize the limitations to OCR, especially that with older texts like censuses or ships passenger lists, there's a lot of error and still a lengthy and costly need for a human being to check it over- but the technology will no doubt improve and that presents an exciting future for genealogy researchers.

RSS Feeds for Public History

2006-10-12T23:23:00.000-04:00

In one week I’ve managed to go from not knowing what RSS feed was to becoming an RSS feed junkie. I installed FeedReader 3.0 and it came with a lot of feeds already set up (I customized what type of news feeds I wanted during the installation, i.e. world news, tech news, sports news etc…and then selected the sources, e.g. BBC, ABC etc. that I wanted). What I really like about it is that it brings the Internet to me, on my desktop, up to date and makes areas of interest that I’m following really easy to keep up on (for example, I added the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Genocide and History Concept feed). I also added everybody’s blogs and FeedReader makes it really fast and easy to read everybody’s new posts. After a few days though, I had to cutback on the feeds I was subscribing too because I was getting to be too much information popping up to read.

Now, part of the reason that I really like FeedReader and the idea of RSS feed is that I really like reading the news. This appears to be one of the best types of information that can be communicated through this medium because it’s instantaneous and its strength seems to be it’s ‘up to the minute-ness’. But for history, it doesn’t seem like the best way to communicate historical knowledge to the public. I was disappointed that the ROM museum feed was only museum news, but I found the BBC ‘On this day’ feed interesting and well suited to the medium because it gives you a little history tidbit that pops and makes history, in a way, part of your day. I think museums could possibly maximize this tool for advertising and especially for an upcoming exhibit; for example, if they gave out little tidbits similar to what BBC ‘On this day’ does about an artifact, with a photo, to capture interest.

I found that RSS feeds for blogs worked even better than news articles in conveying information because the blog content is condensed in my Feedreader program, whereas the other feeds only gave me a headline and brief caption, and a link opened up a browser window to the article. Regarding academic or history blogs, this seems like a highly efficient means of communicating with the public.

Evaluating Some History Web Pages and My Own Web Page

2006-10-12T22:42:00.000-04:00

History Wired

I really enjoyed the History Wired website and the way that it presented information. I liked that it was intuitive to navigate, that a window of information popped up a long the side as I moved my cursor over the different boxes, providing the immediate gratification that I think is important in presenting information online and S. McMillan also touches on in her article about History Wired. Like Molly mentioned in class, I also had a problem with pop-ups not being displayed, and I think that a lot of users could benefit from a message about that.

History Wired’s photos didn’t always show a lot of detail and weren’t always a quality image (for example, George Washington’s Camp Chest is pretty cool, but you can’t see inside of it; also, the Model of a Victorian House is really cool, but even when you view the zoomed image the picture quality’s not great). In "Digital History: The Raw and the Cooked" Daniel Cohen discusses an advantage of digital history as providing new tools and methods for engaging historical artifacts" and I found that History Wired could have taken advantage of this better, and the poor photos prevented me from learning more about the artifacts by not being able to closely examine them. I think if this weakness was improved upon the site could me more effective in presenting history by also allowing students to really engage the historical artifacts.

In class I was undecided about how I felt about the boxes of each exhibit object having their size correlating to the number of votes that they received. Although this provided a similar social experience as you would in a museum, I was concerned that ‘leveling the playing field’ for all information was perhaps a strength of the digital medium that History Wired was missing out on. The more that I think about it, even though there’s a possibility that people might miss some good stuff, they'd be more likely to miss it in a museum; I decided that I like this feature because you get to see what other people have liked and you’re still more likely to get to see things that you’d miss in a museum environment because of the website’s clear and concise layout.

Overall, I was impressed with the website, found it easy to navigate, clear and concise and found that it provided a lot of interesting information and was pleased that many of the ‘Learn more about this object’ options provided even more learning opportunities with a ‘Learn more!’ link. In presenting history, History Wired was very effective providing a brief amount of information on approx. 450 objects in a fun and easy way, and I think this would be a great site for someone interested in history and looking for a cool experience, or perhaps as a starting for somebody looking for an interesting history topic, but not for someone looking for scholarly, detailed or in-depth information with a lot of context.

National Geographic: Remembering Pearl Harbour

‘Remembering Pearl Harbour’ presents history in a number of ways a user can explore depending on how much time he/she has to invest in the site. If one has a lot of time and is looking for a multimedia experience, the ‘Attack Map’ provides a wealth of well-rounded historical information. The ‘Attack Map’ is a multimedia experience of maps, images and a time-line that the viewer can direct himself through chronologically. The map has a clock an map always present on the screen to make the story easier to follow and give context. Drawbacks of the map: the timeline was difficult to maneuver, I was frustrated that I couldn’t maximize the window, and once the narration was finished, the same annoying sound-effects continued to play.

Overall, the attack map provided an excellent chronology – if you had time to sit and go through it. If you don’t have the time, the website also includes a condensed chronology available in the resource section as well as other fact sheets ready in printer format that are quick and easy. I found these fact sheets helpful and informative, but I missed them the first time I looked at the site and the website could have been more effective at delivering history to someone in a hurry if these fact sheets in the 'History' section were more visible.

Another aspect of the National Geographic website was the ‘Memory Book.’ It was searchable, but I couldn’t pull up anybody’s story because didn’t know their name to search for. In this way, I and other users missed out on a lot of interesting personal accounts. What left a bad taste in my mouth about this site was that people’s postings weren’t regulated, so that on the same page I read somebody’s personal recollections of losing family during the attack, I also get a comment like: “i LOVE the japs and are soooooo glad they bombed pearl harbor.” While there’s a lot of history well presented on this site, I think the ‘Memory Book’ runs the risk of quickly turning people off the site.

Overall, the website provided a lot of information to the average reader about Pearl Harbour and has a real strength in that the information is available in either the ‘Attack Map’ or in the Resource section, depending on the time a user has or the type of experience the user wants. It’s very ‘public friendly’ in that the material is easy to read and understand, there’s not too much scholarly information and no primary documents, but rather attractive and flashy ‘cooked history' (as Dan Cohen describes in Digital History: The Raw and the Cooked).

Imaging the French Revolution

Unlike the previous two websites, this website contained scholarly information, and a lot of it. It has a really clear layout, and it was easy to see what was there and to navigate around the site.

The site included essays, images, and a discussion. With the images, I was impressed to find tags linking the images to relevant parts of the discussions and essays, that linked you the exact location of the reference in the document. The essays were introduced well, and I liked that they were available to download – so you didn’t have to do a lot of scrolling.

While the past two websites were a lot of fun, and they presented history well to a general public, this website will appeal to a scholar or researcher with the quality and depth of info. The website’s scholarly and academic content also doesn’t come at the cost of poor design or visual appeal. The only criticism I had of this website that there was no index to the discussion – you had to do a lot of scrolling to see what comments people had posted.

The Valley of the Shadow

Wow! I was really blown away by the amount of cool primary sources available on this website. The difference between The Valley and the other sites is that it’s a digital archive of primary sources, and as the authors of the webpage describe, the site’s more like a library than a single book. It provides no ‘cooked history’ but at the same time this isn’t the site’s purpose and this is made clear. The site is a great resource for research and is an excellent teaching tool - it also has a teacher’s guide providing a lot of different activities to build history students’ ‘history skills.’ The only criticism I had was that the layout hampers the site’s effectiveness: although the site introduces itself as detailing life in two communities, from the layout of the website, these 2 communities aren’t kept distinctly separate in the layout.

Aurore! The Mystery of the Martyred Child

Unlike the other websites (with the exception of Valley of the Shadow), Aurore! is designed for an experience of historical research. There’s a multitude of primary documents, and although a general narrative is provided to outline the story, there’s no interpretation of the documents given, no ‘cooked history.’ If this website was advertised to the general public to check out, it would be frustrating because of the massive amount of documents to review – it's almost entirely raw history; however, the website is clear in presenting itself as an experience of history research, and as an educational experience it’s a great site, with a wide range of primary sources covering a multifaceted issue, in both French and English. Stephane Levesque in "Discovering the Past: Engaging Canadian Stuents in Digital History" discusses the potential that digital history has to offer "powerful tools for inquiry based learning in the classroom" by engaging students to "play the game" and the Aurore! website is a great illustration of digitial history's ability to act as a learning tool.

In the end, I enjoyed looking at all the sites and they were each effective in presenting their own kind of history in their own way. This exercise made it obvious how diverse 'digital history' is and how it's a broad term. This has led me to believe that a critical element of a history webpage would be to make the intended audience and the goal of the webpage very clear.

If I was casually interested in finding out about the Aurore case, I would have found the Aurore! The Mystery of the Martyred Child website frustrating because a condensed ('cooked') history isn’t easily accessible and I would be quick to criticize the site; however, what I would be looking for wasn’t what the site was trying to offer, and as long a site's audience and goal is made clear a digital history website can present history effectively.

I was disappointed that as a whole none of the websites from what I saw related their page specifically to any Canadian or American curriculum objectives or provided any specific guidelines for possible lessons plans, which I think could have brought a lot more attention and use to these webpages. (An exception may be the Aurore! website which had a 'teachers' section that required registration).

Finally, I have published the webpage that I’ve been working on – although it could still use a better title. It’s designed to help users research their family history in Ontario online, by linking the user to free online resources that also have digital material available (i.e. they don’t only point you to where you can find the paper copy of a source). I’d welcome any advice to improve the site, and I’ve mailed the url to family and friends who’d expressed interest and am awaiting their feedback as well.

Reading Agre’s ‘Designing Genres for New Media’ I found myself mentally reviewing the website that I had built. Agre claims that in designing genres for new media, the slogan is to “do more” for users by picking a community, exploring how existing genres fit into existing activities and relationships, and then consider how a new genre might “do more” for the people than the ones they already use. I had, although unknowingly, followed a lot of this advise constructing my website, already being familiar with a lot of genealogy resources online I recognized a need in this community, and ended up doing less, instead of doing more: there’s already so many resources available online that they’re overwhelming, and I wanted to create something simpler and with more direct results by weeding out web-pages that didn’t provide results free or digitally.

I realized that I fit with Agre’s criticism that most designing for new media “jump directly to layout and graphics and bullets and hyperlinks” … to be honest, this is exactly what I did, and although I had asked myself previously ‘who are these pages for?’ ‘what are they trying to accomplish?’ I had really considered some other important questions Agre poses, such as ‘how much or how often will your page change?’ or, more importantly – ‘how will people hear about your page?’ (I’ve decided that the page will change when I find new links to add, and in the future if there’s enough links to warrant new categories of links, but I’m still thinking of a good reply to the advertising question – right now I’m relying on work of mouth).

On Granatstein, Rosenzweig & Thelen, and Lowenthal

2006-10-05T17:27:00.000-04:00

J.L. Granatstein’s “Who Killed Canadian History?”[1] initially made me feel guilty for choosing to build the website that I did – a website to research family genealogy and people’s personal heritage, a sort ‘warm and fuzzy’ (to use Rosenzweig and Thelen’s term[2]) history experience that’s already so popular, that hunting ancestors in like a national sport (to use Lowenthal’s term[3]). Instead of helping Canadians think of Canada as a whole and focusing on our national history, I’m helping to kill Canadian history by helping people experience their personal and firsthand history. This focus on social and cultural history, not a more traditional national historical narrative and moving away from more traditional political, economic, and diplomatic history is what Granatstein argues is essentially killing Canadian history.

Despite my website, I felt myself largely agreeing with Granatstein as I read. I could identify with his criticism of schools who barely teach Canadian history and of Canadian universities, many of whom fail to mandate that Canadian history must be studied to graduate. I was fortunate in high-school to have excellent history teachers who taught Canadian (and all history) well, but the curriculum didn’t leave much room for it; at the University of Waterloo I needed only 1 credit in Canadian History to graduate (I had to take one term of either Pre or Post-Confederation History). As Kris pointed out in discussion on Wednesday, more traditional history classes – military and political – at university are gaining popularity; I experienced this as well at UW, as the Canadian military history classes I took were among the largest and most popular of history courses in undergrad. But Granatstein argues this trend is going too slow.

I will admit that reading Granatstein also made me jealous of (I’ll admit it) the strong sense of nationalism in the United States, which I feel is lacking here in Canada. Granatstein criticizes federal multiculturalism, ignorance, and progressive education as preventing immigrants from being Canadians, and I think this also prevents a strong sense of what it means to be a Canadian in the non-immigrant community.

When I read Rosenzweig and Thelen’s “The Presence of the Past” I was really surprised and taken aback by the results that they found in their investigation of how Americans understand and use their past. Because I felt that their definitions of history-related activities was so broad (e.g. taking photos) and because of my previously-admitted to jealousy, I had a hard time taking in that so many Americans, and especially white Americans, put such a personal emphasis on their national historical narrative, making it their own, that this was more significant to them then a larger national historic narrative. Once this had sunk in, I found myself also agreeing with and finding a lot of sense in their conclusion that the past is present in the lives of many Americans, and that encountering the past enables them to root themselves in families and root their families in the world.

These two conflicting views (of Rosenzweig/Thelen and Granatstien) make quite a difficult job for public historians, and public historians in training. But the more I thought about it the more I felt that a balance between the two is what’s key, that too much focus in either direction is a bad thing. As Lowenthal argues in “The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History” history can create patriots, cultural identity, and unity but this strong sense of nationalism also makes the group more dangerous. On the other hand, too little of a strong national historical narrative can make, as Granatstein says, a culturally illiterate society without a sense of unity.

The more I though about the relationship between the two types of history – one a more national and traditionally focused on politics and military, and one more personal and firsthand, relating to social and cultural history – the more I felt that they can augment each other in an individual’s experience with history. People can root themselves in family, but to root their families in the world is more significant if one’s aware of a broader national historical narrative. And the reverse is also true: a broader historical narrative is more significant if one can place within it their personal history. So in the end I’m unapologetic about building the website that I did.

[1] JL Granatstein, “What History? Which History?” and “Professing Trivia: The Academic Historians,” Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1998), pp.1-18 and 51-78.

[2] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, “Introduction” and “The Presence of the Past,” The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.1-36.

[3] David Lowenthal, “Introduction” and “Heritage Ascendant,” The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), pp.xii-xvii and 1-30.

Douglas Point Historical Plaque

2006-10-05T14:42:00.000-04:00

I posted a blog entry a while back announcing that the Canadian Nuclear Society, in partnership with the Ontario Heritage Trust, would be unveiling a historical plaque at the Bruce Power Visitors Centre, commemorating Douglas Point, its many achievements as Canada's first large-scale power reactor and CANDU prototype, and the dedicated people behind its design, construction, commissioning and operation. I've also blogged about the Douglas Point exhibit that I worked on this past summer and it seemed fitting after all that talk to post a photo of the commemoration.

Building my own webpage

2006-10-05T00:19:00.000-04:00

I’m really excited to get my website up and share what I’ve been working on. Unfortunately it’s not up yet (a basic version is finished but I haven’t figured out publishing yet) … but I’d like to write about it anyway.

It took me a while to get started because I spend a lot of time thinking about what sort of site I wanted to put together, what I could do that would be good digital history and good public history. I was torn between three ideas – a website about Canadian nuclear history, an area that I’m interested in; a website providing links to educational resources on the Holocaust, because I feel passionate about Holocaust education; and finally a website with helpful genealogical research links. In the end I decided that Canadian nuclear history wouldn’t attract a lot of interest (I’m still waiting for someone to add an edit to my Douglas Point Wikipedia article) and that Holocaust education was too significant of an issue, and one that I didn’t want to mess up with my ‘beginner’ website, so I think I’ll save that for a future project.

I went with the genealogical website for a number of reasons. First, as Lauren pointed out on her Del.icio.us account, a lot of genealogical research websites charge a fee to view their records, and I’ve found some to be misleading about how many are available without charge. Second, I’ve also found it frustrating doing genealogical research online that a lot of websites sound really helpful until you realize that they’re just pointing you in the direction of the physical records, which aren’t available online. Third, there’s such a tremendous amount of content on the web devoted to researching family history that genealogical research can appear a daunting task, especially for beginners.

Finally, although I had started planning this webpage before I completed the Rosenzweig and Thalen reading for Public History ‘The Presence of the Past’, the reading reinforced this choice that I had made. Rosenzweig and Thalen present overwhelming evidence that Americans regularly participate in past-related activities, and that the public tends to reject nation-centered histories and prefers history that’s personal and first-hand. As Rosenzweig and Thalen conclude that the past is present in the lives of many I hope that my web-page can assist people in encountering the past and bringing this past present.

I created my web-page (which still needs a good title) to try to simplify doing Ontario family history research online. My page contains links to web-pages that have quality content available online and free. So far I have a small number of quality links in four categories: military links, Ontario census data, historic atlases, and miscellaneous. Many of my links related to research that the Archives class has been doing, but I’m hoping over time to build on the number of links the web-page has.

Hopefully I’ve applied well some of Cohen and Rosenzweig general principles of design and once the site is up I’d like a bit of feedback if anybody has any good suggestions. My main page links to separate pages for each category of links (e.g. historical atlases) has its own page with links to historical atlases. I think that his layout makes it easy for visitors to understand where they are, maneuver the web-site and know the location of the historical materials they want.

I’m trying to make my web-page attractive and user-friendly to beginning researchers. Over the Thanksgiving weekend (if I get my webpage up) I hope to show it to family and eventually get some feedback from them. (It’s also a little self-serving that if my relatives start doing family research as well, that will move my research along faster).

After posting previous blogs advocating that research should be made available more freely, I realized that this was rather hypocritical of me, that I’d worked on family history for a number of years and not really shared it with very many of my relatives. In the future I hope to be able to build on the webpage and share my family research, but for the meantime I’ve created a Flickr account with a lot of old family photos and documents.

Again, I apologize for writing the post before I have a link available to the web-site, but I hope to figure it out this weekend (the problem is that I'd rather not put it up with my Western account, so that it can last longer that my time here; the Google pages that are available don't seem to have a way to upload webpages ready to publish, and I've created my in Microsoft Publisher).

[1] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, “Introduction” and “The Presence of the Past,” The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp.1-36.

The Polyglot Historian

2006-10-03T08:08:00.000-04:00

Manan Ahmed’s The Polyglot Manifesto (I and II) hit home the point that the modern historian needs to be a polyglot – competent in many languages – to engage with the public and communicate effectively. Manan’s idea that historians should be interpreters or translators not only of the past but between humanities and the digital world is idealistic, imposing on historians an even larger workload and necessitating that they be tech savvy as well. But as John Unsworth discusses in Vernacular Computing, the cultural record is being digitized with or without historians, and while commerce and government have responded quickly and enthusiastically to using the Internet, education and scholarship need to play catch-up. I believe that although Manan’s role for historians is idealistic, in today’s digital age it’s also realistic to expect historians to communicate with modern tools. This is part of the reason that I’m excited to get started on my own webpage and learn some html.

Playing a large part in the role of the historian described by Manan, I agree with Daniel Cohen (Professors Start Your Blogs) that it is a historian’s duty to share with the public and reach a wide audience with research that’s often made possible with public funding. With the blogosphere doubling in size every 200 days, and currently 100 times bigger than it was three years ago [1], an academic blog seems like a suitable outlet to share research with the public and blogs fit with the fast-paced technological nature of today’s age as a method of reaching a larger public audience.

I believe that the advantages of an academic blog are many: as Cohen discusses in Professors Start Your Blogs, a blog can act as a platform to frame discussions, point to resources of value, and (as David Glenn’s article Scholars Who Blog illustrates) reach wide audiences rapidly, and disprove misinformation.

Does blogging enhance or endanger an academic reputation? This weeks readings regarding the Juan Cole case and the issue of careers and blogging fit well with a Career Services session I attended Monday afternoon, where we were advised to be careful with the information about us online, whether it be a blog, a Facebook or a MySpace account, as employers have been known to look into what’s online about job candidates. So in asking myself does blogging enhance or endanger an academic reputation, I think that the answer has to depend on the writer, as whatever one writes will affect their professional image. As Cohen discusses, like any other form of writing, the style can be professional and the product does not have to be anonymous. [2] I believe (and hope because I have my own) that a blog can enhance one’s professional image as another example of publication, only reaching a wider and more immediate audience. I believe the best historian blog would remain strictly academic, and a strictly academic blog would work to enhance a professional image and should be evaluated as an additional asset in promotion and tenure decisions. As companies can use blogs to enhance their corporate image,[3] why should historians not use blogs to enhance their academic image?

As a final comment, in Joshua Porter's Social Networks are Killing E-mail, I was discouraged to find out that e-mail is losing ground to context specific messaging, for example, within MySpace. Porter asks ‘why e-mail outside the context that we’re in?’ but for me I’d rather keep e-mail out of the context that I'm working in and keep it in its own context.

[1] Sifry, David. “State of the Blogosphere, August 2006,” Sifry’s Alerts (7 Aug 2006).

[2] Cohen, Daniel J. “Professors, Start Your Blogs,” dancohen.org (21 Aug 2006).

[3] For example, Quixtar's "The Real Quixtar Blog: An Insider's Perspective" http://www.realquixtarblog.com/

Statcounter and Programming Languages

2006-10-02T19:05:00.000-04:00

I’m excited to have set up my Technorati and StatCounter accounts - because I thought I had it set up correctly last week and realized that I hadn’t put the html code in the right spot, and second because I really enjoy that the StatCounter account monitors unique visitors and returning visitors, instead of just having a ‘hits’ counter (like the one that shows up below my right hand column). I’ll be interested in seeing over a longer term how many people read the blog and any trends that emerge. (So far, Sunday and Monday aren’t looking too different.)

Also, I worked through the lab exercise on Programming Languages on Friday. I’ve neglected to blog about it for 2 reasons, the first that I’m not sure what to write and the second because I’ve been more excited about planning a website for this week’s exercise. To be honest, a third reason would be that I had a difficult time with this exercise, and had to review it several times and get some extra help before understanding. For some reason, and it seems so much simpler now, but the ‘selection tutorial’ with ‘if’ ‘else’ and ‘end if’ stumped me at first because it took a while before I realized that ‘else’ was just like ‘otherwise.’

I also didn’t really realize what a programming language was until I started this exercise. I knew that there were lots of ones and zeros, and that there was a language called C++ but until the exercise I didn’t realize that the programming language, like C++ bridged the gap between the human programmer and the computer’s ones and zeros. It’s kind of amazing that the different control structures from the exercise – selection, loops, subprograms and parameters are the building blocks of all programs.

Technology and Material Culture

2006-09-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

I’m interested in the comment Caroll Pursell Jr. makes in “The History of Technology and the Study of Material Culture,” about how most science museums “misappropriate history to serve the ideology of growth and progress. Pursell gives the example of the National Air and Space Museum’s goal: “to encourage young people to aspire to great deeds of technological innovation to keep America great.” [1] Reflecting again on my work experience from this past summer and the exhibit I worked on [left], on Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station, we probably could have stated the exhibit’s goal as “to encourage young people to aspire to great deeds of technological innovation to keep Canada great.” The exhibit certainly presented the idea that the station represented not only a ‘great deed of technological innovation’ but that it was a sign of growth and progress in the Canadian nuclear industry as well as in the development of nuclear power for peaceful purposes. I think that although it can’t and shouldn't always be the case that a science museum appropriates history to serve the ideology of growth and progress, in some cases it’s appropriate (and I feel that the subject of the Douglas Point exhibit was specific enough that it would be appropriate).

Some of our artifacts (for example, “north fuelling machine ‘C’ RAM head”) were difficult to explain to those unfamiliar with the workings of the station's reactor fuelling arm and their explanation alone proved challenging, let alone trying to be a good public historian and explain, as Pursell discusses, the artifacts' meaning and politics. I tried my best and hope I was successful. Reflecting on this summer and looking forward to this year’s innovation/invention project with Museum London, I hope this is a skill that I can improve upon.

[1] Carroll W Pursell Jr., “The History of Technology and the Study of Material Culture,” from Material Culture: A Research Guide (University Press of Kansas), pp.113-26.

Nearby History and Material Culture

2006-09-27T20:54:00.000-04:00

David Kyving and Myron Marty’s “Nearby History – Exploring the Past Around You” has had me reflecting a bit on this past summer that I spent as the curatorial assistant at a small-town heritage house. Kyving and Marty define ‘nearby history’ explaining that a “careful examination of what happened to particular families and communities can clarify and illustrate the broader picture.”[1] Developing my tour of the Paddy Walker House and planning summer programming over the past two summers, I tried to build on this idea, although unknowingly. The Walker House is a former inn and tavern (later ran as a boarding house) that was established in 1850 by early settlers in the Kincardine (formerly Penetangore) community. The picture above on the left is the Walker House (behind the lighthouse) in the 1880s or 1890s; the picture below on the right is at present. I tried to use the history of the Walker family, who owned and often ran the house for almost a century, to tell bigger stories – trends in immigration, early industry and life in our region, different family and gender roles, etc. The stories of the Walker family and other managers (and their photos and artifacts) added a personal touch to otherwise impersonal history. Hopefully I was successful at presenting history from the ‘bottom up.’

Especially due to the fact that the Walker House has been in the progress of being rebuilt and established as a heritage house since a devastating fire in 1995, spending the small amount of time that I did there made me well aware of funding issues, and the often accompanying question of why small heritage houses matter. This is a question that I think “Nearby History – Exploring the Past Around You” begins to answer: not only does nearby history give on a feeling of being part of something larger and longer lasting than a moment, but to help paint the bigger picture, and with a uniquely personal touch.

In “Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard,” Laurel Ulrich comments that objects create the memorialization of their families.[2] As a heritage house named after the family that established it, it’s not surprising that at the Walker House we used numerous objects of material culture, from their chamber pots, to their cooking implements, to their underclothes, to memorialize the Walker family – both the day to day lives of its members and also their greater contribution to the town. This was especially due to the fact that we had quite few photos of the family.

Thomas Schlereth’s “Material Culture and Culture Research”[3] touched on a number of less obvious issues we faced at the Walker House displaying material culture. To start, it was almost impossible to verify past owners and the provenance of our artifacts, making it difficult to tie the story of the family, and the building, to anything larger. (As an example, we had an old CNR lantern on display and also knew that a lot of railway workers had stayed at the inn; however, not knowing the history of the lantern made trying to tell a bigger story by connecting Walker House history to railway and industry history seem like a stretch).

Another challenge that Schlereth points to is that it is impossible to really know how big the gap is between the physical past and reality and that objects that exist aren’t necessarily representative of their makers and users. This is an issue that the Walker House faces in the future as they plan to refinish rooms to different time periods and I find myself wondering if how representative the artifacts we have on display are of life in the past and the Walker family.

Evidential qualities that our objects did have, as a strength compared to documentary evidence, was that they provided wider representativeness of the past – not just of the inn’s owners and managers who show up in formal documents – but of family life, patrons and lodgers. (As an example, property deeds and census records told the story of the inn’s owner, but kitchen utensils and cooking implements told a wider story of life at the house).

Another strength Schlereth touches on is that material culture allowed us to begin to put ourselves into the skins of people from the past. Although Schlereth doesn’t touch on communicating history with children, I often found myself trying to share our history with kids and material culture (especially items they could use and touch) communicated history to them more effectively than documents could.

[1] David E Kyvig and Myron A Marty, “Why Nearby History,” Nearby History: Exploring the Past Around You, 2nd ed. (Walnut Creek, Ca.: Altamira Press, 2000), pp.1-14.

[2] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Hannah Barnard’s Cupboard,” from The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), pp.108-41 and 439-45.

[3]Thomas J Schlereth, “Material Culture and Cultural Research,” from Material Culture: A Ressearch Guide (University Press of Kansas, 1985), pp.1-34.

Digital Maoism and GroupThink

2006-09-26T16:32:00.000-04:00

In Jaron Lanier’s article Digital Maoism, Lanier discusses the resurgence of the idea “the collective is all wise.” His problem lies not with what Wikipedia is, but the way that is has come to be regarded and used, and how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. Lanier points out that collectives can be stupid, as stupid as any individual and in important cases even stupider. This argument reminded me of the concept of ‘groupthink’ from political science and psychology classes I took in undergrad where groups reinforce each others bad ideas (or defined on Wikipedia as a phenomenon where group members agree to pursue goals with which the individual members do not agree and that individuals sometimes produce better solutions to certain problems than groups of those same individuals). I was left feeling cynical after this weeks readings, but I was uplifted by Lanier’s argument that both kinds of intelligence – collective and individual – are essential, so I personally think that it's balance that's key.

Three Stars and a Chili Pepper (If You're Lucky)

2006-09-26T08:10:00.000-04:00

Joseph Ugoretz’s article Three Stars and a Chili Pepper makes the point of using the increasing presence of social software tools online as teaching tools to evaluate info, develop criteria for judging sources, and to learn how to judge and apply ‘reputation’ points. Although this is a good idea and a way of looking at the situation as a glass ‘half full’, I don’t see it fitting clearly in with curriculum, and already busy teachers may not (but hopefully they will develop them over time on their own).

I think websites like “RateMyProfessor.com” highlight a need to have ‘course and professor reviews’ available to students, who – though in some cases want the easiest courses - want to choose the best courses and get the most out of their money. Even though I was surprised by the number of positive comments on the website, I believe that in the long run the site attracts more disgruntled students than satisfied students. If no other tools exist for finding out student feedback on courses and professors, students will go to “RateMyProfessor.ca” out of necessity. Although I’m sure it would still be used if other methods of making feedback available existed, I believe that it wouldn’t be as popular and hopefully not so hurtful. I think the fact that “RateMyTeacher.com” exists, where elementary and high school students can rate their teachers, points to the fact that it would continue to exist even if other methods of giving feedback and having it publicly available existed, because students at these levels don’t get to pick their teachers so the website can’t be used much to help them pick good courses; although students have more room to maneuver in their highschool curriculums, they certainly don’t get any choice in elementary school.

Del.icio.us: Tagging Some Useful Sources

2006-09-26T07:53:00.000-04:00

I’ve spent some time tagging some useful websites onto my del.icio.us account related to Holocaust education, an aspect of public history that I’m interested in. For most of the sites that I added, the tags I added were subject related – usually “holocaust” and “education,” and I tried to be systematic about applying the same tags to similar sites.

I found myself at first confused about the purpose of Del.icio.us: it seemed to me it was just a fancier way of having a “favourites” folder in Internet Explorer, and I found myself in some cases just copying sites from my “favourites” to my Del.icio.us account. I realize that an advantage to Del.icio.us is the ‘social bookmarking’ aspect of the site, but I found this disappointing. Users who had tagged sites of interest to me, in this case Holocaust education sites, lead me to new resources I hadn’t discovered, but the majority had next to nothing to do with Holocaust education (I did find 150 great tips and tricks for cleaning, and the rules for playing dreidel). I decided to do a comparison with Google, and found that entering a search for “holocaust education” produced far more relevant and quality sites and at a much faster speed than what I found on Del.icio.us. I found myself agreeing with Chris Sherman’s article “What’s the big deal with social searches?” and his point that socially mediated searches will never be as comprehensive as algorithmic search. I realize that social tagging was supposed to make it easier to search and discover, but I found the opposite, when I was looking for something specific, but had I just been looking for interesting sites, I found a lot.

Taking into account some of social bookmarking’s flaws (highlighted in the article “Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review”) like overambiguous tags, overpersonalized tags and inexact tags, I may have found more success if I tried a multitude of different searches with the same intent (finding Holocaust education sites), but I found myself asking, why take the time when I can just use Google? In response to the question, ‘why should historians worry about tagging and social software in general?’ I felt like this exercise made it concerning to me that valuable sites will be overlooked and become lost.

I was disappointed with Del.icio.us, and thought, maybe subject matter of such a serious nature isn’t the sort of thing that tends to be bookmarked on a site called “Del.icio.us” and thought maybe I’d have more luck searching for something more popular and related to pop culture. And I thought, I might as well use the Mary-Kate and Ashley example again. I was surprised when I had the same result … that I couldn’t find any good fan websites on MK&A (but a lot of unusual articles and blogs) by searching other people’s tags (this included trying a multitude of variations on their names, both separate and together, with and without last name); again I had better luck using Google.

I felt disappointed that Del.icio.us fell short as an effective tool for digital historians, and I was also disappointed that I couldn’t organize or categorize my tagged sites (maybe this was just user-error). Although they organized automatically by date, I couldn’t separate them into different categories, so piano sheet music that I saved was alongside internship information which I didn’t find very effective.

I think tagging and folksonomy could be harnessed as effective tools for digital historians if some methods for improving tag systems to allow better tags could be implemented. Perhaps this could be done by controlling the vocabulary of tags, even though this would detract from the ‘bottoms up’ nature of social tagging, I think this would ultimately make it a better (more reliable and time-efficient) research tool for historians.

Flyboys

2006-09-25T14:06:00.000-04:00

Over the weekend I saw the new film Flyboys, which portrays the adventures of young American pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille who volunteered to fight alongside the French before the United States entered World War One. Flyboys got me thinking about big-budget film as a medium for public history. My first thoughts were negative: the film has a pro-American bias, is probably full of historical inaccuracies and distortions and will fill people with incorrect and biased thoughts about the Lafayette Escadrille, especially because the film advertises as being "inspired by a true story." So this led me to ask myself, and not just regarding Flyboys, is it better to have no film at all rather than one has historical inaccuracies? After watching the film, I was left thinking to myself that I wanted to learn more about the Lafayette Escadrille and the war in the air; I heard other people in the theatre also wanting to find out more. So I think the answer to my previous questions is yes, assuming that the inaccuracies aren't substantial or harmful, because films like Flyboys stir up an interest in history among the general population who otherwise would quite likely not care at all. These big-budget movies not only have the ability to inspire mass audiences to be interested in history, but they also open a lot of opportunties for discussion. I was impressed by the Flyboys message board online and the historical discussions that were there, about inaccuracies in the film, reading suggestions for research and a multitude of posts by aviation enthusiasts.

Del.icio.us

2006-09-23T17:30:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post: I've added a blog entry ("Google Help") that I wrote last week, and thought I posted but had only saved it as a draft. Second, I'm (in the midst of) figuring out Del.icio.us and realizing that I can share my tagged sites. I was looking around at internship information, to add to my Del.icio.us account, and found quite a few in the United States that have application due dates coming up (October 16th), if anybody's interested.

Learn Some Computer Science: Algorithms

2006-09-22T23:46:00.000-04:00

I worked through the module on algorithm, as last week I accidentally started with data structures. Sorting algorithms seemed pretty basic, and I thought I was in for an easy ride until I started working through algorithm analysis – that took me a little bit longer – and finally order notation – that took me quite a while before I felt like I had my head wrapped around the basics of it.

In terms of determining which algorithm was the best in terms of time and space efficiency, time efficiency seems to me to be far more significant than space, because computers have so much hard drive space now.

Algorithms – sets of instructions for solving a problem(s) – seem to be the building blocks of a computer program, telling the computer how to solve specific problems or tasks, like sorting or searching for a specific result. Thinking to applications of algorithms to work as a historian would be endless, because there’s so many computer programs with so many functions. The examples from the module deal specifically with sorting, and so the most basic application I could see to doing history research would be programs doing searches for dates or ordering databases by dates, but basically any sort of sorting from databases that would take too much time by humans.

I also thought it was interesting that each set of steps in the module ended with the final step: stop. This seemed obvious, but I realized it wouldn’t be obvious to something that wasn’t ‘thinking,’ and the set of instructions, the algorithm, would have to be extremely unequivocally defined. Now, knowing more about algorithms it makes this old joke seem so much funnier:

Programmer Dies in the shower.

Shampoo bottle found clutched in his hands with instructions: Lather, Rinse, Repeat...

Why Study History?

2006-09-22T16:45:00.000-04:00

This week’s Public History readings got me thinking about why I study history and why studying history is important. I’ll admit to being a little more ‘right’ leaning, that I like to think that I’m searching for the ‘truth,’ but I realize at the same time that this is impossible, that it will always be interpretation, so one may ask why bother? I agree with Jenkins, that someone should bother because even though it’s interpretation, some accounts will be dominant, and knowledge is power. This made me reflect on Jenkins statement, that “those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future,” because people need to root themselves.

I can identify with the idea that history is the way people create identities, but I also use my identity to fuel my interest in history. I try to take my personal family connections and relate them to an area of history, especially if I need a little more motivation to get ‘into’ a certain subject. For example, thinking about my family connection to WW2, that my great-uncle flew bomber planes over Germany, helped motivate me to be interested in the history of the RCAF and RAF (his squadron is pictured on the right). Perhaps a better example, because I would have been interested in World War 2 history with a family connection or not, would be early Canadian history, or very local history (local to my hometown) – these are areas that I found myself not particularly interested in or motivated to research, but when I needed to be, it really helped for me to make family connections to these areas. I had a hard time keeping interest in early Bruce County history, until I really thought about my family history and that my great great grand-parents had settled in the area (the family moved away long ago, but now my immediate family has moved back to the area).

Although I see the significance of studying history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, I don’t think this is the best argument for studying history, because I don’t think the world really learns from mistakes made in the past – there’s still horrific wars, genocide, repression etc. A lot of times I like studying history just for the sake of history itself, because stuff was ‘neat.’ But I still feel like the significance of history goes beyond the idea that people need to root themselves and create identities, that there’s a significance alone in trying to best put the pieces of the past together. I wanted to look into answering this question further, so I could give a really good explanation when, inevitably it will come up when I’m with family and relatives at Thanksgiving that they ask, “why study history?”

I lucked out finding Peter Stearns’ article for the American Historical Association, “Why Study History?” who emphasizes that history helps us understand people and societies – it helps us think about and analyze how societies function, which is necessary to run our own lives. Stearns also asserts that history helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be – to understand causes of change enables us to understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite changes. Stearns also touches on history providing identity, contributing to moral understanding, and good citizenship, but I also really liked that he also highlighted that “history well told is beautiful,” that history serves a purpose on the level of human understanding, providing perspectives on human life and society. So now I feel a little bit better prepared for Thanksgiving.

Good History?

2006-09-22T12:09:00.000-04:00

My first reaction to Noel Stowe’s Public History Curriculum: Illustrating Reflective Practice (The Public Historian 28:1 [Winter 2006], pp.39-66) was relief – that I done at least a decent job of explaining to people over the last year what public history is (and I’m working on memorizing Stowe’s definition, just so I can give at least a more succinct explanation). I’m also excited, from class, about my new found confidence in proclaiming myself a public historian (although maybe I’ll add ‘in training’) and also that in Canada right now history has a large audience, thanks to the baby boomers.

Thinking back to our Wednesday discussion about public historians possibly not being able to be as revolutionary as academic historians because they’ve been hired on by a certain company that they have to please and thinking about what Keith Jenkins said, that history is never for itself, always for someone [“What History Is,” Re-thinking History (London: Routledge, 2003), ch.1] made me reflect on research that I did this past summer for an exhibit on Canada’s first full scale nuclear power plant. Our exhibit was being funded by a nuclear power plant, and reflecting positively on the nuclear industry in Canada was at the foremost of my thoughts while working on the project for a number of reasons: to show appreciation to the company, not to endanger further funding opportunities, not to ‘cause a stir’ in our very pro-nuclear town, and out of respect for so many of our visitors and volunteers who are/were employed in the nuclear industry.

Although there weren’t any areas that I felt I had to ‘cover-up’ to protect its image, thinking back I certainly made decisions about research avenues not to pursue, avenues that might put the early nuclear industry and the site in a bad light. (For example, possible links between sharing Canadian nuclear technology and countries like India then developing nuclear weapons, roots of the nuclear industry from developing atomic weapons, and very high life-time radiation doses early workers in the industry received). I could justify this decision because we were certainly dealing with space limits, and I didn’t have room to pursue these tangents, and they were in fact tangents. So I find myself now reflecting, asking myself, did I do bad history? If it was an essay, not a public exhibit, I certainly would have explored the issues. But to me, these issues really were tangents that didn’t fit within the larger themes of the exhibit (possibly with the exception of the high radiation doses, which could fit into the operation of the site), and their omission isn’t causing me to lose sleep at night.

It leads me to wonder, however, if I was doing research for an exhibit on a topic with a ‘darker past’, that possibly would have issues or events that would make an employer look bad, what would I do? For example, I think, what if the exhibit was not about Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station, but the Chalk River (Nuclear) Laboratory [photo], that experienced a partial melt-down of it’s NRX reactor core in 1952? It was a significant event, so an exhibit that overlooked it would me making, on my opinion, a serious omission. But at the same time, “melt-down” doesn’t reflect well on Chalk River at all. To me, this is a case of a ‘half full’ glass instead of a ‘half empty’ glass. I feel the exhibit would have to make reference to the meltdown, and subsequent damage, to be objective, but it could also make reference to the good that came out of it: I met with an operator who was at Chalk River during the meltdown, and he emphasized that it had been a valuable experience because a lot of lessons were learned that made future reactor design significantly safer. I’m hoping, though, that from this course I’ll learn more on how to present history in this sort of situation and other cases that are more complex.

As an aside, I’m excited to announce that this coming Wednesday, the 27th, the Canadian Nuclear Society, in partnership with the Ontario Heritage Trust, will be unveiling an historical plaque at the Bruce Power Visitors Centre, commemorating Douglas Point, its many achievements as Canada's first large-scale power reactor and CANDU prototype, and the dedicated people behind its design, construction, commissioning and operation

On a Stable Wikipedia, Historian’s Responsibility to the Public, and Linkocracy

2006-09-22T11:42:00.000-04:00

Rosenzweig states that because Wikipedia challenges the authority of professional historians it can’t be ignored, and by being concerned about professionals losing their authority (and burning out trying to keep articles in their areas of expertise accurate) and by Wikipedia’s increasing influence, I was excited by Giles news that Wikipedia planned to introduce a ‘stable’ version of each entry. After tagging an article as ‘stable’ when it reaches a specific quality threshold, further edits can be made to a separate ‘live’ version which will replace the tagged version when it’s determined appropriate. I feel that this best takes advantage of all Wikipedia’s assets (its strongest I feel is its accessibility) while making it more stable and credible, a ‘legitimate’ source to cite, depending on how they determine the ‘specific quality threshold’. I would like to see this determined by experts in the field, versus user ratings, as I believe that this sort of collaborative project is best lead by experts, which also means that there is somebody to be held accountable. Although I don’t think Wikipedia is a realistic model for professional scholarly collaboration, I think this ‘stable’ version would be a step in a better direction.

This week’s readings also made it apparent that maybe I should be more worried about the increasing dominance of digital information by a small number of giant corporations while digital information increases in importance. Ironically, what I thought was one of the primary advantages of ‘digital’ – accessibility – is being subject to the same divide, between rich and poor as information did before it was digital, with the high subscription costs to journals and other massive digital collections.

Rosenzweig emphasizes the need to work to maintain and enlarge the rich public historical web, not giving it over to giant corporations, and the ‘stable’ version of Wikipedia entries seems like a step in the right direction. Although I don’t feel that historians have a responsibility to write for a more popular audience than most historians traditionally address, I believe historians have a responsibility to make available what they to a larger popular audience, and I hope academic historians will see the importance and justness of publishing their (in some cases publicly funded) research openly online, available for all.

Thinking about this responsibility, a CNN news article on Yale University grabbed my attention that fit excellently with this weeks reading. Yale is offering digital videos of some courses available online for free, along with transcripts in a number of languages and the syllabi. The article makes reference to MIT and other universities having course material online available for free, but Yale is the first to focus on videos. I’m hopeful and optimistic that this step, being taken by such a prestigious school, will set a precedent and other universities will follow in Yale’s footsteps.

Thinking again about Google, and our “linkocracy” discussion in class, I’m still wondering if there’s anyway Google could offer options related to how searches are returned, similar to library catalogue search results that can be displayed by author, date of publishing, from most recent to least etc… Similarly, could Google someday (or already) return your search results by publishing date, or some sort of user-ranking in coherency or relevancy or correctness, instead of popularity? If I, for example, wanted to join (just hypothetically) the most popular Mary-Kate and Ashley fan club, I could perform a regular Google search, but if I wanted to join the oldest, I could set my search preference to rank results by date, or if I wanted to join the club that has the most user-friendly site, I could set that as my search preference. For this to happen, I realize Google would have to implement some sort of system where users could rank sites by user-friendliness, and other quality measures, so this aspect of the search I realize is unlikely, but it doesn’t seem that hard to have results come back oldest to youngest or vice versa (although I’m assuming that the site’s date of creation is somewhere in its metadata). I think this would not only make for better searching, but also make people aware of how Google searches and why their search Google results come up as they do.

Raw Archives

2006-09-22T11:19:00.000-04:00

Dan Cohen’s article Raw Archives and Hurricane Katrina left me thinking of my earlier blog entry concerning the dangers of electronic records as he highlighted that raw archives like the September 11 Digital Archive, and sites like Flikr don’t have commitments (and sometimes abilities) to store information for a significant length of time. I was especially moved by the September 11 digital archive and photos on Flikr on the same material, and thought of how tragic it would be to lose the information – personal stories, photos and remembrances – for future generations. Interestingly, Cohen posted this article the same day I visited the Ground Zero site in Manhattan this past summer.

Douglas Point

2006-09-20T22:17:00.000-04:00

This week I've been working on, and am pretty excited about putting together a Wikipedia entry (my first!) to build on the ‘stub’ that exists on Douglas Point Nuclear Generating Station. I’ve put the article together largely from exhibit text that I researched and wrote for an exhibit on Douglas Point this past summer. It’s taking longer than I expected because I (foolishly) didn’t anticipate having to omit all of my original research (which was a lot of the text, because there isn’t a lot of material printed on the topic) and (even more foolishly) forgot to save a good copy of the exhibit text to my home computer, so I’ve had to make changes from a printed ‘good copy’ to my digital. In the end, I may have gotten a bit carried away (increasing the size of the article from a 200 word stub to approximately 1300 words) because it's a topic I'm so interested in

Although I’m doubtful that my Wikipedia entry will get as much editing as T. Mill’s “What’s for dinner” (as I understand that nuclear development in Canada is less interesting for most than cannibalism), I’m hoping at least a little interest will be generated on the article in my hometown, where the impact of the nuclear industry has been massive. I've put out a request at the heritage house with the Douglas Point exhibit encouraging people to contribute to the article, especially former employees of the station. There’s also a lot of strong emotions floating in the employee and local community on a number of topics related to Douglas Point, including its shut down in 1984, its enormous impact on the local economy, and the overall significance of the site, so I'm optimistic the article will undergo some change.

I’m hoping to improve on Rosenzweig’s criticism of Wikipedia articles, that they frequently don't look at the ‘bigger pictures’ in industry and don't always emphasize the historically relevant by trying to convey in my article the significance of the station. Unfortunately, I found because I had to omit my original research and because there's so little published on the topic, that the article's a little choppy. I recognize that there's a lot of gaps in the article, especially related to the construction of the site and details of the site in operation, and there some entire topics absent (such as the site's impact on the local economy and agriculture) because of the omissions and limitations I had to make.

Data Structures

2006-09-15T17:46:00.000-04:00

I worked (slowly) through the online module Summary of Data Structures. Much later I realized that data structures is the lab exercises for next week, and this week’s module was Algorithms. So, I’ll just do them in reverse order and blog next week about algorithms.

Initially, I had difficulty relating data structures to my process as a historian (I’ll insert the definition here for data structures for anyone’s benefit but mostly as a reminder for myself: ways of storing data so it can be used efficiently by a computer).

Then I thought about the advantages of organizing information digitally on my computer: easy storage and quick information retrieval. For example, data structures greatly assist the organization of my genealogical research – trying to keep track of hundreds of people, details of their lives and their relationships to each other. In Grade 11 I had to make a family tree for a genetics assignment and to compose a smaller version of the tree was painstaking (and involved a lot of tape). The amount of information I could ‘store’ on this tree was extremely limited, and retrieving information relied on a visual search and very basic index. Digitally, however, I’ve been able to easily store a mass amount of information and have it easily accessible in a variety of forms in a genealogical software program (GenoPro; I've added the link to the program's download page - it's free and the program's core is data structuring).

Google Help

2006-09-15T17:42:00.000-04:00

I’ll admit, although at first I was embarrassed, that I started the lab exercises with the ‘working with search options’ exercise because I knew I wasn’t a good ‘searcher.’ And now I’m pretty excited about being able to do much more accurate (and helpful) searches. For example, I always knew that Google automatically excluded common words, and this sometimes messed me up if I wanted to search for, say one of my favourite shows: “The Office.” I knew about using quotation marks, but being able to add the “+” sign (and the “-“ sign if I want to omit a result), will be very helpful. Also, had I known about domain searches I would have found the campus recreation swim times an awful lot faster by searching “swim time: http://www.uwo.ca/” than just “swim time Western” – which is how I would have searched before this exercise. I played around with the tilde search, and also the numrange search – which I didn’t find especially helpful, because I don’t shop a lot online, until I played around with applying it to dates (instead of prices) for genealogical searches and realized this is going to be really helpful. I also feel silly for all that time looking at the “I’m Feeling Lucky” icon and not knowing what it did until now.

(I wrote this last week, and accidentally saved it as a draft but never posted it)

The Infinite Archive

2006-09-15T13:55:00.000-04:00

I’m excited about digital history, to have a chance at learning about computers and technology, because it’s so current but also new to me. I thought previously, about programming, and making websites, and computers that it’s so far beyond my abilities and there’s so much to learn, why even try. So I’m excited about having a chance in History 513F.

Right off the bat, I enjoyed the language of the readings: hypertext mark-up language (html), hypertext transfer protocol (http), uniform resource locator (url) – I enjoy acronyms and I like feeling a little more ‘clued’ in about these common terms.

When I thought about the digital era and what it means to historians, my first thoughts were negative, and of similar concerns raised in David Talbot’s “The Fading Memory of the State: The National Archives Struggle to Save Endangered Electronic Records,” (Technology Review [July 2005]), Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era,”(American Historical Review 108, no. 3 [Jun 2003]: 735-762) and Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig. “Introduction: Promises and Perils of Digital History,” Digital History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005).

As a history student that loves research the thought of digital records ‘rotting’ faster than paper ones, that digital records are not durable, alarms me. As does the thought of records being lost because they were in the form of e-mail or other discarded digital material. As does the thought that the mutability of the Internet means that historical material, like online news articles, will disappear and I’m unsure how digital material from the present will be available to historians in the future. Thinking about the fragility of evidence in this digital era, illustrated by the deletion of the “Bert is Evil” websites (http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/bert.htm) concerns me, as does issues of ensuring the authenticity of preserved information.

I felt overwhelmed by these hazards of the digital age for historians and disappointed that the readings didn’t reassure me that all of these problems have been solved and are being fixed (although some of them are being worked on) - especially because as a history student and not a computer scientist, I don’t feel like I can be of much help.

Putting the dangers of digital material as historical evidence aside, and not wanting to appear a technology hater, I’m excited about Cohen and Rosenzweig’s ‘promises’ of digital history: huge storage capacity, accessibility (especially accessibility!), flexibility, diversity and interactivity. I also feel that it will be – if it can be preserved – incredibly advantageous and exciting to historians in the future interested in popular culture to have so much information available to them, in terms of content on the Internet and the Database of Intentions as an artifact (“The Database of Intentions,” John Battelle’s Searchblog [13 Nov 2003]).

I enjoy as a hobby from time-to-time doing genealogical research. The digital age has expanded this area of history enormously and I can do so much research whereas 10 years ago I would have been able to do almost none, without traveling around the continent. Personally, I feel that the greatest advantage of the digital era to historians is this issue of accessibility – how exciting is it to think that 5 libraries had agreed to have their print collections digitized (announced in December 2004) and that a vast amount of historical source material, especially primary resources, would be available to anyone with access to the internet? Material can be accessed simultaneously by users and old and rare books can find new audiences, Courant’s example of the 1860 book, Bees and bee–keeping http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/) was especially poignant. But most importantly, as mentioned by Kevin Kelly (“Scan This Book,” New York Times Magazine [14 May 2006]) because access to original documents will deepen our grasp of history!!!

Even if the ‘risks’ of this digital era outweighed the benefits to historians and students in history, (and I don’t think that they do), the trends towards increased digitization couldn’t be reversed. As a history student, I’m excited about the research doors being opened by digital history, wish my best luck to those trying to save ‘endangered’ electronic records and digitally preserve the past and present for the future, and hope that at some time I could be of some help.

Getting Started

2006-09-07T15:58:00.000-04:00

Hello! My name is Carling and I'm a Public History MA student at the University of Western Ontario. I'm from Kincardine, Ontario and did my undergraduate degree in history, with a minor in psychology, at the University of Waterloo. I've created this blog for History 513: Digital History and History 500F/501G.