Thoughts on Public & Digital History by Adam Crymble

Citation in Digital Humanities: Is the Old Bailey Online a Film, or a Science Paper?

2012-01-13T05:13:00.013-05:00

Recently I was writing a paper for a journal and needed to cite the Old Bailey Online (OBO). Not any particular piece of content contained in the project, but the project itself as an outstanding example of digital humanities work. For those unfamiliar with the venture, it's a database containing 127 million words of historical trial transcripts marked up extensively with XML; still the flagship project of its kind in this author's opinion. I found myself struggling to decide who the authors of the project were; that is, whose names was I bound by "good scholarship" to include in the citation. Who deserved public credit? I happen to meet regularly with one of the project's principle investigators, Tim Hitchcock of the University of Hertfordshire, and raised the issue with him over drinks at the pub - incidently the pub is the most engaging place to discuss topics as dry as citation practices and the discussion becomes increasingly more engaging as the evening progresses. As it happens, the project had over 40 known contributors who actively participated in its creation. His initial response was that the team decided not to include any names when citing the project to avoid leaving people out and focusing credit in the hands of only some of the team members. The resulting citation looks like this:

Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Version 6.0, March 2011. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

This is a very noble position for the project leaders to take; however, I do not believe it is the right position. In an effort not to emphasize the contributions of some over that of others, this policy makes most contributors entirely invisible. This is particularly significant for people in the alternative academic (alt-ac) fields whose career progression and in many cases, next meal, depend upon the strength of their portfolios. These people have roles such as project management, database building, and web design, all of which are crucial to ensure the projects themselves are world class. If we adopt the no-names policy across the board, these people will never be cited anywhere, whereas traditional academics may still have books and journal articles on top of their digital project work.

Though we brought our positions much closer together, the issue proved too much for a bottle of wine to solve. We parted ways and Hitchcock took the discussion to H-Albion, a list-serv for historians of Britain and Ireland where many historians and librarians have contributed their opinions. Seth Denbo then brought the discussion to Humanist, another list-serv for digital humanities scholars where a separate conversation has now begun. Rather than contribute to either or both of those conversations, I have decided to address the issue here with the hopes that it can find new contributors who may not otherwise see it in the list-servs.

The most interesting question to arise so far is whether digital humanities projects like the OBO are films or science papers. Not literally of course, but in terms of the model of credit offered to contributors of the finished product. Both films and science journals have developed unique models of credit. In films, the credits run at the end. In science papers, everyone who made a meaningful contribution gets listed as an author and those who made minor contributions get an acknowledgement. I will argue that digital humanists would be doing their field and industry a great service by adopting both models simultaneously. The OBO and projects like it are both films and science papers.

Films

One of the respondants to the list-serv discussion, a retired librarian Malcolm Shifrin, suggested that the point of a citation was to retrieve the source, not to provide credit. In this sense, it does not matter whose names appear in the citation, as long as there is no ambiguity and the item can be identified. However, if that were the case, we could merely cite ISBN numbers, which would drastically cut down on the size of footnotes. Or, in nearly all cases, titles alone would suffice. For example, if I were to task you with finding a copy of the paper: "An alternative definition of the scapular coordinate system for use with RSA" without any further information, I'm entirely confident you would make your way to a paper by my lovely wife, which appears in the Journal of Biomechanics. Citation is not merely about finding an item, it is also about credit; however, as Shifrim points out, it is not crucial that credit appears within a citation. An alternative model is the one used by the film industry in which a portion of the finished product is dedicated to letting everyone know who was involved with its creation.

Most major website projects, including the OBO, already do this. The OBO's "About this Project" page lists 24 of the leading contributors along with their roles and effectively mimics the credits on a film. A listing of this sort is important because it offers an official "in-house" acknowledgement that's difficult to fake without breaking the law and hijacking the website to add your name. This allows everyone to direct future potential employers to evidence of past work that can be independently verified. I would certainly argue that any collaborative digital humanities project should reserve a space on their website for such a page, which has absolutely no cost but can be instrumental to the future career development of your team members. But, I certainly do not think it's enough.

We do not know where the alt-ac world is going, and we would be wise to ensure that as many doors as possible remain open to those people who currently occupy this grey space in academia. Some members may aspire to a future tenure-track position and may find it difficult to convince more conservative senior faculty that film-style credits on a webpage are akin to hits on JSTOR. And because these conservative attitudes change slowly, it would be rash for digital humanists to abandon a well established if perhaps dated model of credit just because we want to rebel in the name of progress. There's a baby in that bathwater.

Science Papers

This is where the model used by the academic science community is particularly helpful. In the humanities, typically if someone got paid to do the work as part of a grant or part-time role, we pretend they didn't exist. The work "was done" rather than "was done by soandso". We don't expect McDonalds to list the names of individual "team members" when they brag about how delicious their french fries are. It doesn't matter who made your fries. They were paid to do so and thereby give up their right to credit.

In the sciences, everyone who makes a meaningful contribution is entitled to a share of the authorship of a paper. Assuming each of the 24 members of the OBO team met those criteria, a citation for the OBO might look like this:

Hitchcock T, Shoemaker R, Emsley C, Howard S, Hardman P, Bayman A, Garrett E, Lewis-Roylance C, Parkinson S, Simmons A, Smithson G, Wilcox N, Wright C, Clayton M, Bankhurst B, Lingwood D, MacKenzie E, Rogers K, McLaughlin J, Henson L, Black J, Newman E, O'Flaherty K, Smithson G. Old Bailey Proceedings Online. Version 6.0, March 2011. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

It may be a bit more of an eyefull than the previous example, but at least it's a more accurate reflection of the work people put into the site's creation. The exact criteria for determining a "meaningful contribution" generally rests with the policies of individual journals. A typical example, from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors requires that each author must have made substantial contributions to all of the following:

the conception and design of the study, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content
final approval of the version to be submitted

Obviously those criteria are designed specifically with a peer-reviewed journal article in mind. However, they can easily be adapted to the needs of a digital humanities web-based project, which typically is split into two parts: the project itself, and the digital infrastructure for allowing the audience to interact with the project. A digital humanities "author" could be someone that must have made substantial contributions to all of the following:

the conception and design of the project or website; or acquisition of data or materials; or analysis, transformation and interpretation of data or materials
drafting or creating any text, artwork, sound, video, workflow, interface, user experience, or code, that was integral to the success of the project and that would have been substantially different if it had been completed by someone else
final approval of the finished product

In the case of the OBO, that may eliminate some people from the list of those credited with the project. As I am not one of those people, it is not my place to decide. But it is something I think as a community we should start discussing as soon as project teams are put together. What is the intended output, and how will each person's contribution be credited? It can be an awkward conversation at first, but it's a proactive solution to the elephant in the room for those in the alt-ac community.

Conclusion

The OBO is both a film and a science paper. Project leaders of web-based digital humanities projects would be doing their industry a favour by ensuring projects have both a page of film-style credits which outline contributors and their roles, as well as a science-style listing of substantial contributors or authors that are prominently displayed for anyone wishing to cite.

This two-pronged approach can only serve to help digital humanities to find its place within the academic world. It's the model that keeps the most doors open for those alt-ac members of our project teams who are unsure of which path their career will take in the future. It acknowledges the tremendous teamwork that goes into producing world class digital humanities work, setting them apart from single-authored papers. And it doesn't misrepresent or misconstrue the purposes of either model of credit. The citation may not mean much to a tenured professor, but it can help launch the career of someone in the alt-ac world. And so, the citation may be a bit clunkier if we use the science model, but at least it's an honest reflection.

Photo credit: "Steve Jobs rendered in Applesoft BASIC" by Blake Patterson.

Crymble Awards: Digital History Best of 2011

2011-12-31T05:19:00.005-05:00

It's the last day of the year and I thought it'd be fitting to write briefly about the research and projects published this calendar year that's had the most impact on my personal scholarly development. With all the talk of research impact these days, particularly in the UK, I think it's important to acknowledge that not all influential work gets cited. Much of it inspires our own research indirectly by introducing us to new techniques, ideas, or source materials. Here is my own list of my favourites for 2011 in no particular order. I've dubbed these awards the "Crymble Awards", so fee free to put that on your CVs. Unfortunately, that's the only prize. But as my grade 1 teacher always said, "everyone likes a warm fuzzy".

Tim Hitchcock and William J. Turkel, "The Old Bailey Proceedings, 1674-1913: data mining for evidence of court behaviour" (paper presented at the Digital History Seminar, the Institute for Historical Research. London, 16 May, 2011).

This paper and its accompanying visualisations (see the pdf for the whole paper), takes traditional historical research questions down the path of large-scale analysis. Using the proceedings of the Old Bailey, Turkel and Hitchcock were able to step back from the content of the transcripts, and looked at the proceedings as data rather than something to be read. The result of the study was some interesting new insights into court room practices in the mid nineteenth century that challenged previous conclusions.

These insights were only evident through a large-scale visualisation that plotted the lengths of each trial transcripts by year on a logarithmic scale. That may sound complicated, but it's really quite simple, and that's what makes it so great. Anyone looking at the graph is clearly drawn to the same conclusions as the researchers: something funny is going on in the mid nineteenth century. Unlike with so much historical research, the data told the researchers where the question was, rather than the researchers seeking an answer to a predefined question. This serendipitous approach is something for which I think the world is ready for more.

Obviously as historians we cannot merely stop reading content when forming our conclusions about the past; however, I think this paper demonstrates that content isn't the only way of learning new things. Sometimes, as in this case, it's the word-length of the trial transcripts that points us towards new knowledge. And we shouldn't be afraid to get off the beaten path a little, and experiment with content in ways that it perhaps was never intended to be used by its original creators.

On Twitter: @williamjturkel and @TimHitchcock

Tim Sherratt, "Discontents" blog.

One of the few research blogs I still actually read. Sherratt has done extensive work combining Python with datamining as a way of extracting useful information from online sources. He lives and works in Australia and has done extensive work with the Trove newspaper database, which contains transcribed versions of historical Australian newspapers. Not only is the work unique, in that he's looking at sources in a way most scholars don't bother, he is very open with what he's doing and how he does it, making the blog an excellent learning tool for those looking to expand into the realm of digital history. This is of course the style of blogging that Bill Turkel championed on his now retired "Digital History Hacks".

Sherratt's work has taught me more this year than just about anything else I've ready and I hope he continues to provide more into 2012.

On Twitter: @wragge

Ben Schmidt, "Sapping Attention" blog.

Like Sherratt, Ben Schmidt keeps a research blog that chronicles his own work and the challenges that he has to overcome. Schmidt is working on a PhD in history at Princeton and his work into linguistic analysis is both far beyond what I myself am capable of, as well as creative and intriguing to follow, even for a non-specialist like me. Schmidt also has a talent for extraordinarily beautiful visualisations which are both technically complicated, but semantically transparent, supplementing his text with an effective means of showing how the data supports the conclusions. Some great examples are in his posts, "Comparing Corpuses by Word Use" and "Predicting publication year and generational language shift".

I sincerely wish more digital historians - myself included - would keep such open and inspirational research logs as Schmidt and Sherratt that celebrates not only the conclusions that are of interest to historians studying similar topics, but to all digital historians who are interested in learning new ways to interrogate and understand the past.

Sean Kheraj, "Nature's Past" podcast.

Sean has been producing a monthly podcast for a few years now, which looks at environmental history in Canada. Though his research focus is significantly different than my own, I can't help being impressed by the quality of the work he puts into the project. He does all the writing, recording, and editing himself, and it comes out radio quality both in terms of the sound, and the organization of each episode. If nothing else, Kheraj has showed that if you're going to do something, do it well.

Jeremy Boggs, "the Praxis Program" Website Design

I have to admit, this one I'm attributing to Boggs though his name does not appear officially as the web designer. It does, however, have all the elements of a Jeremy Boggs website. The fonts move beyond the traditional subset of web fonts, but never take away from the content by becoming too showy, or too difficult to read. The simple, complimentary colour palatte sets the mood, without being distracting, as do the graphics, which are minimalistic but essential to the design.

I've yet to come across anyone in the academic web design community that can put together as elegant a site as Boggs, and the Praxis website is an excellent example of that. May there be many more examples next year.

Congratulations to all of our winners. And thanks for the great work. It's inspired me, even though none of your work had been peer reviewed.

How to Record a Presentation for the Web (Well)

2011-08-17T07:17:00.006-04:00

By Adam Crymble

Few things are as ephemeral as speech. It is spoken, and it is gone. This is fine if you have just delivered the worst presentation of your life and want nothing more than to forget it. But, there are speeches worth saving. Research is global; not everyone who is interested in the speaker will be able to attend in person. Not everyone who will be interested is interested now – for example, a first year student may want to hear the presentation four years from now when she is working on her Master’s degree.

Academia has developed a solution to the ephemeral speech and it has become increasingly popular. The recorded lecture, often mistakenly referred to as a “podcast”, is a way of archiving what transpired at an event and making it available online. Many conferences and public lecture organizers are adopting this idea to increase the reach of their event to those outside the immediate room in which the presentation occurs.

However, while the solution is in place, the skills needed to enact it well are not. The recording process is frequently an afterthought, thrown into the hands of an inexperienced graduate student or an already taxed session chair. The recorder is left fumbling with a device he or she has likely never used, hoping desperately that they get it right on the first try.

Predictably, the results are usually poor. Even comparatively good examples often suffer from low-quality audio. Frequently, listeners will feel the recording lacks context and they will be frustrated if the speaker refers to slides that have not been included with the recording.

All this can be avoided with a little bit of planning and practice to ensure your recorded presentations are good recorded presentations that do justice to your speakers and your listeners.

Listen to or Watch a Good Example

Start with the best. No one has better online presentations than TED. “Ted Talks” are live presentations by passionate speakers that have been recorded and posted to the Ted.com website. They have become an Internet sensation and anyone considering archiving a speech should watch at least one Ted Talk. I am not suggesting you do as TED did and hire multiple professional cameramen, a director and a sound editing team. What I am suggesting is that you follow TED’s lead on the following key points.

Talk to your Speaker Beforehand

I do not mean simply get permission to record – although of course this is important and you should get permission in writing. Instead, I mean find out what type of presenter your speaker is. Do they use PowerPoint slides, and if so do they own the copyright or have permission to use all of the material? Do they wander around the room as they speak? Do they ask the audience to participate frequently?

By asking questions about the style of presentation the person intends to deliver you can preemptively find solutions to problems before they arise. If your speaker tells you she likes to move around a lot during the presentation, use this advanced knowledge to track down a wireless microphone that can clip onto her lapel. If your presenter plans to use a PowerPoint presentation with images that violate copyright, suggest he look into using images licensed by Creative Commons so that you can legally share his presentation.

Dedicate Someone

As soon as you decide to record the presentation, find someone whose sole job will be to handle the audio equipment and get him or her to practice. Days before the event, the recorder should know exactly how to use the recording equipment, what volume levels are suitable, and how close to the speaker the device will have to be. If the microphone must be clipped onto the speaker, the recorder should try the mic on a few locations on his or her own shirt to see how placement affects sound quality.

If the chair and the speaker are fairly far apart – more than a few feet – then be sure to check if the device will clearly pick up the chair’s voice. If it sounds like he or she is far away or “tinny” then consider getting a second recording device and record both people independently.

The audio testing should be done in the same room as that in which the presentation will take place, and if required, your recorder should make note of nearby power outlets to determine if an extension cord is needed.

By spending even one hour practicing and preparing, your recorder will be confident when the time comes for them to do their job.

When that time does arise, it is best to push the record button well before the presentation starts. The audio can always be edited later, but once a presentation starts – and often they start unexpectedly – what has been missed is gone. Make sure your recorder gets the speaker introduction, as well as the speech.

If the presenter is using slides, have your recorder note the time in the recording when the slides transition. This will make it much easier to combine the slides and the audio later.

The Context of the Room

A major complaint of listeners who access presentations online is the lack of context. When attending an event in person, you have the context of the physical space, the other people in the room, and even other presentations you have heard or plan to hear at the same event. When you listen online, this context disappears.

The chair of the session or the person introducing the speaker can provide this context, as long as they have been warned ahead of time. Most people in this position do their introduction the same way whether they are being recorded or not. That is, they speak only to those listeners in the room and often seem uncomfortable at the idea that people might be listening that they cannot see. Rather than address this virtual audience, they pretend it does not exist.

To get beyond this barrier, sit down briefly with your chair and give them some pointers on providing context to the online audience. One effective way of dealing with this problem is to have the chair acknowledge both audiences in the introduction. Thank everyone for coming, but also thank your online listeners. Provide a short blurb about the event and why you have gathered for it. The listeners in the room will recognize that your blurb is for the benefit of the online audience and will not be put off.

If you are recording multiple sessions with the same audience present, this can become repetitive and strange. In that case, record this context information later and it can be added to the start of your presentations in the editing stage. If you are not sure what context is missing, ask a colleague to listen to the recorded presentation; they will be able to tell you what needs to be added.

Question Period

Decide if you plan to include the question period in your recording. Often this means seeking the permission of everyone in the audience, but will vary depending on your jurisdiction and university policy. The challenge with question period is that it is often difficult to catch the questions on the recording device, particularly in a large room.

One solution is to require people who want to ask a question to go to a microphone. This can be obtrusive and adds to what is already a complex process, so you may decide to end your recording after the speaker finishes the formal presentation. By ending early, one tends to avoid the chair thanking everyone for coming and inviting them to head to the pub; the result is a more professional conclusion.

After the Fact

The work does not end when the recorder pushes the stop button. The audio will have to be edited. If your presenter used slides, ask for them and plan to create a “slidecast” that will pair the audio with the relevant slides. It is also a good idea to get a one to two paragraph abstract of the talk from the speaker, a one to two sentence bio of the presenter, and a half-dozen keywords that allow online visitors to find the presentation. Search boxes still cannot let us find out what is in an audio or video file, so you will need to provide enough information with the recording to let interested people find it.

Once you have received the slides and contextual information, you are ready to edit. This can be done by anyone and need not be the same person who made the recording. However, if you have more than one lecture it is a good idea to dedicate this job to one person. This will ensure that all of the recordings are consistent.

Editing the Audio

There are a number of good audio editing programs available. Audacity is an open source, free program that you can use to edit the audio and to adjust volume levels if needed. Mac users will find GarageBand, preinstalled on most new Mac’s, a useful tool for achieving the same.

If possible, try to avoid too much “dead air” at the beginning or at the end of a file. It is also a good idea to make sure you end the recording at a suitably calm point. Stopping abruptly in the middle of applause is less professional than fading down the volume or waiting for an appropriate break. MP3 is still the industry standard file format for audio, so if given the choice between formats, MP3 is a safe bet.

Adding the Slides

Often with online presentations if slides are available they will only be provided as a separate PowerPoint file available for download. This is better than nothing, but often it is not clear when the speaker transitioned slides and the listener must fumble to figure out which slide to look at. Because your recorder kept notes while listening to the speech, it should not be difficult to combine the slides and the audio into a video.

Again, Mac users should find iMovie installed on newer machines. This program makes it easy to drag slides and combine them with audio. If you do not have a Mac, SlideShare (http://www.slideshare.net), a website dedicated to sharing slides, now allows you to combine audio and slides, and to adjust timing all within your Internet browser window.

Share it

Once you have finished editing the presentation, you are ready to share it. Post it to your event website, department website, or to a video or audio sharing site. Make sure you let the presenter know it is available, and finally, promote the presentation as widely as possible. By promoting the recorded presentation, your conference or lecture can live on beyond the end of the live event and can continue to engage listeners for years to come.

Taking a few moments to plan and adding a little extra time editing will ensure the recorded presentation is almost as good as the original. Some presentations are worth saving, and those that are, are worth saving well.

Adam Crymble is the Webmaster for the Network in Canadian History & Environment, an organization that has archived over 150 academic presentations. Adam would like to thank Sean Kheraj for his comments on a draft of this article.

Is Digital Humanities a Field of Research?

2011-08-11T05:57:00.002-04:00

If you are a Canadian graduate student, the answer is currently: no.

At least according to SSHRC, the Canadian national research funding body. Canadian graduate students applying to fund their studies must choose one of five “multidisciplinary selection committees” to review their proposal. These committees are designed to ensure that someone with an expertise in your field – broadly construed – will be able to critique it fairly. Unfortunately, digital humanities does not appear in the list and SSHRC’s official suggestion is that students choose as best they can from the choices available.

Fine arts, literature (all types)
Classical archaeology, classics, classical and dead languages, history, mediaeval studies, philosophy, religious studies
Anthropology, archaeology (except classical archaeology), archival science, communications and media studies, criminology, demography, folklore, geography, library and information science, sociology, urban and regional studies, environmental studies
Education, linguistics, psychology, social work
Economics, industrial relations, law, management, business, administrative studies, political science

This puts Digital Humanities students at a distinct disadvantage, as their work will only be deemed valuable if it contributes to history, literature, geography, or some other traditional research discipline, and cannot be judged on its own merits.

Please join me in telling SSHRC that Digital Humanities is an academic discipline, and one that deserves recognition within the SSHRC infrastructure. I have sent the following letter asking for a review of their current practice. If you support the measure, please send a brief, polite message to Roxanne Dompierre, SSHRC Program Officer (roxanne.dompierre@sshrc-crsh.gc.ca), outlining your support or let SSHRC know on Twitter (@SSHRC_CRSH).

Thank you very much

Adam Crymble

***

Ms. R. Dompierre

SSHRC Program Officer

RE: The inclusion of “Digital Humanities” as a category for graduate study

Dear Ms. Dompierre,

I respectfully submit a request to the SSHRC Doctoral Committee to add “Digital Humanities” as a category in one of your multidisciplinary selection committees.

Digital Humanities is a vibrant worldwide community of multidisciplinary scholars with PhD and MA programs in Canada, the US and Europe. This is a rapidly expanding field with more international involvement every year. It is a community that is researching and working within and beyond academia, with traditional peer-reviewed research, community outreach, and government partnerships. Research ranges widely from user studies, to humanities data mining, to digital tool construction.

The value of digital humanities research is clearly recognized within Canada. Recent SSHRC digital humanities funding initiatives for faculty include “Image, text, sound and technology” and “Knowledge Syntheses on the Digital Economy” (2010), as well as “Digging Into Data”, which was jointly funded by SSHRC, the NEH and AHRC. Despite ample funding at the faculty level, funding opportunities for students have not yet caught up with this trend.

The current advice from SSHRC for students studying within this emerging field is that they should apply to an evaluation committee with a traditional discipline that touches on the themes of their research. Working in a multidisciplinary field such as digital humanities, applicants are put at a distinct disadvantage when competing for funding against scholars doing traditional research within a single field. This is particularly the case when the judging criteria asks evaluators to assess how the research will impact that traditional discipline, something which may not be the explicit aim of the multidisciplinary research.

I urge SSHRC to make a positive step towards removing the ambiguity for digital humanists and encouraging the participation of new scholars in this developing research area by explicitly adding “Digital Humanities” to one of the multidisciplinary selection committees.

Thank you for your consideration.

Adam Crymble

SSHRC Applicant

PhD Candidate, King’s College London

Review: Lunch at the British National Maritime Museum

2011-07-31T14:31:00.003-04:00

I'm going to give the collections and exhibits at the British National Maritime Museum (Greenwich), a free pass at the moment, because much of it is still under construction for the next few months. I will say I was under-awed at what was there, and frustrated on occasion that the panels were positioned for 6 year olds, not 6 foot tall adults. Nevertheless, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now and will leave my comments about the exhibits at that.

What was noteworthy, however, was lunch. I've learned not to expect much from British restaurants. Particularly those in museums. Usually I'm happy if my prepackaged sandwich has wholewheat wonderbread and at least two distinguishable flavours. If I can find a side made with something other than potatos, I'm awestruck.

So, upon visiting the Museum Café, with its beautiful views of Greenwich park, I was completely bowled over at the quality of the food. It was fresh, home made, healthy, and delicious. I had gone in expecting deep fried fish and chips - appropriate for a Maritime Museum I thought - and instead came out with a homemade pork and pickle pie (clearly made by someone who knew their way around a kitchen), and a wonderful toasted pecan and gorgonzola salad. My wife had delicious smoked salmon on a bagel and a slice of perfectly ripe watermelon. To our surprise, and that of everyone before us, the fresh fruit was included with every sandwich, prompting more than one person to put down their bag of chips (crisps).

The tragedy is of course, that a healthy lunch is noteworthy at all. At institutions that focus on drawing families, it's disheartening to see all too often that the only options are deep fried. In one case - Hampton Court - the food was so bad that my family left most of it on our trays and went hungry until we could get home. Museums have the opportunity to act as examples for the community, as cultural centres of sharing and learning. I hope more of them follow in the footsteps of the British National Maritime Museum, and extend that to a good, healthy meal.

Where are the Digital Humanists?

2011-03-17T07:59:00.008-04:00

This year has brought a lot of discussion about just what the digital humanities are. Self-described digital humanists have blogged on what they think makes a digital humanist and what doesn't. As with all definitions of identity, everyone has a slightly different opinion.

I won't rehash those discussions here. Instead, what I'd like to do is ask where the digital humanities are by looking at the participants of two major crowd-sourced activities from the past 12 months: the Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) [March 18, 2011], and Hacking the Academy (Hackacad) [May 21-28, 2010]. If you are unfamiliar with these projects, a brief background will help.

Day of DH asks self-described digital humanists to blog or otherwise record their activities on March 18, 2011. The project is based at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Participants are pre-screened before being given a blog, though it's not clear who if anyone was rejected. Selection is self-applied and because there is no physical meeeting, participation is open worldwide.

Hackacad was a crowd-sourced book written in a week. The project was initiated by the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University in Virginia. Anyone could contribute a chapter (blog post), as long as it was submitted by the end of the week. Though this was not targetted specifically at Digital Humanists (more technologically literate public historians and researchers, I think), it did attract quite a few DH-type articles. Like Day of DH, there was no requirement to physically be somewhere so it was open to participants worldwide.

Last year, I compiled data on where the Hackacad contributors were writing from. Meg Stewart compiled my data in an easy-to-read map. What I argued at the time, was that contributors were skewed towards those who lived near, or had likely met or worked with the organizers and was not truely representative of the "crowd" of possible contributors. This isn't meant to be a criticism of the organizers who pulled off an impressive feat with their crowdsource experiment. Rather, it shows us that when crowdsourcing anything, one must ask who's in the crowd and who got left out.

So to take a closer look at that, I have made some maps. The first shows where the Hackacad contributors came from, the second shows where the Day of DH contributors live, and the third shows the people who contributed to both projects. (The tags won't lead you to anyone's house; just the city in which their university or institution is located). You can view each map in Google Maps and explore the data by clicking on one of the images below.

Hackacad 2010 Contributors

Day of DH 2011 Contributors

Hackacad 2010 + Day of DH 2011 Contributors

What this shows us in both cases is that the personal and professional networks of the organizers influence who participates. If one only looked at the Hackacad map, one would be forced to conclude that digital humanists - broadly defined - lived almost exclusively in the North Eastern United States. There are pockets of Digital Humanists in southern California, and a few solo scholars plugging away through much of the western world, presumably in great loneliness. As English was the language of the book, the great empty continents are perhaps not too surprising, but they are telling in terms of who belongs to this great academic discussion.

The Day of DH map tells a different story. That is: Digital Humanities is not so focused on the US. There are strong communities in Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Mexico. The trickle of Asian-based DH people suggests there's obviously a lot more, but perhaps few have the command of the English language needed to participate more fully in this English-language discussion.

The third map surprised me. Only a handful of people participated in both events. Though, I did recognize most of the names from either Twitter or active blogs, suggesting that as with most things, there is a small vocal core to every community.

So where are the digital humanities?

Well, it depends. The top cities, according to Hackacad are:

Fairfax Virginia (project home): 12

New York: 11

Boston: 8

Los Angeles: 8

. . .

Edmonton: 0

According to the Day of DH:

London: 19

Edmonton (project home): 14

Oxford: 10

San Francisco / Bay Area: 10

Los Angeles: 8

. . .

Fairfax VA: 3

What does this all mean? Well I think for one, it shows that in any crowdsourced activity, those close to the organizers will be overrepresented in the results. Edmonton is not - to my knowledge - a Mecca of digital scholarship, though I will say they do some fantastic work there. Instead, Edmonton is where the Day of DH exists out loud. The organizers live and work there and have almost certainly discussed the project with staff and students. This encourages participation in a way that goes outside of the crowdsource and instead is based on face to face interaction.

Overall, I think the maps, if combined, give us a good idea of where the digital humanities are. Certain areas are surely over represented (London, I think fits this category). Some are vastly under-represented (Australia & NZ). Perhaps most interesting is that the top schools in terms of reputation, according to Times Higher Education, often don't appear at all on these maps.

The top 10 schools by reputation and the number of Digital Humanists based on these two events are as follows:

Harvard: 2

MIT: 0

Cambridge: 1

UCAL - Berkley: 0

Stanford: 6

Oxford: 11

Princeton: 0

University of Tokyo: 0

Yale: 0

California Inistutute of Technology: 0

It would seem that these schools havn't built their reputations on innovative humanities research!

We can also conclude that the self-identified digital humanists are primarily: urban, working in Western countries, at major research focused universities. But hey, we probably already knew that, huh?

New Omeka Theme Released

2011-02-03T04:18:00.003-05:00

For those Omeka users out there, you've now got one more free design option for your site. I have recently released my theme, "Easy Colour", freely available on the Omeka website.

For those without website design experience, a free theme can save you thousands of dollars. The one I have created is designed to make it easy for users to customize the colour palatte to suit their own tastes or institutional colours.

I hope you find it useful!

Distant Reading by Using a Written Index

2011-01-25T10:54:00.003-05:00

Today, gauging the general pulse of what people are saying or talking about or reading is fairly easy. Twitter's "Trending Topics" are one of many methods for seeing what people are interested in right now. Others include a scan of the top stories in today's newspapers, or a comparison of today's blog posts by keyword.

But how do we gauge that same pulse historically? What were people interested in 200 years ago? Can we really know?

One method is to look at what people read. For example, in 18th century London, the Gentleman's Magazine was the most successful magazine that targetted a wealthy and powerful audience. The Gentleman's Magazine published for over 200 years, starting in 1731 and during the late eighteenth century was England's most respectable magazine. In the first issue, the editor declared the magazine was originally conceived to "give monthly a view of all the pieces of wit, humour, or intellligence, daily ofered to the Public in the Newspapers, (which of late are so multiplied, as to render it impossible, unless a man makes it a business, to consult them all)".

Since we know that the magazine sold well, it's fair to assume that the editors were providing content that people wanted to read and is therefore a relevant measure of what people found interesting, broadly construed. That's not to say everyone who read it thought every article spoke to their soul. It's just to suggest that people vote with their wallets and one of the strongest indicators of a publication's influence is the number of copies it sells and for how long its able to continue publishing.

This magazine has since been digitized by Google Books, but to my knowledge, there is no accessible machine-readable text version freely available. However, there is a paper subject index of all the essays written for the magazine. The index was compiled in 1821 by some poor chap whose father insisted upon the task. The index won't give you the same full-text search option we've come to love in search engines. It is organized thematically into categories selected by the indexer. This means there is a fair degree of bias in terms of what was categorized, how it was categorized, and what was overlooked. However, with 675 pages of topics, along with the various page references to find the article, the index itself provides a useful gauge of what was appearing in the magazine during the 30 year period covered by the index (1787-1818).

Each page is split into two columns. Using the columns as a unit of measure, I have compiled a list of the 34 most prevalent subjects from the Index and graphed them as a word cloud. France had the most 11.5 columns of entries and Africa had the least with half a column. Given the status of the magazine with Britain's upper classes, and given the fact that the magazine was successful, and therefore publishing content its readers wanted to consume, I believe it is fair to say that this word cloud is a fairly good - yet rough - illustration of what was important to wealthy Englishmen from 1787 to 1818.

Given the international affairs between Britain and various countries of the world during this era, the countries that appear most prominently are perhaps not a surprise. However, there are a few observations that I think are worth noting. Overall, I would suggest this wordcloud shows us what the wealthy people of late eighteenth, early nineteenth century England were worried about. Without reading the articles, or even knowing what the titles of the articles are, it would seem that these "Gentlemen" were writing essays about countries with which England was at war or at odds: France, Ireland, America. Less frequently appearing are Scotland and Wales, both passive at this point in terms of relations with England, along with Switzerland who tended to stay out of things.

The third most common term is "Naval Action" and "Buonaparte" is high on the list. Fires (7 columns), Storms and Murder all appear on the list. The first two threaten commerce, and murder is an obvious concern. Cowpox (which had been discovered could be used to vaccinate against Smallpox) is as prominent as Scotland or England. However, notice theft, rents, or poverty don't appear at all.

By applying my historical knowledge of Britain during this era, my distant reading of the Gentleman's Magazine suggests to me the following conclusions:

Wealthy Englishmen in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century were interested in whichever country was currently causing the most trouble. They wanted to be kept informed of things that could kill them, or things that could disrupt their trade. They were interested in discussing the structure of the Anglican church, but less interested in discussing other religions, or directly engaging with the Bible. And finally, London was more important than America.

Is this perfectly accurate? No, of course not. But it is a macro-analysis of the interests of wealthy male Englishmen from 1787 to 1818. And it only took 20 minutes.

I would be interested to hear from others who are engaged in distant reading, or comments and concerns you may have about my methodology and conclusions, from digital humanists and historians alike.

My C.V. is Better Than Yours

2011-01-03T11:08:00.004-05:00

Sure, you may have more publications, conference presentations and funding. You may have a better job than I do or more awards. The contents of your C.V. may make mine seem underwhelming.

But my C.V. is better. In fact, I’m confident that if we applied for the same competition, it would be my C.V. that had the committee members talking over lunch. “Did you see that guy’s C.V.?”

My C.V. makes noise. It moves by itself. It’s shiny.

See why My C.V. is better than yours: My C.V.

I’ve taken up the challenge of Dr. Tom Scheinfeldt in his blog post “New Wine in Old Skins: Why the CV needs hacking”. In that post, Scheinfeldt urged academics to come up with new ways of presenting their achievements. Ways that moved beyond the traditional lists that have largely remained unchanged since the eighteenth century.

So I'd like to extend a challenge, particularly to the digital humanists out there. Let 2011 be the year you make your C.V. better than mine. And let me know about it.

Do People Want Open Access to Research?

2010-11-20T04:01:00.002-05:00

If you post a peer reviewed article on your blog, will anyone care?

Apparently, emphatically yes.

In an experiment earlier this week I decided to post my recent article about Social Media use by Archives and Archivists (see my previous entry) and made a quick announcement on Twitter. The response was far greater than I expected, with over 700 people in just a few days taking the time to visit and read the abstract or access the PDF and I received messages from several archivists thanking me for sharing the article.

As you can see from the graph of my recent traffic on this oft-neglected site, the results weren't typical.

So what does this mean? Well I think we can infer a few things from this.

Firstly, that people want to read research. Secondly, if authors retain copyright of their work, that access becomes possible.

The only reason I was able to - legally - offer this article to readers was because of Archivaria's very forward-thinking rights assignment policy in which I retain the copyright for the work but grant Archivaria all the rights they need to publish as many copies as they like in as many forms as they like. In return, I have been asked to always provide a full citation whenever I reproduce the article to acknowledge the work of Archivaria.

As an author, this rights assignment policy was the most influential single factor I took into consideration when choosing a journal in which to publish. In this case I overlooked larger journals who demand authors assign full rights, because I believe the whole point of me doing research is to share the results.

Arbitrarily assigning all rights doesn't achieve that goal if the article then sits behind a paywall that may or may not be heavily subscribed.

So what can we do to promote this open-access attitude?

I think the first thing is to start telling editors that you want it.

For writers:

Email editors before you submit and tell them you have an article idea but you are a supporter of open access and you would like to know the journal's policy.
Protect your copyright. Negotiate your copyright assignment so that both the editor and you can benefit. There is absolutely no need for you to give away your copyright. And if you are going to give it away, insist that everyone has access: license it under Creative Commons.

For readers:

Let editors of publications know that you want to cite material in their publications but you do not have access and will have to overlook their contributions.
Let authors know you would like to cite material they wrote but you do not have access and will have to overlook their contributions.
Thank editors who have formulated forward-thinking copyright policies that promote open access to research.

On that last note, I'd encourage anyone who accessed my article over the past week to contact Archivaria (Contact Info) and let them know that you appreciated being able to read their material. Sometimes a little thank you goes a long way to driving change.

An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community

2010-11-16T06:02:00.002-05:00

I have recently published an article in Archivaria, the journal of the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) that looks at how Archives around the English-speaking world have used Facebook and Twitter as a form of social outreach.

I hope this work will be of interest to those outside the archival community and amongst those who may not have access to Archivaria, so I have decided to share a copy freely in PDF format.

Crymble, Adam. "An Analysis of Twitter and Facebook Use by the Archival Community" Archivaria 70 (Fall 2010): 125-151 [PDF]

Abstract: This paper discusses how the archival community is using social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook as outreach tools. The study analyzes the usage patterns of 195 individual and institutional users over a thirty- two-day period during the summer of 2009. By focusing on the 2,926 outbound links posted to the services during the period, the author shows that use is dramatically different between the three test groups: archival organizations using Facebook, archival organizations using Twitter, and archivists using Twitter. The study shows that archival organizations overwhelmingly use the services to promote content they have created themselves, whereas archivists promote information they find useful. In all cases, more frequent posting did not correlate to a larger audience. By examining how others have applied social networking, archivists and archival organizations can determine a social media outreach platform that is suitable to their institutional needs. This study may serve as a starting point toward a greater understanding of outreach in the digital age.

An Easy, Effective Event Homepage for Your Academic Event

2010-11-07T03:42:00.009-05:00

Last year I wrote a blog post about How to Archive a Conference. Since then, I've been hired by several academics to build conference websites. Now, I'm pleased to offer a simpler, more affordable solution : Academic-news.org.

From upcoming conferences to past workshops. Academic News is your affordable, stable, simple solution - no website experience necessary. Be up and running in minutes.

Web designers are expensive: $40 to $100+ per hour. And building a website isn't just a matter of cutting and pasting. Design takes time, and that adds up. A small website with just a few simple pages can cost well over $1000.

Academic News recognizes your funding is precious. So I've developed an alternative: a one page Event Homepage hosted on the Academic News website, configured to effectively showcase your event - no web designing experience necessary.

All webpages share the clean, professional look and feel of the Academic News website. The easy to use form lets you customize your page by adding text and images. There's even space (20MB) to upload readings, schedules, maps, forms and more.

Focus on what matters. Leave the website to Academic News.

Use the site to attract potential participants, or as a deliverable to funding bodies.

You’ll get:

A professional looking, easy to edit webpage

Configured specifically for academic events

A customizable web address (URL)

20MB storage for PDFs (schedules, maps, readings, etc)

Email support

Maintainance of copyright ownership

5 year guarantee

All for a simple one-time fee – no subscriptions, no hidden costs. Do-it-yourself or full services packages available.

View a Sample Homepage

Reaching a Popular Audience - Vancouver 2010

Have questions? Check out the FAQ or Contact me at admin@academic-news.org .

How to Write a Zotero Translator: Wikified

2010-08-04T15:59:00.002-04:00

I'm pleased to announce that the book I wrote a little over a year ago: How to Write a Zotero Translator (2009) has been released as a user-editable wiki on the Zotero website, released under an "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported" license.

The new version, How to Write a Zotero Translator ++, contains all the original text, but allows anyone with an understanding of HTML, JavaScript and Zotero translators to update the book. This became necessary as Zotero is an ever-evolving program and in the 17 months since I first released the guide, much has changed.

I encourage anyone with the required skills and energy to help make this resource as useful as possible for as wide an audience as possible.

Thanks to Rintze Zelle and Tom Roche for bringing the need to create a wiki version of the book to my attention.

And I leave with a challenge: take a look at your past works. Would any of them benefit from being released in a similar fashion?

Who are the #hackacad contributors?

2010-06-02T23:54:00.007-04:00

If you've missed it, Hacking the Academy (#hackacad) has just finished its 1 week call for content. The project, initiated by Drs. Scheinfeldt and Cohen at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, is an attempt to crowdsource enough good content to create a book in a single week.

As I mentioned on Twitter, the project attracted approximately 190 different authors who contributed almost 330 entries. 90 of the entries were written specifically for Hacking the Academy, while the remainder were old posts, videos or presentations that authors felt fit the mandate of the planned book.

The project is now into its second phase: reorganizing the ~330 entries into manageable groups and whittling down the number to something that might be publishable.

I was curious who the contributors were and where they came from, so I went digging.

I was able to tie 133 of the 180 to an institution with the help of Google and all those C.V.s people have on their blogs. I'm sure it's not 100% accurate, but it is probably good enough to give a rough idea. The graph shows the number of posts by institution, including all schools with 4 or more posts (click to see full size):

I probably should have also included group blogs such as University of Venus (14 posts) and Professor Hacker (7 posts). The chart shows the folks at CHNM definitely got on the bandwagon, which is great. But, at least in the first draft, one might suggest the entries are geographically...biased. I guess that's what happens when entrants are self-selected.

Stay tuned for another chart when the final version comes out.

The End of People Moving? Follow the Grad Students

2010-05-25T19:09:00.008-04:00

An original article written for #hackacad

I'll be presenting in Montréal later this week, from the comfort of my Vancouver home, 3 500km away. It may seem like something out of a 1950s commercial for picture-phones, but as we all know, it's really not that complicated anymore. In this case, all I need is a webcam and an Internet connection.

As soon as I've finished this article, I'll don my dinner jacket and ascot, sit by the fire in a wingback chair and record a video of myself speaking with a fake British accent. I'll then post it online where my graduate student colleague in Montréal can access it and show it in a week's time at the conference. As he is co-leading the project with me, I trust he will have no trouble answering any questions the audience members may have about our work.

Distance travelled: 0km
Total Distance not travelled: ~7000km
Total cost: $0

The work I'll be discussing is a virtual network of scholars I helped establish this past year for graduate students looking to reach audiences beyond the academy. Every five months we put out an internal call for participation that asks members to draft an idea to submit to an editor. We then meet to offer encouragement and feedback on the drafts.

Please note that by “meet” I mean none of us leave the comfort of our homes. We leverage the power of a Google Group and email to bring together graduate students from 17 different Canadian institutions of higher learning. After our first call for participation, our members had a 75% publication success rate - far higher than the 10% return most new freelance writers can expect.

Distance travelled: 0km
Total distance not travelled: ~22 000km
Total cost: $0

On Monday, I have a meeting with colleagues in Ottawa, Edmonton, Toronto, Saskatoon and Tokyo. We've decided to forego the collective 17 000km it would take to bring us all together, and instead we'll be meeting via Skype.

Distance travelled: 0km
Total distance not travelled: ~ 39 000km
Total Cost: $0

It's a good thing we're getting used to Skype, because we're meeting to discuss a virtual workshop we're hosting in October that will bring together 20 graduate students from around the world. The event will be held online using Skype, Flickr, YouTube, Wordpress and email. Students who would never have otherwise had an opportunity to meet in person will be able to do so without having to leave town. We've never done anything like this before, so there's a bit of that will anyone come to my party feeling, but I'm happy to report that with several weeks to go until the deadline we've already received applications from over a dozen students in four countries on three continents.

Distance travelled: 0km
Total distance not travelled: ~ 95 000km
Total cost: $400 (we're issuing headsets to all participants to ensure our cross-continental workshop has good sound quality).

The idea for the workshop came from a Canadian virtual reading group that graduate students have been running of their own initiative since September. Students from across Canada meet once a month - you should be catching on to the meeting venues by now - to critique dissertation chapters and draft articles. The tools of their trade are Skype, email and Google Groups. With them, these students have developed a long-lasting collegial rapport with one another, which no one-time event could achieve.

Distance travelled: 0km
Total distance not travelled: ~ 145 000km
Total cost: $400

The Canadian Historical Association's (CHA) annual meeting is being held next week in Montréal. This is the biggest annual historical conference in Canada with thousands of people attending to witness approximately 400 scholars present papers.

I've been trying to find an interested graduate student who plans to attend the conference, and who could audio record presentations that would then appear online. This would allow people who were unable to travel to Montréal to access the information that was shared at the conference. Unfortunately, so far every response I've received is, “sorry, I'm only going to my own session and then going home.”

Distance travelled: ~1000km / participant * 1000 = 1 000 000km?
Total distance not travelled: ~ 145 000km
Total cost: $Millions

Maybe it's time we followed the lead of these graduate student initiatives and started moving information, not people.

Adam Crymble lives in Vancouver where he works for a national network of researchers. His boss lives 3 368 km away.

Online Versus Face-Time

2010-05-11T15:26:00.003-04:00

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) is cutting an on-site World War I workshop intended for high school history classes, and took some heat in the Globe and Mail for the decision (the article, "First World War workshops soon to be history" [Feb. 25, 2010] is behind a pay wall).

The workshops offered Ottawa-area students the opportunity to handle World War I era letters from soldiers and learn about the soldiers' experiences from LAC archivists who had expert knowledge of the material.

The article paints Canada's national archives as near-sighted for replacing face-time between students and expert archivists with online PDFs and lesson plans for teachers.

Nothing could be further from the truth, and Canadians should be applauding the decision. In the face of a huge Canadian deficit this year, it is important for cultural institutions to justify their spending and look for more efficient ways to offer Canadians their services. LAC has achieved this by placing the learning resources online, making them available to far more students, and reassigning the staff who offered the workshops to other tasks.

Critics argue that it's not the same for students to read online PDFs as it is to hold the actual letters written by soldiers, and that the expertise of the archivists adds to the learning experience. I certainly cannot argue that these cuts are not a loss for Ottawa-area students and teachers. But, claims made in the article that teachers - who are not WWI experts - cannot teach the content or that students will be unable to make the connection between the short-hand, “GSW” and “gunshot wound” are overly apocalyptic.

Our educational curriculums are designed to teach our students skills that are realistic and are based on their maturity and prior education. To suggest that Canadian high school teachers are unable to teach those skills without the help of an archivist is a disservice to the countless excellent teachers out there - many of whom have no option but to create their own lesson plans.

If a teacher is concerned that the students will not have the same experience with a PDF as they would with the actual letters, I invite them to use some creativity: print off the letters and Google “how to make paper look old.” All you need is some coffee and a little bit of planning. Not sure what a “GSW” is? Read the tool kit that accompanies the project, or email an archivist for clarification.

This shift from on-site to on-line content will create a program that students and teachers from Vancouver to St. John's to Yellowknife can use in their classrooms. Unlike smaller countries like Italy or Germany, Canadians are not connected via high-speed rail lines or short bus trips. Even if financial restraints were not a concern, it would be environmentally irresponsible to fly all Canadian students to Ottawa to participate in these workshops. Paying to set up workshops across the country is equally unrealistic.

Instead, to keep our education system competitive, we have to ensure our virtual connections can bridge the vast distances our geography demands and offer all students access to important educational resources.

The solution is not to offer more local programming, but more national programming that is created once and remains useful for many years. Instead of asking Canadians to continue to pay for each workshop, LAC has decided to ask Canadians to pay once more for archivists to scan and upload the documents and make them available for years to come at no further financial burden.

The change may not be the best for everyone, but it's better for most Canadians. Face- time is great, but we must also be prudent and accountable to all Canadians for the money we put into services accessible to only a few. For that, I applaud LAC for their forward thinking as we continue to make our educational system more sustainable, from coast to coast.

Photo Credit: "Takin' it to the BANK$Y" by John.

New Article: "Beyond the Peer Review"

2010-03-09T15:49:00.002-05:00

Looking to ensure your research gets exposure? Take a look at my article "Beyond the Peer Review" in this month's University Affairs Magazine.

You might also be interested in learning more about the "Reaching a Popular Audience" Workshop I'm involved with later this month.

Disseminate or disappear.

Reaching a Popular Audience Workshop: Vancouver 2010

2010-01-18T12:07:00.003-05:00

Application Deadline: Feb. 15, 2010
Event: Mar. 26, 2010

Apply Now

Fifty thousand screaming readers rush the newsstand to get a copy of your latest research. Okay, maybe they're not screaming, but the numbers probably aren't that far off. While peer-reviewed journals may make the academic world go round, it's through magazines and newspapers that your work can make its way into homes across the country – and you might be surprised to find out how interested Canadians are in what you do.

The Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) is sponsoring a one-day graduate student workshop on Friday, March 26, 2010 at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The workshop will teach participants how to propose a suitable article for a popular publication and effectively pitch it to a relevant editor.

The application deadline is February 15, 2010. Applications can be made using the online application form. Accommodation grants are available for out-of-town participants. A limited number of participants living outside the BC Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island may be eligible for travel grants.* Anyone who is registered or intends to register as a graduate student at a Canadian university in 2010 can apply, though some places are reserved for students studying environmental history or historical geography. Space is limited.

Participants can opt to receive continued support by joining the Active History Writer's Guild, a free organization which encourages and mentors young academics looking to propel their ideas into the public eye.

Download the poster (pdf)

Visit the Event Website.

Generous Support Provided By:
The Network in Canadian History & Environment and the University of British Columbia.

* NiCHE has provided funding to fly in and accommodate up to two students living in Northern B.C., Alta., or Sask. who are current NiCHE members.

Photo Credit: "1959 Voss Deluxe" by Oliver Hammond.

Active History: Live Blogging History

2010-01-05T12:56:00.002-05:00

For those looking for new ways to engage the public with history and the internet, check out my article on Active History that looks at the idea of posting historical events to a blog over the same span of time that the event took to unfold.

Live Blogging History: Accessible and Creative

Google Anti-Spam Policy Hurts Poor / Disabled Most

2009-11-29T13:27:00.005-05:00

Google has decided to fight against spam emails by making it much more difficult to sign up for a Gmail account. The idea they came up with was to require a person signing up for an email to give a cell-phone number with texting capabilities. Google would then text you a password which you can use to activate your account. This allows Google to make it much more difficult for automated systems to set up accounts and by limiting the number of accounts per cell-phone number spammers will have trouble staying in business. A rather ingenious solution, but one designed with the western world in mind.

For me - a non-cell phone user - it's annoying. The solution recommended by Google is to ask a friend if I can have the password sent to their phone. I don't want to do it, but if I need to I can get around the problem. After all, I can't complain too loudly considering Gmail is free and offers invaluable services to users.

But, what about those millions of people who do not own cell phones or do not have friends with cell phones either? There are thousands of people whose only access to the internet is on shared computers in public libraries, community centers and job-bank agencies who could benefit immensely from free email service as they search for jobs or to connect with friends and family.

What about people in third-world countries who may have access to a community computer, but may never have seen a cell phone with texting capabilities? One of the greatest things about the internet has been the ability for people from all walks of life all over the world to access information and services that had previously only been available to the rich.

What about my blind grandfather, who is an avid computer user, but obviously has no use for texting? I hate to stereotype, but I'm pretty sure if he were to ask his friends at the retirement home, he'd be hard-pressed to find anyone texting their grandchildren who he could ask for help from to get onto Gmail.

I can appreciate Google wants to cut down on spam and that people in third world countries, on government assistance or the blind probably don't bring in as much revenue as your average upper/middle class Google user, but the whole policy strikes me as anti-social and poorly thought out. Gmail was an opportunity for those unable to pay for expensive services such as cell phone plans. And it's an opportunity that's being denied them by a company that so often takes the lead in making information and services available to the world.

I'll be keeping my eye on this policy and I hope to see changes soon:

You can see the "Help" page to see for yourself just how inaccessible this policy is.

How to Write a Zotero Translator - Print on Demand

2009-11-18T12:09:00.004-05:00

After a suggestion from Tom Scheinfeldt at foundhist ory.org, I've decided to release my open-content monograph, "How to Write a Zotero Translator" as a print on demand book for those who prefer a paper version. The book was originally released as an open-content website by the Network in Canadian History & Environment and is still available on their website.

As Dr. Scheinfeldt rightly pointed out, sometimes it's nice to have a tangible copy that doesn't compete for screen space with your coding work. The book is available for $11.99 through Lulu.com.

The content of the print on demand is the same as what's available on the website, so it's up to you to decide which you prefer.

I'm happy to report that several people in a broad range of countries have used the guide to create translators, including some for foreign language sites. If you have used the guide to help you create a translator, please let me know!

To acquire "How to Write a Zotero Translator" visit the product order form on Lulu.com.

"Discover Canada" Open Editing Call

2009-11-14T12:51:00.005-05:00

The Canadian government recently released a new document, "Discover Canada" (pdf) that is the basis of the citizenship test for new Canadians. It contains a fairly significant section on Canadian history and, as you might expect, many Canadian historians who weren't consulted on the project have opinions about shortfalls in the document.

Yesterday, Andrew Smith posted a blog entry that suggested:

"maybe we should investigate using a Wikipedia-type process to write a real guide for new citizens. A more widely distributed process would be the best way of coming up with a statement of consensus values in modern-day Canada."

So, I’ve created a wiki and added the text from the “Canada’s History” section of the document. I encourage anyone interested in Canadian history to feel free to edit it as you see fit. Once everyone has had an opportunity to add their input, I will pass along the result to the Canadian government as a recommendation for improving the guide.

The wiki is located at: http://discover-canada.wikispot.org/

You can add to, subtract from, or make any changes you like.

It’s one thing to disagree with a government policy and another to do something about it, so here’s our chance as historians to have our say.

How to Archive a Conference

2009-11-13T11:56:00.006-05:00

Conferences and workshops are great places to network, learn new things or test out research ideas. Unfortunately, they tend to be ephemeral. Even in a best case scenario, most conferences and workshops only result in a white paper or maybe an edited collection. The vast majority of work becomes lines on the CVs of those who presented, without leaving a good record of what transpired.

If you'd like to archive your conference or workshop, but don't want to put together a book, there are a few ways you can achieve this on the web. This isn't a technical guide on setting up a website, but suggestions for what types of material to save that can help provide something tangible to point to of a conference you have been involved with.

Archiving a conference or workshop is a two step process:

1) Collecting

You'll have to put together enough material to make the project worthwhile. If you only have a one paragraph description, you aren't going to draw many lookers.

2) Hosting

If you don't have a website or access to one, you can set one up for free, or look for a research network that may be interested in hosting the project for you. Environmental historians could turn to the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) and there may be others for those studying different topics.

---

What you collect depends on what type of conference or workshop you are hosting. If you are running a traditional podium-based conference, you might consider the following:

1) Conference Description

Don't make the mistake of assuming people will understand from your conference title what the point of the event was or what its goals were. It's always a good idea to provide 3 or 4 paragraphs of information about the event. Who put it on and why? When was it? Where was it? Who supported it? Who attended?

You should probably answer all or most of, who, what, when, where, why and how.

2) Audio recording

For less than $100 you can get an MP3 recorder that you can leave by the podium to record the talks given by presenters. Don't forget to get signed consent forms before recording, as some people may be uncomfortable or unwilling to participate. In my experience, most people are willing if asked politely beforehand and if you explain that you are archiving the proceedings for those who were not able to attend.

You likely won't get thousands of people flocking to listen to the audio files, but as with any archive, the material is there for those who do wish to seek it. As time rolls on, you might be surprised with the number of hits you do receive.

3) Reflections

If your participants are bloggers by nature, use this to your advantage and ask people to blog about the conference and to send you links to any posts they make. You can quickly tie together a list of posts about your conference so that anyone interested can get several different perspectives as to what went on.

It's a good idea to mention this at the start and end of each day of the conference to reinforce it in everyone's mind. If you let the participants know you will be collecting the posts together they will be more likely to participate - everyone likes to think their work is appreciated.

If you're lucky enough to have a group that are active on Twitter, you might consider saving a copy of their tweets and making them available.

If your group aren't bloggers, you might consider asking 3 or 4 graduate students to write a 500 word reflection of what they learned, enjoyed, discussed, etc. Graduate students can always use exposure and this is a perfect opportunity to give it to them while getting content for your conference archive.

4) Photos

Not photos of people sitting around tables giving awkward smiles. Not someone stuffing their face with a donut. Good photos.

You might consider taking a photo of a landmark in the city you're holding the event. If you're in a nice building, take a photo of that. A good photo of someone speaking at a podium can be great, as long as it doesn't catch them with a particularly unflattering expression on their face.

Group shots can work well, but make sure you take down names as soon as possible. By the time you end up putting all the material together you may find you can't remember everyone.

If you don't have any good shots - or don't have a camera, try to find some photos with an open license that you can use. A Creative Commons search should bring up plenty of photos that capture the essence of your event. It's better to use a good photo that represents your event than a bad photo that was taken at your event.

5) Links / More Info

Sometimes people will stumble across your conference archive and want to learn more. Provide them with some links to relevant organizations, or books they might consider reading. Feel free to plug your own work as long as it's germane.

---

How much material is enough?

Well, you don't want too little or no one will care, and you don't need a book. I'd recommend something comparable to a magazine article. If you have between 1000 and 4000 words (can be from multiple authors writing different pieces), a few photos and a couple audio files, that's probably great.

Examples

Though not a standard practice by any means, there are a few good examples of archived conferences assembled by organizers and participants. Here are a couple that might give you some ideas.

Canadian Historical Association, Ottawa 2009 - environmental history presentations, e-hosted by NiCHE.

Svartarkot fieldcamp, Iceland 2009. e-hosted by NiCHE.

Hacking as a Way of Knowing, Toronto, 2009. e-hosted by NiCHE.

THATCamp '09, Fairfax, VA, 2009.

A conference archive not only removes the ephemeral nature of an event, it gives you a tangible deliverable to point to when seeking more funding for future work. It can also build your professional online profile and generate some excitement about your work.

If you're hosting an upcoming event, consider archiving it online.

Popular Publishing Writer's Guild formed

2009-11-04T14:25:00.002-05:00

Led by Adam Crymble (NiCHE) and Jason Young (York University).

A joint effort between NiCHE and Active History, this group came out of the graduate student workshop, "Publishing for a Wide Audience" held at the University of Western Ontario on October 19, 2009.

The workshop sought to teach young academics how to branch out and reach broader publics. Publishing in the popular press – whether local newspapers or nationally-circulated magazines – is one way to communicate academic research and analysis to a wider audience. The workshop taught students skills that will help them get their messages out to a wider audience. Sessions at the workshop included writing attention-catching op-eds, press releases, and magazine queries.

To continue to foster these new skills, participants have been invited to join the "Popular Publishing Writer's Guild," where every five months, members are asked to draft a submission to an editor of a popular publication. The length, format and subject matter are optional; the goal is to support the dissemination of research by academics to a wider audience. The first round of submissions went underway at the end of October, 2009 and round two will be held in the Spring.

We hope to expand this group in the future, as well as to offer more, similar workshops so that knowledge learned in the academy can be spread to all Canadians.

The Popular Publishing Writer's Guild wishes to thank NiCHE for support to put on the Workshop at UWO.

You can read about the initial workshop on the event website.

#apiworkshop Reflection: free the data

2009-10-26T09:20:00.003-04:00

I recently attended Bill Turkel's Workshop on APIs for the Digital Humanities held in Toronto and had the pleasure of coming face to face with many of the people who have created the historical data repositories I have used so enthusiastically.

What I came away with was an even stronger conviction that data in humanities repositories should be completely liberated. By that, I mean given away in their entirety.

The mass digitizations that have occurred recently have provided a great first step for researchers. I no longer need to fly to London and sit in a dark room sifting through boxes to look at much of the material I seek. But, I'm still - generally - unable to do with it what I like.

Many repositories contain scanned documents which have been OCR'd so that they are full text searchable, but that OCR is not shared with the end user, rendering the entire thing useless for those wanting to do a text analysis or mash up the data with another repository's content.

Most databases require the user to trust the site's search mechanisms to query the entire database an return all relevant results. If I'm doing a study, I'd prefer to do so with all the material available. Without access to the entire database on my hard drive, I have no way of verifying that the search has returned what I sought.

Many of those at the workshop who administered repositories were willing and eager to email their data at the drop of a hat, but that is not yet the norm. Most of my past requests for data have been completely ignored. When it comes to scholarly data, possessiveness leads to obscurity.

As humanists become increasingly confident programmers, many will define research projects based on the accessibility of the sources. Those who are giving their data away will end up cited in books and journal articles. Those desperate to maintain control will get passed by. If someone asks you for your data, think of it as a compliment of your work, then say yes.

Publishing for a Wide Audience: Grad Student Workshop

2009-09-14T09:23:00.004-04:00

Monday October 19, 2009
London, ON, Canada

Fifty thousand screaming readers rush the newsstand to get a copy of your latest research. Okay, maybe they're not screaming, but the numbers probably aren't that far off. While peer reviewed journals may make the academic world go round, it's through magazines and newspapers that your work can make its way into homes across the country – and you might be surprised to find out how interested Canadians are in what you do. Did we mention that you also get paid, and the amount of work is probably less than you spent on your first undergrad paper?

The Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) is sponsoring a graduate student workshop on Monday, October 19, 2009 in London, Ontario which will teach participants how to sell an article about their work or experiences to a popular publication. The workshop will be hands-on and by the end of the day all participants should have a proposal finished and ready to submit to an editor.

Accommodation grants are available for out of town participants. Priority will be given to students studying topics on Canada and the environment and those who are registered as NiCHE members. Membership is free and you can sign up at http://niche-canada.org/user/register.

Participants are also invited to attend an optional public lecture that evening by Harriet Ritvo, president of the American Society of Environmental Historians. Ritvo will be discussing her new book, The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, and Modern Environmentalism (Chicago UP, 2009).

Space is limited, so if you are interested please contact Adam Crymble at acrymbl@uwo.ca as soon as possible. Formal registration to follow. No fee.

See the event poster (PDF).

Photo credit: "Ode to Jack Keruac", Oliver Hammond.

Learning Unix

2009-07-21T10:53:00.004-04:00

I was recently given the task of learning Unix on my Mac. Recently, in this case means last week. I make no claims of being a Unix expert, but I am making some good headway. So, I thought I'd compile a post that tells others in a similar situation what resources I found helpful. If you have other suggestions, please add them in the comments.

Read:

Hayne, Cameron. "Unix FAQ (for OS X)", Hayne of Tintagel.

It's fairly long, but it provides a great overview of what you're trying to learn. There is plenty of opportunity to practice while reading through the various sections.

As you read, keep the following reference chart handy:

"An A-Z Index of the Apple OS X command line". This basically tells you what all the commands do and shows you the syntax required to use them.

Next, try the following questions, compiled by Bill Turkel to keep me occupied while he did more important work:

Open a terminal.

What directory are you in?

What files are in the directory?

Can you list the files in the directory in different ways?

How do you go to a different directory?

What files are in that directory?

How do you see only a few of the files at a time? Say ones that begin with the letter 'a'?

How do you see only the .html files?

How do you copy a file?

How do you move a file to a new filename? Is that the same as renaming it?

How do you make a new directory?

How do you get rid of a directory?

How do you list the contents of a .txt or .html file to the screen?

How do you break a text file into screen-sized chunks if it is too big to display on the screen?

How do you show the first part of a text file to the screen?

How do you show the last part of a text file to the screen?

How do you find a file in a different directory if you know (part of) its name?

You should be able to use the reference list posted above to solve all these problems. If you're totally stuck, leave a note in the comments.

Then you can move on to some more Turkel questions. Characters in quotes are commands to type into your Unix terminal. Don't include the quotation marks:

What do the "uname", "hostname" and "set" commands do? (minus quotes)

Try "ls -l" and "ls -1". Read "man ls"

Practice using "touch". Read "man touch"

Practice using "grep".

Make sure you read about . .. ~ and / .

Read "man less"

Read about pipes and redirection (|, <, >, >>), sed, split, chmod, curl and lynx

Once you're done that, you can try out some of the free quizzes on the bdv-unix-skills website.

Hope that helps, and since I'm still learning too, more advice is most welcome!

Google's Geographic Bias

2009-07-18T16:06:00.003-04:00

If you're sitting in Atlanta, it makes sense that when you Google "Hair Dressers" you are probably most interested in services near to you. It doesn't do you any good to know "Jimmy's Haircut Shop" in Vancouver BC doesn't require an appointment; you need to know who in your area can cut your hair.

Google's searches have several mechanisms in place to help with this. For example, an American will automatically be directed to Google.com when they navigate to Google. Here in Canada, you get sent to Google.ca, and in Jolly Old England, you go to Google.co.uk. Each is designed to help users find search results most likely relevant to them. Canadians are more likely to see Canadian sites ranked higher.

However, this "helping" can effectively mean people in some countries are blind about what occurs elsewhere in the world. Many people do not look beyond the first page of results when they have performed a Google search. Hence the intensely competitive "Search Engine Optimization" industry that works hard to ensure sites are ranked highest. What this all means for a researcher new to the internet or unaware of the perils is that depending on where you live, Google might not point you to the same resources. This is especially the case if you are trying to research another region.

For example: the Google search for "england history" on the US, UK and Canadian instances of Google all provide 83 000 000 matches.

However, while the page "The History of England" ranks 6th on the UK version of Google, it is ranked 66th on the Canadian and American versions of the search engine, deep enough down that most people wouldn't likely bother to check it out.

If I were interested in the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE), hosted at niche.uwo.ca, and did a search for "niche", what I found would depend on where I lived:

Google.ca rank: 3rd
Google.com rank: 15th
Google.co.uk rank: 420th (that's the 42nd page!)

The .ca attached to the address means that Google has decided that this page is likely irrelevant to Brits. Now, granted, I should probably refine my search to get beyond the fact that a search for a word like "niche" is a bit ambiguous. But, the important thing to take away here is that Google is vetting what knowledge we find, in many cases without us even being aware of it.

What can we do about it? Probably not very much that will get Google to change their ways. But as responsible researchers and internet users, we should be aware of this. When you're doing research, make sure you don't just accept Google's top 10 suggestions at face value. Try another search engine (there's lots!). And if you're doing research on another country, make sure you try out their version of Google as well as your own.

Technology is great, but we've got to know it's limits.

Do You Have a Wiki Yet?

2009-07-14T17:15:00.003-04:00

If you're doing research without a personal Wiki, you're livin the hard life. Whether you love or hate Wikipedia, you can't deny it's got appeal and a large part of that is the wiki environment. It's extremely easy to link pages together, edit and keep back ups of previous work all at the same time.

Working on multiple projects? A central wiki can branch off into each project and keep things organized for you.

Don't have a big research budget to spend on software? How's free sound? If you already have webspace you can install the open source MediaWiki, the same package that Wikipedia runs on. If you don't have server space of your own, try Wikispot who will provide free wiki access to anyone working on a collaborative project.

If you're concerned about privacy or having your unfinished research show up on Google Searches, fear not; there are ways to prevent search engines from Indexing your wiki, usually found in the preferences, depending on which wiki you use. If you're running your own wiki, you'll have the option to password protect it.

So, do you have a wiki yet?

History: Enough with the Quizzes

2009-06-30T11:10:00.007-04:00

I came across the Dominion Institute's newest quiz this morning. The quiz involves identifying famous Canadians based on their photographs. It included everyone from Wayne Gretzky to Sir. Fredrick Banting. The Dominion Institute issues these quizzes knowing full well that most Canadians will do poorly on them. The resultant statistics then make for timely Globe and Mail or National Post articles around Canada Day in which we are shamed for our lack of Canadian history knowledge.

I took the quiz, and got 10 out of 10, but not without a great deal of difficulty. In one case (Nelly McClung), I had to figure out the answer by process of elimination, ruling out Celine Dion and Michelle Jean from the list of choices.

The average Canadian did much poorer than I did. But, who cares? Why is it only history that we have to quiz? How come the Physics institute of Canada doesn't go around polling everyday Canadians with 3rd year physics problems, only to complain we have been neglecting our physics, as a nation?

So, I've created my own 1 question chemistry quiz, of comparable difficulty level:

Identify the following molecule:

Choices:
Apple Juice, Butter, Mustard, Saturated Fat, Vitamin C, Garlic, Aspartame, Hydro-Chloric Acid, Yeast, Caffeine, Tomato Juice, Folic Acid, Vitamin B12, Chlorinated Salt, Vitric Acid.

---

If you didn't recognize that as Caffeine, you're either evidence that chemistry isn't given enough funding / emphasis / time in schools, or that's just not something that's ever been important enough to your life to memorize or learn how to interpret.

Enough with the quizzes. People don't like to be shown how stupid they are. Not everyone yearns to play trivial pursuit. And, the inability to recognize a remote historic figure is not a sign that Canadian people are stupid.

If you'd like to take the quiz it is available here (for now): http://www.dominion.ca/

Digital Humanities: Where to Begin?

2009-06-29T17:54:00.003-04:00

I was speaking with someone today with a MA in History, who was interested in getting involved with the digital humanities. She's keen to learn, but didn't know where to start.

My suggestion: take the best essay you think you've ever written and turn it into a webpage.

This will ground you in principles that will be forever useful as you progress to bigger and more complex projects, and it will give you a tangible 'deliverable' that you can be proud of. It is also something that you can teach yourself to do, with little instruction and a lot of experimentation.

Creating a simple website has many advantages. A lot of the advanced work you will do as a digital humanist will require you to work with webpages. This may involve dissecting pages from their source code, to extract content. You'd expect your surgeon to know what was connected to your knee bone; and I'd expect my digital humanist to know what was in my <:head> tag.

Also, markup, which is the language-type simple websites are written in, is much easier to learn than programming languages that use commands, such as JavaScript or Python.

To get started, see my previous post "Putting a History Essay Online".

What about the other digital humanists out there? What's the best first step for an aspiring student?

Collaboratron: an experiment in physical computing

2009-06-06T12:00:00.003-04:00

Today is #hackday. Devon Elliott approached me about using a system called "Trackmate" to create a cool user interaction. At it's most basic level, Trackmate sends a message to your computer when an object is placed on a special platform (made out of a piece of plexiglas bought at the dollar store). We wrote a program in Processing which created a visualization that changed depending on which objects a user had put on our plexiglas platform.

In our case, we decided to use the Network in Canadian History & Environment's (NiCHE) member list as our dataset. When they signed up, each of our members were able to choose up to 45 research interest areas. The idea was that this information could be used to help people find those with like interests. Our system used a physical object to represent each of those 45 research interests. Users can put one or several of the objects on the platform and the program will create a dynamic display which will recommend potential collaborators based on the user's selections.

It's just a prototype at this point, but since today is #hackday, we thought we'd share what we've got so far. You can take a look at a video on the NiCHE website.

Choosing a proper noun for a Project Name

2009-05-13T11:46:00.005-04:00

So, you've got a great idea for a project / research group / lab / product. It's going to change your field and soon, everyone will know your name. But, what is your name?

Some people are tempted to choose a name or a acronym that spells out a word in the dictionary. Maybe something that evokes a characteristic they want their project to embody. Maybe you decide to call your new lab "TIGER" because you are developing orange and black striped organisms.

Cute.

But before you choose the name, consider the downsides of this decision. Until you are more famous than tigers, it will be almost impossible to track yourself on the web. There will already be thousands of people out there using your name as a word, rather than to refer to your activities. Someone who loves Tigers will beat you to the Twitter username "Tiger". The Detroit Tigers will always rank higher than you on Google. Many of your visitors will leave the moment they realize they aren't going to find any photos of Tigers on your site. And your would-be visitors will have to try strange combinations of of search words just to find you.

Using a combination of upper case and lower case letters to write your name often does not help. Many search functions ignore capitalization so your search for "TiGeR" will return the same results as "TIGER" or "tiger".

So when choosing a name, maybe it would be better if you went with something a bit more obscure, like "Omeka".

Thomson Reuters harassing Zotero community

2009-05-07T15:43:00.004-04:00

I, along with presumably 285 other people who are interested in Zotero's development got this email this afternoon:

Dear Zotero Development Community Members,

First off, please allow me to apologize for clogging your inbox with this unsolicited message, but I hope you'll understand that the severity of the situation requires me to contact you. In its ongoing litigation with George Mason University, Thomson Reuters has demanded that the university produce contact information (name, email, and username) associated with all two hundred eighty-six Zotero SVN/Trac accounts.

We can think of no use Thomson Reuters's counsel would have for this information other than to intimidate and harass you, and we made every effort to avoid turning over this information until compelled. We have requested that the contact information be placed under protective order, which in principle means that only the lawyers involved should have access to the information. Nonetheless, we feel it is our obligation to notify you that we are being forced to release this data. Please note that you are in no way required or requested to keep this disclosure confidential. If you are contacted by Thomson Reuters or their attorneys in connection with this lawsuit, please do let us know.

We deeply apologize for this encroachment on your privacy, and we sincerely hope that it does not dissuade you from remaining active members of the Zotero development community.

How to Rename Files En Masse

2009-04-28T16:39:00.005-04:00

Recently, I was confronted with a rather large batch of image files that needed renaming. There were several hundred, and it would have taken far too long to do it manually. So, I wrote a short Python computer program that will do this in a matter of seconds.

If you also ever need to rename many files and don't want to do it manually, you can use this same technique (no experience necessary).

This example is provided as is. Please don't send me your angry email if you accidentally rename all the files on your computer and nothing works anymore. Follow the directions carefully.

Follow these steps.

1) Make a complete copy of all the files that need renamed and save them to a new folder. You can't undo this renaming thing so you don't want to take the chance that all your files get renamed incorrectly. Back them up and be safe. Nothing but the files to be renamed should be in the new folder. Call the folder "rename"

2) Download Python from their website and install it: http://www.python.org/

3) Download Komodo Edit from their website and install it: http://www.activestate.com/komodo_edit/

4) Read Chapters 1-3 of Bill Turkel's "Programming Historian" and set up Komodo Edit to have a 'Run Python' feature (it's in the chapter. Read it! It will only take 10 minutes).

5) Open Komodo Edit and create a new file. Save it as Rename.py .

6) Paste the following code into that file. Indenting is important:

#code

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
from os import rename

x = os.listdir('C:\\Documents and Settings\\Replace with Path to Folder')
print x
a = 0
b = 0
for file in x:
    if x[a].find(".tif") != -1:
        print a
        os.rename(x[a], 'newName-' + str(b) + '.tif')
    a+=1
    b+=1

#end code

7) Three lines need to be changed.
a) x = os.listdir('C:\\Documents and Settings\\Replace with Path to Folder')
change this to have the path of your folder containing the files to be changed. Make sure you use two slashes between directory layers, not one. The first slash is actually an "escape" character that tells the program to consider the 2nd slash as an alphanumeric character rather than a code character with special meaning.
You can find the path of your folder by right clicking it and selecting properties.

b) if x[a].find(".tif") != -1:
Replace ".tif" with whatever type of file you are changing the name of. This can be any file type you like. .jpg, .txt, .html, etc.

c) os.rename(x[a], 'newName-' + str(b) + '.tif')
Replace "newName" with whatever you want to change the name to, and ".tif" to whatever file format you selected in step (b). This is a pretty simple program - if you go through it line-by-line you can probably figure out what each step does.

8) Resave the file. Place Rename.py in the same folder as the files that you want renamed. Treat this program like a loaded gun. You don't want to run it in the wrong folder. If you run it will rename everything in that folder whether you want it to or not. As long as you don't double click it you should be ok.

9) Open Rename.py in Komodo Edit and run the program using the technique described in the Programming Historian's "Hello World" example.

You should now have an entire folder full of renamed files. They will be named "newName1.tif", "newName2.tif", etc. Notice that the old names are now completely gone.

This can save you a lot of time if you're dealing with hundreds of files. But, please be careful. Don't rename any files that are critical to your system.

A little bit of computer programming can go a long way

How Researchers can Effectively use Twitter

2009-04-17T20:21:00.006-04:00

I've been getting a lot of questions lately by friends and colleagues who wonder how and why I use Twitter. Most of these people seem to assume that I'm tweeting what I had for breakfast (or hoping to find out what the CHNM staff had for breakfast). To these people social media is a place where you post pictures of your drunk friends from last night, divulge far too much personal information and take tests that tell you which type of car you are.

There are certainly users of both Facebook and Twitter that have propelled these stereotypes along, but there are definitely good, professional and educational uses for Twitter. One of the best examples of this is the digital humanities community.

I've decided to only use Twitter as a professional learning tool. I don't seek out social friends, am not helping Brit reach 1 million followers (even if there might be a pair of concert tickets in it for me) and actively "unfollow" people who send throngs of breakfast related messages. That has left me with a small but active group of people who provide a steady stream of helpful and insightful information to me every day. Here are the types of tweets I find most helpful as a researcher and digital humanist:

1) Conference Streaming
These live, on the go tweets come from people attending a conference or public lecture. They provide an outline of what a person is presenting, along with interesting excerpts from the audience or thoughts the tweeter may have. Often, these tweets include links to the presenter's slides or notes. While not nearly as good as attending a presentation yourself, this is a big first step in reducing the ephemeral nature of the podium speech and disseminating it to those of us who could not attend, or might not think to attend.

2) Interesting & Relevant Links
With so many people writing in so many places, it's impossible to notice everything. Tweets routinely point me to blog posts, journal articles and webpages relevant to my research - as long as you're following the right people.

3) Finding other Digital Humanists
Around last year at this time I was pretty sure Bill Turkel and Dan Cohen were the only two digital humanists on the planet. Through Twitter, I've found a few dozen more and have stumbled upon research that has both amazed me and prompted new avenues for my own study. For those twitterers interested in Digital Humanities, make sure you check out those listed under #digitalhumanities on http://wefollow.com .

4) Project Updates
Some of the people I follow aren't people at all. Many organizations create twitter accounts for their projects / institutions and send out tweets to let people know of upgrades / upcoming events. It's easy to go overboard with these types of tweets, so I have to say I always appreciate those organizations who exercise discretion and only tweet about significant news.

5) Crowdsourcing
Need a second opinion? Looking for a piece of software that does something obscure? I've found plenty of both by sending out a tweet and waiting for the expertise of my followers to kick in with suggestions.

And the last thing I have found it useful for is getting my own message out. A few weeks ago I posted a message on this blog about my Zotero translator guide and walked away. Within an hour, twitterers has noticed my post and tweeted it across the twittersphere. Over the next couple days I received a few hundred visitors, directly because of the tweets and the internet had been seeded with links (in more than one language) pointing people to the resource I had created. If I had sought traditional, print based forms of publishing, I'd probably still be waiting months for the presses to roll.

Twitter lets me keep up to date with research and developments amongst people with like interests. If done prudently, you can avoid the drunk photos, tests about what car you are and information about what everyone had for breakfast.

Incidentally, I had an apple cinnamon toaster's strudel this morning. And on Mondays, the whole staff of CHNM eats bagels. Ahhh, how I miss those bagels.

How Best to Approach Academic Journals

2009-04-01T17:35:00.005-04:00

Are you a humanist trying to get published in an academic journal? Trying to decide if it's worth the time and effort? Do you know someone who fits this category?

The round table discussion (audio) at the American Society for Environmental History, recorded in Talahassee this past month, offers some excellent tips for grad students and post docs. The round table was made up of editors from several academic journals and offers insights into what they like, what they hate, what to do and what not to do. A must listen for any grad student and a great recommendation for any prof to give to their students. Don't let the environmental history topic scare you away; it doesn't factor into the equation at all. This recording is useful for anyone in the humanities; including profs with poor writing skills.

How to Write a Zotero Translator

2009-03-29T09:39:00.006-04:00

I have put together what I hope is a very comprehensive online guide detailing How to Write a Zotero Translator. This guide is the guide I wished was available for me when I was given the task of writing a Zotero translator for the site http://www.canadiana.org/. The task was part of an internship during my Masters of History at the University of Western Ontario. This internship, during the summer of 2008, was held at the Center for History and New Media — the home of Zotero. When I took on the project, I had no experience with computer programming; when I left, I had created over fifty site-specific translators.

This guide is the product of that brief, yet intensive learning experience.

The goal of this guide is to provide readers enough skills and direction to create a Zotero translator of their own (which I hope they will share). It also gives researchers, libraries, archives and databases a specific resource to make their own translators rather than rely on the overworked Zotero team.

http://niche-canada.org/zotero-guide

Voting with Twitter

2009-03-27T10:06:00.007-04:00

I've started using Twitter to keep up with the wide world of Digital Humanities research which prefers to disseminate itself in 140 character messages 500 times a day, rather than wait 8 months to publish now out of date material in a journal. And whilst Twittering I noticed that one of my followers was also following Federal NDP leader Jack Layton.
I began to wonder how politicians are using Twitter, and how effective it is or how effective they are at using it, so I added the five national party leaders to my list. I've discovered two things. First, most don't Twitter very often or very effectively. At best it's a brief propaganda message once or twice a week preaching to the converted, with very little dialogue to be seen. In fact, one party leader doesn't even pretend they care to engage in a dialogue and doesn't follow his followers.
The second thing I noticed was that the number of followers each leader had did not necessarily represent the percentage of seats that their party received in the last election (Oct 08).

The total number of Twitter followers was 19 545, taken on Mar 27, 2009.

If we attempt to infer meaning from this, we might be tempted to suggest that Elizabeth May's "Green Party" supporters are overrepresented amongst Social Networkers. Perhaps they are young, and they are more likely to be comfortable with a computer.

We might also ponder, Jack Layton's NDP Party has almost twice as many Twitter followers as seats. Maybe the old adage that the NDP has trouble getting the vote out, or that its supporters vote for Ignatieff's Liberal party in an attempt to thwart the Harper's Conservative party is true?

Lastly, it looks like Gille Duceppe's "Bloc Quebecois", the separatist party either isn't in to Twittering (perhaps a language / culture issue), or he's lost a lot of support since October. I'd bet on the former.

However, when we make the same comparison by looking at the popular vote, rather than the number of seats in parliament, an entirely different situation arises.

Now, the only presumption that looks like it was correct is the one about Gilles Duceppe's lack of Twitter support being a cultural issue. The Green Party and NDP (Green & Orange) are much more closely preportional between Twitter followers and Voters.

In fact, with the exception of Gilles Duceppe's Bloc Quebecois, the number of Twitter followers accurately reflects the percentage of the popular vote that a party received in the last election, within 5 percentage points.

What does this mean? Keep in mind that almost 6 months have passed since the election (including a ridiculous power struggle that went no where back in January), so support levels will have changed a little. But I think this proves A) Pie Charts are fun to make. B) You don't need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on researching voter intentions. C) Make sure your data sets reflect reality. In this case, the "Seats" graph gives a skewed view of what really happened.

If you'd like to make lovely pie charts like those in this post, you can do so for free at MrNussbaum.com

Day in the Digital Humanities Day

2009-03-18T11:31:00.006-04:00

Today, March 18, 2009, about 80 scholars from all over the world who somehow fit into the category of "digital humanists" are recording what they do on a series of blogs set up specifically for the task. The idea is not much different than the "Day in a Life" photo books that incorporated photos from many photographers all over a given country, taken on a single day. This project has been set up by the Text Analysis Portal for Research at the University of Alberta. I'm looking forward to checking out the results and playing with the data sets created by the collective blogging!

Of the 80 participants, I've met two. You can see what they were up to today here:

Bill Turkel, University of Western Ontario
Trevor Owens, Center for History & New Media

Or you can check out the main page for the project.

Charles Taylor Prize to Historian

2009-02-09T22:22:00.002-05:00

The Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction was given out today in Toronto.

The jurors narrowed down a field of 135 books from all fields of non-fiction to just three. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the three finalists had all written histories.

Tim Cook's Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918, a history of Soldier's letters in WWI, won the grand prize. Tim is also an employee of the Canadian War Museum.

Also on the short list were Elizabeth Abbott's Sugar: A Bittersweet History and Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russian's Revolutionary World.

Take that non-historians!

Academic and Public Historians: Working together?

2009-02-02T14:06:00.003-05:00

Sean Kheraj, a postdoctoral student at the University of British Columbia recently defended his doctoral thesis on the environmental history of Vancouver's famous Stanley Park. In most people's books, that' makes him an expert on the field.

Sean was recently asked to write a review of the Vancouver Museum's exhibit, "The Unnatural History of Stanley Park." The experience, which Kheraj likened to "witnessing the physical manifestation of my dissertation as a museum display," was a challenge for him. Every detail that the museum had gotten wrong popped out. But, rather than posting a negative review, Kheraj reflected on the role many academic historians could be playing as consultants in instances that they choose not to.

It's something that came up a lot last year in our UWO Public History discussions, but perhaps not something that regularly enters the consciousness of many academic historians.

You can read the review at http://niche.uwo.ca/foresthistory/resources/exhibits

New Zealand Museums: Good

2009-01-28T19:03:00.002-05:00

I spent the Christmas break in northern New Zealand this year and dutifully visited a couple museums. The two museums were the Kaori Museum in Matakohe and the Auckland War Memorial Museum, incidentally in Auckland.

I must say, I was extremely impressed with the two museums. Even better than some of the world's best institutions such as those I visited in Washington DC last summer.

The Kaori Museum

Kaori is a species of tree that grows for thousands of years and is akin to the Redwoods of the North American west coast. The Kaori Museum is essentially a small town museum, entirely funded on ticket revenues and giftshop sales. It does have the good fortune of being able to sell large quantities of Kaori wood products which fetch a pretty penny. Nevertheless, any museum which runs on private funds is impressive. One that does it so well is amazing.

The museum has dozens of 'townspeople.' One for just about every role of 19th century life in New Zealand. These townspeople don't move much. Most mannequin's don't - Today's Special exempt. However, what's intriguing is that each mannequin has the face of someone who actually lives in the town. The tag might read, "This barber is modelled after Jim Smith who still lives in town and whose family ran the original barber shop in Matakohe."

Perhaps I don't get out much, but this was the first time I'd ever seen such community involvement in a museum.

I can't say enough good about this museum.

The walls are packed with old photographs - probably a large percentage of the archival holdings of the museum - each with a caption that viewers can choose to read or to ignore. Dozens of artifacts are on display, including many tools which I was allowed to try out - at least, I did try out and nobody said anything. Sensors in the walls took note of passing visitors and initiated coversations with some of the townspeople.

Needless to say, I was impressed.

The Auckland War Memorial Museum

I actually only got a chance to pop into the Museum, so I really only saw a small, temporary exhibit which I think was called "behind the scenes." It certainly put the muse back into museum. The exhibit was a collection of all the weird stuff the museum had collected over the years, including a baby orangutan which is being kept in a freezer "until they get around to doing something else with it." I must say, it was cute and intriguing, in a morbid kind of way.

Oh, and there was the stuffed deer that "had been in the women's toilet in the storage area longer than anyone could remember."

Apart from the weird and wonderful, the exhibit was also artistically and technologically marvelous. A giant wall of ticking clocks was the perfect - and extremely creepy - setting for peep holes, through which users could find any number of strange things. The atmosphere that wall of clocks created was unreal.

One aspect of the exhibit involved a series of dots spaced on the floor, each infront of a series of artifacts. To my sheer amazement, when you stood exactly on the dot, you could hear a perfectly clear narrative. Move one step to the left and the sound vanished.

If you are in the museum field, these are two museums you should definitely make the effort to see. And if you're doing an internship at a Kiwi museum, you should hop on a plane up to Auckland and check it out.

Kudos to the Kiwis and their museums. They were an absolute delight and an example the world should be following.

Book Review: "Remember, Remember (the Fifth of November)"

2008-12-27T17:39:00.006-05:00

Parkinson, Judy. "Remember, Remember (the Fifth of November): The History of Britain in Bite-Sized Chunks." (London: Michael O'Mara Books, 2008). 182p. 10pounds.

The book attempts to survey all of British history through a chronological series of encyclopedia entries, each one page in length. Each page outlines a major historical event, figure or stage in British history, beginning with the Roman Invasion of AD43 and ending with the founding of the United Nations. The title, of course, refers to the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November, 1605, still remembered with the celebration of Guy Fawkes Day.

Parkinson has succeeded in creating an abundantly clear survey, which will no doubt clear up confusion many people have as to the order of events in British history. Readers can clearly see how events influenced or were influenced by one another; no entries appear to stand out as isolated from the rest, which is a credit to the author's choice of topics.

Each entry can stand alone and the book can be used as a reference, or it can be read through from front to back. Those who elect the latter will note that at times events or persons are explained in more than one entry, especially in cases where one entry is the subset of another - a battle and a war, for instance. This repetition makes it possible for readers to use the work as a reference book and should not be considered a failing.

Someone looking for a brief survey, or an undergraduate about to embark on a British history course, could certainly benefit from this book. Its brevity and journalistic prose make for light reading. Parkinson has done a fabulous job of creating what is essentially a chronological encyclopedia without leaving the reader feeling like they have been sitting with a copy of Britannica.

As the entries are short and without footnotes, the book is not of much scholarly use - though no encyclopedia is. There are a handful of instances that used direct quotations in which even a quick footnote or reference would have been appropriate so that readers interested in pursuing further reading could at least be directed. However, the lack of references was not a major issue.

Nearly all British historians will feel that their area of expertise did not receive proper treatment; many important events are only referenced in an entry devoted to something else. For instance, the South Seas Bubble gets a single sentence in King George I's article (p. 102) and nothing of its own. Likewise, many other important aspects of British history do not appear at all. Nevertheless, the task of writing two-thousand years of history in 150 entries is a major undertaking and many worthy events must be cut to make the project doable.

Since it is impossible for anyone to be an expert on a topic so vast, I am unable to comment upon the accuracy of each entry. However, I can say that the entries are fairly consistent, with a few notable exceptions. The articles "Munich and the run-up to the Second World War" (p. 174) and "Germany Invades" (p. 177) list that Britain formally declared war on Germany on September 1, 1939 and September 3rd respectively. Even a non-historian can see issue with this claim.

The most glaring problem the reviewer noted was in the "Magna Carta" entry (p. 53). In this article, the author makes a bold claim that the Magna Carta is "the most famous and most significant legal document in the history of democracy" (p. 53). This is a very partisan claim that most Americans and a good many others around the world would certainly debate. Given that the book has limited itself and decided not to provide evidence to support such bold claims, they should not be included. One cannot assume that a reader has the time or inclination to look further into the topic to come to an educated conclusion.

Apart from these minor failings, the book is certainly worth the cost and time required to read it. It would make an excellent course reading for the first week of a British history survey. More countries could benefit from a similar survey of their own history.

Journal Articles in an RSS feed?

2008-12-17T10:48:00.002-05:00

Has anyone come across an academic journal that releases its contents in an RSS feed that users can sign up for? Would certainly make it easier to keep up with the latest scholarship.

History in the UWO Bookstore

2008-12-10T19:57:00.003-05:00

I went into the UWO bookstore the other day to look for Christmas presents to myself. I had a walk around the non-textbook part of the store, which accounts for about a quarter of the inventory. To my surprise, books about history and historiography in this "popular" section included four shelves. That's more than all the fiction combined; it's four times more than the comedy, four times more than the cooking, and twice as much as the biography.

Guess there's more of a market for history out there than I thought.

Visualization of Newspaper Content

2008-12-02T18:08:00.005-05:00

I made a quick visualization of what the people of Canada are saying about the current coalition that seems imminent in Canadian federal politics. The visualization is made with Wordle, which is a snap to use.

The first is the frequency of word use amongst commenters to the article: "Tories launch anti-coalition ad blitz." This article was printed in the left leaning "Toronto Star" on December 2, 2008. There were 264 comments in total.

This second one is the word frequency of commenters on the National Post article, "Dion mortgages federalist ideals to sign on with separatists." The National Post tends to lean to the right on political issues. There were 64 comments to this article.

Both articles essentially say the same thing, but with opposite perspectives on what makes good politics.

It's interesting to note the slight differences in the two. In the first article, Prime Minister Stephen Harper is the clear focus, whereas his name is noticeably smaller in the pro-Harper National Post article.

Likewise, "Quebec" is fairly prominent in the National Post article, which suggests commenters frequently pointed to the fact that this Liberal led coalition will involve the separatist party, the Bloc Quebecois. To the right, this is akin to a deal with the devil. In The Star, "Quebec" is barely visible - you can squint to see it next to "People."

There are plenty of other assumptions you could make about the contents of these comments and the worries of both sides based on the visualizations, some of which might even be true. And, I know it's not really history, but one day it will be.

Great Example of Teaching History

2008-11-26T10:11:00.004-05:00

If anyone is looking for an amazing way to teach school children about Canadian settlement, check out Joe Ralph's blog, which features a short video of Canadian school teacher, Mike Ward and his hands on approach to teaching history.

It's amazing what you can do with a little bit of dirt and some plastic barnyard animals.

Kudos to Mike and his creativity.

Archiving Conferences

2008-10-28T16:04:00.002-04:00

What happens in a conference is usually lost the moment the words leave the speaker's lips. Last week I filmed a conference in the University of Western Ontario: Canadian Climate History workshop, so that what happened might be useful to others.

Just because conference presentations aren't in written form doesn't mean they aren't worth keeping.

Consider recording your next conference or conference talk. If you're looking for a place to store it, try ITunes University.

Photo Archive of One Man's World

2008-10-22T12:32:00.004-04:00

My father sent me a link today to one of the most amazing photo archives I've ever seen.

Jamie Livingston took a single Polaroid image nearly every day from March 31, 1979 until his death in 1997. The whole collection is roughly 6000 images, which show everything from the evolution of hairstyles, to the urban regeneration of New York City, where he lived.

There are no words, only images. The people in the photos remain a mystery. But, the story the images tell are of one man's world, as he saw it. An amazing story, to say nothing of the collection's value to social historians. If you were born between 1979 and 1997, you might see what he was doing on your birthday.

Take a look:

http://www.gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?id=5890

http://photooftheday.hughcrawford.com/

Definitely worth a look; and extremely well presented. Archives might consider using a similar format for presenting their archival collections online. Why search with words, when our eyes are already built for searching?

Plaigiarism is not Dishonourable

2008-10-19T20:56:00.004-04:00

Allow me to plagiarize:

Students must write their essays and assignments in their own words. Whenever students take an idea or a passage from another author, they must acknowledge their debt both by using quotation marks where appropriate and by proper referencing such as footnotes or citations. Plagiarism is a major academic offence.

This addendum came with every syllabus I received during my undergraduate degree. Irony prevents me from telling you which university I plagiarized this work from.

Teaching students what should and should not be cited, and why citing is important is admirable. But, by teaching that citation is a system of acknowledging intellectual debts, students may never learn why we really cite others. Instead, they will cite to avoid punishment, and in some cases will do so when it is not necessary. Plagiarism is bad for several reasons; however, failing to acknowledge an intellectual "debt" to someone else is not one of them.

You are not indebted to someone whose ideas you borrow, rather, the strength of your argument depends upon what they wrote and what evidence they used to support their arguments. You do not cite them as a "thank you," rather you cite them so that a person reading your work has the means to check your sources. So that they can determine if what you say makes sense and is based on a sound foundation.

Hopefully, the person you cited also cited other authors. In this manner, footnotes and citations provide an unbreaking chain of logic / evidence, which goes back to an original source. For this, citations are extremely useful.

There are no victims of academic plagiarism. Plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. If someone sees your work as worth stealing, it must be good. Any undergrad who can write well enough to plagiarize without making it painfully obvious is probably smart enough for a BA anyway.

Transparency in education is important for creating a meaningful learning experience. Students aren't stupid, so maybe we shouldn't treat them like they are.

Plagiarism is not dishonourable; it's just counterproductive.

Open Peer Review

2008-10-08T17:54:00.004-04:00

I came across an open peer review request the other day. Ara Basmadjian, a UWO digital history student posted a draft essay proposal on his blog, asking his colleagues for constructive criticism.

Not only is this brave and a nice change from the defensive, secretive nobody look at my paper attitude that so many students have, but, if it works, it might prove to be a good first step into an open peer review system that helps create good, solid scholarship in a timely manner, without the need for the bottleneck of journals. I hope it works.

Doctoral Candidate Candidate

2008-09-28T16:14:00.003-04:00

I'm a doctoral candidate candidate and I've spent just about every free waking moment of the last month trying to the read minds of committee members I've never met who will decide my fate.

I've gone to the seminars about choosing a grad school, approaching a potential supervisor, applying for grants. I've written, rewritten and rewritten again every paragraph of my applications.

I've been warned that my project proposal should be compact, doable and specific from one group of people, and warned by another that's terrible advice and I should show broad interest in a range of ideas.

I'm a doctoral candidate candidate, and it's a lot of guess work.

Most Popular Historical Topics of Year 2100?

2008-09-26T18:19:00.002-04:00

Everyone likes to think they're unique. But, how predictable are young historians?

What are the history students of next century going to find interesting about us? Will they look into the predictable topics? 9/11 and the sudden concern about global warming? Will they look at us at all? Or will we be considered one of those boring decades that earn little study?

Here's my guesses for most popular history essay topics for students studying our current decade. Some history professor in a hundred years can check if I'm right.

1) Terrorism
2) Global Warming
3) Rise of China in the global economy
4) Fast Food Lifestyles
5) Religious Conflicts

I hope I'm wrong; be unique, students of the future!

Interactive History Displays

2008-09-23T18:33:00.004-04:00

I've been working on some projects for Bill Turkel recently that he likes to call "Interactive, Ambient and Tangible Devices for Knowledge Mobilization." In layman's terms, that's "Interactive History Displays."

The project I'm currently working on is an interactive ice core. It's not really ice, but it's a cylinder of plastic, cooled by a device called a "Peltier Junction." When a student touches the ice core, sensors determine where the finger touched and a monitor displays relevant information.

Our current prototype is a cardboard tube, but it's going to get way better, we swear. We have recently started working with a milling machine. This machine is essentially a 3D printer. You give it directions of what you want, put in a block of material - plastic for instance - and it creates your shape in relief.

For those of you interested in the technical details or who wish to follow along with our progress, you can do so here.

But, that's not why I'm posting. The purpose of this project is to demonstrate new ways to engage students with history.

Textbooks have their place, but so many children learn by touching or experiencing. And, because it's not very feasible to truck an ice core into a classroom, we're creating the next best thing. Perhaps better, since most children lack the university degree in paleoclimatology required to decipher ice core secrets.

The interactive display also gives students and educators more control over their learning experience. Students can choose to learn about only those aspects of the core that interest them, by deciding which parts of if to touch. If they are particularly interested in the bubbles which are trapped under the surface, they can focus their attention on that aspect. If they want to know about the dirty section near one end, they can do that too.

These displays can be made relatively inexpensively. The ice core will likely cost about the same as your average science textbook and could be used to teach an entire classroom.

Bill has already started work on a tree-ring which follows the same principles as the ice core.

I think this idea has a bit more potential. So, if anyone has a suggestion for something they would like to see, or that they think would be useful for teaching history, please leave a comment here or send me an email at adam_crymble@hotmail.com. I'd love to hear your ideas, and perhaps we can bring them to life.

Be creative: dinosaur bones, a castle, a dress. Anything is fair game.

No one will check the internet

2008-09-21T15:23:00.004-04:00

I volunteered at Doors Open London yesterday. Doors Open is held one weekend a year; various sites around town, including museums, historic homes and churches open their doors to the public, free of charge. My job was to help people who came to the London Tourism Bureau by giving them a map and telling them about any of the sites they were curious about.

One of the sites had recently pulled out of Doors Open, but unfortunately the brochures and maps had already been printed. No big deal, I just made sure I told everyone who took a map to cross that one off.

Then, one man asked why they didn't reprint the thousands of brochures to prevent confusion; if he hadn't come to ask me, he never would have known the problem. I explained that it wasn't economically feasible to reprint them so late and that the change had been noted on the internet so he could get the latest information.

"Yeah, but nobody will check there" he says.

The generational line has been drawn.

I live in a world where I stopped reading my local newspaper because they redesigned their website and I dislike the result. Where the bus schedule is found with mouse clicks, and all answers can be Googled.

He lives in a world of paper and face to face contact in which the bus schedule is kept in a drawer, not a cookie.

This is not meant as a criticism towards this man. It just surprised me how different his worldview was on this particular issue. Maybe I need to get out more. And important to remember when working in public history. Not everyone will check the internet.

Thanks to the Archivist

2008-09-09T18:44:00.004-04:00

For any archivist, archival assistant or poor grad student who digitized something today and made it available online: Thank you.

Canadianization of Zotero: Results

2008-08-31T15:27:00.003-04:00

In June, I sent out a request for suggestions of databases useful to Canadian historians. My goal was to make Zotero - a citation management program designed for use on the internet - friendlier for Canadian history researchers.

A tool like Zotero is only good if it works when you need it to. By extending it's capabilities to include more Canadian content, Canadian researchers now have more incentive to move away form expensive or subscription software that can grab citations from a limited number of databases.

Thank you to everyone who made suggestions and told me about the databases they use regularly.

Zotero now has more translators dedicated to Canadian sites than any other country outside the US.

My focus was on making translators for archives, journal repositories newspapers and university libraries. The results of my Canadianization is as follows:

National Archives and Archival networks:

Archives Canada (archivescanada.ca)
BCAIN
Archives Network of Alberta
Saskatchewan AIN
Manitoba AIN
Archeion
Bibliotheque et Archives Nationales Quebec
PEI AIN

Databases and Repositories:

Artefacts Canada
Archives Canada-France
Canadiana.org
Champlain Society
Civilization.ca
Canadian Letters and Images Project
Glenbow Museum
AdvoCAT - Great Library Catalogue
CARL Harvester
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Newspapers:

The Globe and Mail
The National Post
The Toronto Star
Le Devoir
The Hamilton Spectator
Winnipeg Free press
All newspapers hosted on Canada.com
All newspapers hosted on Cyberpresse.ca

University Libraries:

UBC Library
UQAM Library

* note: most Canadian university library systems were already supported by Zotero. Zotero now supports 90% of Canadian university libraries.

------

Anyone using Zotero can now automatically grab citation information for anything from fonds, to journal articles to artifacts on these Canadian content sites and dozens of others that are already supported. Go forth and research!

Thank you to the Center for History and New Media for funding this project.

Second languages for history PhDs - JavaScript?

2008-07-29T16:03:00.003-04:00

Most PhD history programs require students to be proficient enough in a second language to translate a one page passage of text into English. Many even require a third. Which languages a student is expected to know usually depends upon his or her proposed course of study.

At some of the more prestigious institutions, someone studying French history would generally be expected to know English, French and German. Someone studying Chinese history would need to know two Asian languages. This makes sense, as anyone claiming to be an expert on a given topic best be able to read primary sources in the language they were written.

At the Center for History and New Media, where I am currently working, I've had to learn another language: JavaScript. Some of my colleagues are also fluent in php, html, Java, python, perl and c++. In the past year by using these languages, my colleagues have created powerful tools; one helps over a million people manage their internet research (Zotero), and another powers the digital collections of museums and archives all over the world (Omeka), all for free.

I wonder how long until the language requirement for Ancient Greek is replaced with "JavaScript, Python and one of php or html?"

Say No to Canadian National Museums in Winnipeg

2008-07-20T09:01:00.003-04:00

Some day in the not so distant future, Winnipeg will have a Canadian National Museum: The National Museum of Human Rights. This will be the country's first national museum outside of the capital region.

This is a terrible idea, and I do not intend to visit.

Despite this, I understand why someone would make a case for a museum in Winnipeg. Canada is one of a handful of countries in the world so big that centralizing everything in a capital region means that some people will live too far away to benefit from these institutions. This problem is only getting worse as fuel prices rise and airline ticket prices skyrocket. Underprivileged kids in St. John's and Vancouver will likely never get the opportunity to come to Ottawa to experience all the museums and monuments.

It's no secret that Western Canadians feel life is unfair and everyone in Toronto is trying to destroy the world, so the concept of having a national museum a little closer to home is a refreshing idea. But, is Winnipeg really closer?

Winnipeggers aside, nearly everyone else in the country - including many northern Manitoba residents - have to fly into this rather isolated community. It's so isolated, that the nearest major city (Minneapolis) is seven hours drive, just slightly shorter than the drive from Toronto to New York City.

It is actually cheaper for someone to fly from Vancouver to Ottawa, than from Vancouver to Winnipeg.

Prices for July 21, round trip:

Vancouver to Winnipeg: $914
Vancouver to Ottawa: $900
St. John's to Winnipeg: $1469
St. John's to Ottawa: $952
Toronto to Winnipeg: $710

The poor, underprivileged who live outside of Ontario and Quebec may never be able to afford to come to Ottawa to see the national monuments and museums, but what will putting one of these institutions in Winnipeg do to help alleviate that? Pardon my skepticism, but I find it hard to believe that anyone is going to spend a thousand dollars or more to fly into Winnipeg to see one museum, when they could spend the same to go see many in Ottawa, and even catch an NHL game while they're at it (too soon?).

Sure, the 600 000 residents of Winnipeg will have an opportunity to see the Human Rights Museum, but they aren't likely going to go often enough to keep it open and prevent it from being a drain on federal resources. And sure, those people who do go to Winnipeg for vacations or business will likely go. But, does anyone honestly believe putting a museum in the middle of a small isolated city is going to draw in flocks of tourists from thousands of miles away?

Tourists don't flock to Paris just to see the Louvre. They don't go to Amsterdam to see just the Rijksmuseum. They don't go to New York just to see the Museum of Modern Art. Nobody is going to go to Winnipeg just to see the Human Rights Museum.

The decision to decentralize Canadian museums has other negative effects. The biggest cost associated with most history research is getting to the resources. If the collection you need to study is in Ottawa, you've got to get to Ottawa to look at it. This is why professors go on sabbatical and spend a year far from their universities, spending travel grants paid for by tax payers.

Library and Archives Canada is in Ottawa; that means most researchers studying Canadian topics will have to make the trip to Ottawa already. Anyone studying something related to the Human Rights Museum's collection will now have to stretch their research budget further and make a trip to Winnipeg.

The only argument for decentralizing these records is that Ottawa is under constant threat of nuclear attack and if everything is in Ottawa during the attack it will be lost. Despite what the American media would have us believe, I don't think this is a real problem at the moment. If we are worried, digital copies of the records can easily be stored on computer servers across the country to make it harder to destroy all traces of our collections.

And that leads me to my final point.

If the decision to put a national museum in Winnipeg was made to make Canadian National Museums accessible to more Canadians, then we should build the museum in Ottawa, and work towards becoming a world leader in online museum experiences. There are very few exhibits, lessons and resources that can't be effectively put online, with a bit of creativity. This will bring the museums to all Canadians. Building in Winnipeg will not.

Washington DC, the ultimate History Mashup

2008-07-13T18:59:00.006-04:00

I spent the better part of Saturday afternoon in the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington D.C. doing some family history research for someone I know. I went in with a single name and to my surprise, came out with a very complete picture of three people.

The Washington library has a lovely little shelf of books for genealogists to do their one-stop shopping for information, almost all indexed by surname. It turns out, nearly everything a genealogist in D.C. could want has been indexed this way by a couple of dedicated archivists. My research was just a matter of flipping through the index of each book, looking for the name I wanted, or a close variation thereof. I was essentially Google searching the old fashioned way.

Not only did I find marriage records, death announcements and a transcription of a will, but I found what was essentially a phone book for 1822 D.C. listing most of the 13 000 residents, and abstracts of the newspaper, the National Intelligencer from 1800 to the end of the Civil War. Each one of these works is an amazing feat in itself, but together they paint an amazing and rather comprehensive image of what Washington DC was like during the 19th century.

Based on the information available in the books on this shelf, it would be quite feasible to map exactly where almost all of Washington D.C.'s 19th century citizens lived.

The woman I was researching lived at the "n side I n. btw 19 & 20w."
Here's where that falls on a modern map. Plotted for me by Google Maps.

The David Rumsey Map collection has already been working with Google Earth, and overlays of historic D.C. maps can be viewed using Google Earth. This means that KML markup (the language that allows people to add their photos/comments/links to Google Earth) can be applied to these historic maps.

Using the City Directories, available from the Washington Public Library, the residents of 19th century Washington could be plotted onto this map. The directories were published every 5 years or so, and the migration of citizens could be plotted over time.

Each entry could include all of the documentary evidence still available about these people, much the same way people add photos to Google Earth.

Such a project would be a fabulous finding aid to genealogists who are searching for relatives who lived in the D.C. area.

It would also be one of the world's greatest Mash-ups, making evident a huge number of relationships to historians. Everything from patterns in crime, to trends in migration, to whether or not people married outside of their neighbourhoods would become open to the data mining of historians, using techniques not unlike Bill Turkel's Naive Bayesian project using the Old Bailey Online database.

Perhaps a future CHNM project?

"I know nothing of Canadian history"

2008-06-30T21:08:00.006-04:00

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of fighting D.C. rush hour traffic a with one of my colleagues at the Center for History and New Media. For anyone who doesn't know D.C. rush hour, that means we had a really long time to chat.

She is a Russian foreign exchange student; when I found this out, I instinctively went over everything I knew about Russian history in my head (I know, only a history buff would do something like that).

I recalled the book I read about Catherine the Great for a first year history essay; the battle of Stalingrad, which "Enemy at the Gates" brought to life; the communist regime which dominated sections of nearly every 20th century history course I've ever taken, and a dozen other facts.

When I mentioned that I was a Canadian foreign exchange student she said, "You know, I hate to say it. But, I know nothing of Canadian history." "We don't learn any of that."

This surprised me a little. I figured since we both shared soul crushing winters, that might evoke some interest in how we had coped with the bitter cold. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. That very same day at the George Mason University bookstore I had noted that you could buy history books on everywhere from Eithiopia to Finland, but not one on Canada. Last time I checked, even Harvard doesn't teach anything about Canadian history.

She probably thought of most of it as British history, I informed her. Prior to 1919, Canada had never even signed a treaty in its own right. That doesn't leave for much history to know, really. We found some common ground in the 1972 summit series between Canada and the USSR, and shared a laugh that Americans take so much pride in the 1980 "miracle on ice" (a tournament in which the best hundred or so Canadian players were too busy being paid in the NHL to compete).

I felt a bit wounded that this Russian girl knew nothing of my nation's history, but then I recalled that I know almost nothing about New Zealand's history. Even less about most sub-Saharan African, South and Central American, Scandinavian, Adriatic, South East Asian, and South Pacific countries.

In fact, I really only know the histories of a dozen or so nations. And perhaps only three or four well. The ones I do know tend to have had rather unwelcome influences on the world at some time or another, be that British colonialism, German expansionism, or American cultural dominance. So maybe no publicity is good publicity when it comes to history? Maybe we're just not obnoxious enough to be studied.

At least, that's what I'll tell myself.

Living Historic Documents?

2008-06-27T10:20:00.006-04:00

You'll all be happy to know that citizens of D.C. were given the green light by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday to walk around with handguns (District of Columbia v. Heller). It turns out that the law previously preventing this was in violation of the U.S. Constitution's second amendment that allows Americans to arm themselves.

I know Americans love their constitution, but when it comes down to it the US Constitution is just a historic document, written by people with different hopes and dreams and needs than anyone alive today.

This 2nd Amendment was written generations ago by men who likely associated the right to carry weapons with the privileged life of the nobility back in Europe. Eighteenth-century European riff-raff couldn't carry guns, and these men wanted to show they were gentlemen. Carrying a gun suggested equal status with nobles. And of course it made it easier to ward off the danger of British invasion - which could still happen at any moment.

The whole situation reminds me of a book I'm currently reading: "The Year of Living Biblically" by A.J. Jacobs. The author tries to live for an entire year without breaking any of the rules of the Bible. His book repeatedly makes it clear that living literally by a historical text results in some ridiculous outakes. My favourite so far was the story of the old man who Jacobs was forced to throw pebbles at in Central Park to uphold the biblical rule to "stone adulterers." A close second is the ritual of stealing a pigeon's egg - quite clearly outlined as a rule in the Bible.

Excuse my lack of zeal for the U.S. Constitution - not being an American and hating guns - but it seems to me that this quest to live by a historic document (the U.S. Constitution) that has been taken out of context by the passage of more than a hundred years, is not far removed from Jacobs' liberated pigeon egg. Which, I would hazard to suggest breaks the "Thou shalt not steal" rule. But, maybe that doesn't apply to pigeons.

Spoils of an ongoing Afghanistan war, in a National Museum?

2008-06-23T20:24:00.005-04:00

The National Gallery of Art in Washington DC is currently exhibiting "Hidden Treasures from the National Museum in Kabul." The collection on display was saved from the wrath of the Taliban by the Afghan curator and hidden for several years before being smuggled to Washington for this temporary exhibition.

The artifacts are beautiful, and the gallery has done an excellent job on the show, but something felt distasteful seeing these artifacts in the United States, especially while NATO troops are currently engaging combatants in Afghanistan.

I realize that these artifacts - mostly elaborate gold jewelery -would have been destroyed by the Taliban who seek to carry out their interpretation of the Qur'an. I realize that the American people have an opportunity to learn a little bit about Afghani culture and history. And I realize that these artifacts will one day, God willing, go back to Afghanistan for as a record of the past for future Afghani's.

But, why now?

To argue that the museum is neutral in this conflict is hard to swallow. The Smithsonian - of which the Gallery is a part, is an American national institution. The conflict in Afghanistan is everything that post 9/11 American culture stands for.

It is one thing for the Americans to help safeguard the collection during a time of danger, and entirely another to put it on display. If the tables were turned and the insurgents held the U.S. Constitution in a museum in Kabul, the American people would surely see the situation differently.

I applaud the National Gallery of Art for helping to preserve these priceless objects. But, let's not rub it in anyone's face. It wasn't Andrew W. Mellon who brought these objects here. It was bullets. Good intentioned bullets, perhaps. But bullets none-the-less.

Taking Interactivity Into Your Own Hands: Touching in the Museum

2008-06-14T21:11:00.007-04:00

"Daddy, I want to touch him."

"Him" is a rather large fellow who lived approximately 65 million years ago. In this case, the skeleton of a T-rex standing in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

The young boy's father looks around coyly to check for security and quickly picks up his son. Excitedly, the boy reaches over the Plexiglas barrier and places his hand on the dinosaur's leg-bone. His eyes light up.

We learn by touching. Babies are the best evidence of this. They'll put things in their mouth that even the dog would turn its nose up at, just for the chance to learn a little bit about an object.

This boy, now about six years old, has graduated from licking things he wants to learn about and has moved on to touching them. And I can't say I blame the kid for his choice of object to touch. If he is anything like I was at 6 years old, he knows that the T-rex is the most scarriest, most meanest dinosaur ever, and it could chomp him in one bite. Who wouldn't want to touch him while he's in this less harmful, yet awe inspiring state?

It will be many years before he realizes that the leg he touched was made from a mold. Meanwhile, that experience he just had will remain the coolest, most precious thing he's ever touched - until he gets married, and not a day sooner.

After about a half-hour in the dinosaur exhibit, it became clear to me. People want to touch what they see in the museum. They want to connect with it in some way. The little boy and the dinosaur now have a relationship: they touched once. And if they ever meet at a cocktail party, at least they'll have something to discuss.

What is more, on the most fundamental level, the little boy turned what was a static display into an interactive experience. Sure, not too much happened to the casual observer, but for the little boy it was magic.

I saw evidence of this touching all over the Natural History Museum.

This object, prominently labeled "Cast" is situated so that the front few teeth on the bottom jaw are within arms reach of anyone over three feet tall. Even though it's not authentic, the teeth have either been created to show extreme plaque build up on these front teeth, or thousands of hands have brushed them over the years, wearing off the paint until only the white cast remained.

I stood and watched for less than a minute and nearly everyone passing this skull touched the teeth. Even the adults who were able to read the sign - or who knew better than to think the Museum would put a real T-Rex skull so carelessly close to visitor's hand - couldn't resist at least grazing the tips of the teeth with the palm of their hand.

Understandable. Dinosaurs are cool; they bring us back to our childhood when we read stories about them and were able to recite endless facts about them to any grown-up who would listen. Did you know that stegosaurus have spikes on their tails and that diplodocus is a plant eater?

However, that doesn't explain this:
This poor couple in the Western Civilizations wing of the museum are in serious need of restoration.

These aren't artifacts, nor do they pretend to be. They don't have nearly the same 'wow' factor as the T-Rex. Nevertheless, thousands of fingers - mine included, have worn away the paint.

I'm inclined to suggest that this is a cry for help by the visitor. The museum has provided such a rich assortment of visual stimuli, that people take the first chance they get to change that up. They touch it.

It's a harmless action that fulfills that need for an interactive experience. It may sound silly, but I would rate my nose-touching experience among the most memorable of my day at the Smithsonian. If nothing else, it was a little bit naughty and it was a change from walking around with my hands neatly folded behind my back.

I must thank the Smithsonian for including these interactive, tactile exhibits. Though they weren't overly complex, they allowed me and everyone with a little boy still inside them to get some pent-up energy out. They gave my eyes a momentary rest, and let me contribute to the slow, meticulous destruction of objects in the museum with just a hint of oil from my fingers.

Oddly enough, there was no evidence of the same wear on text-panels. And nearly all of them were within touching range.

The Canadianization of Zotero

2008-06-11T20:02:00.003-04:00

Zotero is a pretty amazing computer program for historical researchers using the internet. What makes it even better are the translators. Translators allow you to click on a little icon in the address bar and automatically save all the bibliographic information found on the website. This is a great time-saver as those of you who use Zotero for this purpose already know.

If you're not familiar with this feature and already have Zotero installed, go to www.amazon.com, search for your favourite book, go to the entry and click on the little blue book icon on the right hand side of your address bar. Then take a look at what got saved in Zotero. Pretty nifty for one click of a mouse.

However, they're not as easy to make as they are to use. The translator for Amazon.com only works for Amazon.com. Each website that is supported - and there are a lot - have a custom-coded translator, specific to that site.

Right now, most of the sites that are supported are American. I say it's time for a change.

So, in the interest of promoting Canadian history research, I'm offering you a chance to get the translator of your dreams, free of charge.

I am taking requests for translators for sites that are used by CANADIANS for research.
These sites can be in English or French (or both), and priority will go to historical databases, and requests made by UWO history professors who gave me good grades.

If you know of a site that fits these criteria that you would like a translator for (or if you operate such a site), please post your request HERE, and include the word "Canada" somewhere in your message.

I will do my best to fulfill all suggestions, provided they are posted prior to July 15, 2008.

To be eligible, the site must contain:

a large database of records (1000+ entries).
each entry must have its own page with a stable URL (if you can cut and paste the URL into a blank browser's address bar and it takes you to the entry, then it's stable enough).
Each entry must have a title.
The entries must be searchable via a search box.
I must be able to access the records. (That means if it's password protected, it must either be accessible to me via the library at the University of Western Ontario's subscription, or you must provide me with access.)
The site cannot be under construction, or planning changes to its structure/design in the near future.

Examples include:

Canadiana.org
Glenbow Library and Archives
the Globe and Mail
CAIN
BCain
UWO Library

Please forward this request to any of your colleagues who may find this helpful.

Remember, only until July 15, 2008. After which time I'll be on to other things.

Colonial Williamsburg: Experts or Actors?

2008-06-07T17:29:00.003-04:00

Colonial Williamsburg has brought one small town in southern Virginia back to 1775. According to the man out front of the cobbler's shop on the main street, this living history museum employs over 3000 people, 1500 of which are costumed re-enactors.

Personally, I've never seen anything like it. At least not on this scale. There are scheduled events you can witness as they would have been like in 1775. My girlfriend and I watched a mock-trial, and caught a bit of a reenactment (essentially a play that occurs in and around the tourists in the streets), and took a few guided tours of old buildings. It's like Disneyland for colonial America history buffs.

While I enjoyed my tour and watching people walk around dressed in silly outfits say Old Tymey phrases, what I really enjoyed was talking to the craftsmen. Colonial Williamsburg has all of the shops and tradespeople you might expect a small Virginia town in 1775. There was a wigmaker (she was a bit looney if you ask me), a tailor, a brickmaker, a blacksmith, a gunsmith, a cooper, a carpenter, a cabinet maker and just about anything you could think of. And these craftsmen work away at their trade while they chat with tourists - in character of course.

I wondered what happened to the products that these craftspeople were making after they were done. Unlike in Disneyland where mechanical elves simulate hammering a nail over and over again until the gears in the machine break down, these people are actually working on what it looks like they're working on. And their labour actually goes towards projects to expand Colonial Williamsburg.

The cobbler informed us that the books he was making would be used by a new employee as part of his costume. All those barrels the cooper was shaping were being used as trashcans on the side of the road. The blacksmith informed us they had an order for 3000 nails to construct a new building in town, which he was making one by one - in between answering tourists questions. Whatever excess they produced found its way into the gift shops.

On the plantation just outside of town, we talked to a man making shingles from a log. He split the wood into boards with an axe, then used some medieval looking tool to split the boards into the proper shape. "Nobody else in the world makes shingles like this any more" he told us, adding "we get orders from museums all over the world looking for authentic style building materials. We asked him how long he'd been there. "9 years." We began asking the other craftsmen similar questions. It seemed like they'd all been there for quite a while. The cabinet maker had been there 25 years, and he wasn't even the senior cabinet maker. These people had devoted their careers to a particular craft, the way it had been done two hundred years ago.

Sure I know they're not really ghosts from the past, and I know the guy in the gunsmiths shop is probably tired to death of telling tourists "You can pick up that rifle, but please don't cock it." And I'm sure there are days when he would rather be drinking a beer and watching the game than answering dumb questions, but when it comes down to it, there isn't a book in the world that can tell you more about eighteenth century craftsmanship than any one of those senior craftsmen.

Sure the researchers found the right tools to put in the cabinet makers shop. And they found examples of eighteenth century cabinets for the tradesman to use as models. But after 25 years of using those tools and building from those patterns, that maker's expertise has far outstripped anything any academic has found in a book.

These are living, practicing experts. They may not have a background in academic history - most were tradesmen before joining the museum - and part of their duties is to act a roll in a grand play for tourists, the Colonial Williamsburg tradesmen show that you can in fact practice history. And you can do it well.

the Problem with Telling your own History: The Newseum

2008-06-05T20:03:00.002-04:00

I went to the Newseum in Washington DC last weekend. For those that don't know, this museum, dedicated to the history of news media opened last month.

History is a bit of a stretch, since 95% of the content is from the past 65 years, but that's a minor point.

The exhibits themselves are quite visually stimulating, the technologically cutting edge and some of the display techniques rather innovative. From an experience standpoint, I'd say they earned my $20.

But what struck me repeatedly was how obvious it was that the members of the news media had created this museum to give accolades to themselves. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the world's spin-doctors have decided to put a little spin on their museum. But, if I didn't know better, after my visit, I'd be sure that if it were not for the media, all truth would vanish and tyranny would envelope the earth.

At the Newseum, you too can learn important life lessons such as:

The problem with the Soviet Union was that they did not have a free media.

The East Germans lived their lives solely to watch and listen to the Western Media secretly at night.

And the reporter who brought to light the Monica Lewinski scandal had performed a great service to America by shedding light on the truth.

I'm sorry, but I just don't see it. The boogie man is not trying to get me, and your reporting did not save me in the nick of time. You did not do the world a great service by bringing us the O.J. Simpson trial 24 hours a day.

The media exists only to sell advertising. And if you don't believe me, you've clearly never written a SEO article for a website, or read an advertising media kit for a magazine. Where were the exhibits on that I wonder?

Rather ironic that an outlet that promotes bias-free reporting of the truth would turn towards such shameless self-promotion.

The media does not save the world. They watch other people do it.
Kevin Carter realized that. Too late, unfortunately.

The Importance of MetaData on websites

2008-05-11T11:43:00.012-04:00

As Bill Turkel noted in his recent blog post, I've been doing a summer internship, part of which involves making translators for a program called Zotero.

If you're a historian or a history student and you don't know what Zotero is, you should definitely look into it. It allows you to save and collect bibliographical information for just about anything you find on the internet, often with the click of a button.

For example, if you go to a webpage about the United Irishmen, you can use Zotero to save a snapshot of the page (kind of like a bookmark), you can attach notes to it, create tags to help you remember what the page is about, add the author's name, date, publisher...just about whatever you want. You can then export that bibliographic data in proper Chicago/MLA/APA format and save yourself writing it all out.

Some pages are even easier to use. These are pages that Zotero has translators for. On these pages - Amazon.com for example, a little icon will appear in the address bar of the page. If you're looking at the entry for Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, when you click the little icon Zotero automatically saves all the relevant bibliographical information for you. You don't have to type in a thing!
Unfortunately, these translators have to be made one by one. Each and every page on the internet has to have its own translator. Because of this, only the most important historical repositories are currently supported.

You'll find them for websites such as JSTOR, Amazon, even the University of Western Ontario's library page. But there are several important (often Canadian) pages that are not yet working.

How a translator works, is that a JavaScript program is told to check if the webpage you're currently on is one of the webpages that Zotero knows how to find bibliographic data on. This often entails checking the website's address. For example:

If this webpage's address starts with www.canadiana.org then,
I should load the translator for Canadiana.org.

The next part is quite a bit trickier! Zotero is just a program. It doesn't know anything about what it is reading. We have to teach it how to recognize which piece of information on the screen is the title, which tells us the author, etc. And I've noticed two distinct trends: those sites who provide this information in metadata and those who do not.

Metadata, for those who don't know, is helpful, clearly formatted information about your site. Go to any webpage, click on the "View" menu, and select "Page Source." If the website in question has metadata, you'll notice quite near the top several lines of code that read something like this:

This essentially tells us that there are some keywords that you might find helpful in remembering what this website is about. They include "Adam Crymble, history".

We can also tell that the author is "Adam Crymble" and this website was last revised in "spring 2008."

If a webpage contains this data, it makes it MUCH easier for other people to use the data on your page. Zotero can easily be taught to recognize that the words after the meta name=”author” tag should go in the bibliographical field "author." It is also quite easy to tell Zotero that words after the meta name=”keywords” should be separated and made into "tags" which you can then use to organize your work.

However, many...rather, most webpages do not have very good (or any) metadata. In these cases, it requires extensive work to tell Zotero what it is looking at. Rather than simply associating one metatag with one entry in Zotero, the person must analyze your page's HTML code, figure out how your page is structured and write a customized line of code called an XPath that looks something like this:

//div[@id="Content"]/div[@class="NormalRecord"]/table[@class="Bibrec"]/tbody/tr/td[2];

Don't worry, it looks like gobbledigook to me too. Each and every part of data that Zotero wants to collect needs a custom written Xpath like this. This one would find the title of a book in Canadiana.org's repository.

What could have been 3 lines of code had there been Metadata on the page now requires dozens of lines.

None of the three websites I have been working on translators for include metadata. In two of these cases - well known Canadian museums, the websites are almost brand new. They're visually stimulating and engaging. Yet the information is hidden in complex code and confusing paths.

In the 21st century, websites are not merely a static representation of one person's work. Especially those that hold information for others to use, such as libraries, archives and repositories. Designing your webpage to incorporate metadata makes the information you have put out there easier for others to use. It makes people more likely to use it. And it encourages people like those who use Zotero to help your site stand out, with exciting add-ons that are changing the way people do internet research.

Canadian History for Sale!

2008-04-28T17:09:00.001-04:00

We all know Canadian history is boring. We live in a new country, where nothing happened until 1914 when the Germans attacked us. Then nothing more until 1939 – Germans again. Naught else worth knowing really.

Nothing man-made worth seeing either. In Vancouver, the only nice old building in town is the Christ Church Cathedral, built way way back in 1895. That’s roughly 2413 years after the Greeks finished the Parthenon. It’s even younger than the Eiffel Tower, the modern addition to the Parisian skyline.

So how are we supposed to compete with the French, who can convince twenty thousand visitors a day to stand in line for three hours to get into the Palace of Versailles? Or what about the Egyptians, who attract throngs of tourists to see the Pyramids despite the travel cautions warning visitors to beware of kidnappers?

How about the same way toy companies convinced us we all needed a Furby, or a Tickle Me Elmo? Make it talk back. Make it make noise and shake when I push its tummy. Make it fun. Sell it to me! This isn’t a case of Canadian history being boring, but a case of Canadian historians not knowing how to sell it.

Historians learn how to analyze, write and present history, but let’s face it, most couldn’t sell a loaf of bread in the midst of a famine – though they might give it away for a donation. Canadian museums and historic sites quite often operate in the red. Too frequently it’s government funding, and your tax dollars keeping these places afloat.

Historians learn how to write grants, not business feasibility studies. They’re taught to write clearly, not passionately. They look for evidence that illustrates their thesis, not that make little boys shout, “Whoa!” and little girls shriek, “Ewwww!”

Happily, this year’s our big chance.

Quebec is 400 this year. And tourist season is just about upon us.

I can only hope that the cheesy reenactments will be out in full force every night – drunken sailors in the pubs, soldiers patrolling the old city and a man with an olde tymey hat and a bell – a loud bell, pointing tourists to the next great historical show.

Not history you say? Too Disnified? Absolutely!

But hey, I don’t remember the last time Walter Disney submitted a grant proposal to the government. And no one has taught me more about pirates than the good people at Disney. It’s a skewed view about pirates, but at least it’s a view. And that's more than most people have of Canadian history.

Quebec 2008 is all about getting our foot in the door with the billion dollar historical tourist market. Because like it or not, tourists don’t want to read journal articles. Most don’t even want to read your text panels. They want to be entertained.

They want to see executions, the changing of the guard and the governor’s wife stumbling around her garden in a drunken stupor. Ok, maybe the executions will have to be dramatized, but you get the idea.

Canada’s a big place. If we can hook them with Quebec, they’ll come back and spend more money; perhaps in a different region of the country. Perhaps even in a local museum. And they’ll tell their friends, who will come too. But, they’ll only come if it’s cool. If it shakes and laughs like Tickle me Elmo, or talks back like Furby.

This isn’t a case of who killed Canadian history? but of who is going to bring it alive?

If we can’t do it this year, it can’t be done. But hey, the government will always be there to bail us out financially, won’t they?

For those who think History should be interesting

2008-04-27T16:18:00.005-04:00

Maureen Ogle's recent article in Historically Speaking is an lively tale of someone who saw the light and embraced the life of a 'loser' - erm, popular historian.

Give it a read. Hustler magazine did.

Interested in UWO's Public History MA?

2008-04-17T08:07:00.003-04:00

I'm noticing quite a few people coming to this blog via the UWO public history webpage, which leads me to believe they have been receiving/are expecting offers of acceptance to the program for next year and wondering what it will be like.

Please feel free to email me at acrymble [at] uwo.ca if you have any questions about the program. I'm not on staff so I can tell you the truth. And I'm sure most of the other students in the program would be happy to answer questions as well.

Jstor, meet Kindle: Simulated Page-Turning

2008-04-15T11:18:00.005-04:00

I've essentially gone paperless over the past year. No longer do I print off articles to read; especially if they're available on the internet.

However, I've always hated the way most websites with articles on them are set up - especially sites that scan in images of journal articles or old books such as Jstor or Early English Books Online. More often then not, users are forced to click a tiny little "next" button at the bottom of the page. Call me fussy, but the 1/18th of a second it takes me to move my mouse to that itsy bitsy button makes me hate using these sites. It's even worse when the next page loads and to find the button, I have to scroll my screen down. Set-ups like that just reinforce the complaints of the book-lovers who would rather trudge into the library and use a hard-copy than use the online databases.

Amazon's new electronic book-reader, Kindle came up with a rather novel way of dealing with the fact that most readers like to quickly turn the page, rather than click a little button. The Kindle has two large buttons that run the length of the 'page'. The one on the left, predictably takes the reader to the previous page, the one on the right goes to the next page. Not only are the buttons placed where the readers thumb will likely anyways be - to avoid any effort on the reader's part at all - but they're the best way I've yet seen of a simulated page turn using an electronic device.

Apparently, the people at Jstor took notice. The scrawny little next buttons and clumsy navigation are gone and instead, large Kindle-like buttons appear on every page. They're the tan-coloured bands in the image. Rather than having to scroll around looking for the button, I can see it no matter where I am. Sure, the change probably hasn't saved me that much time - in fact, they've so far cost me the time it's taken to write this post - but they've made the interface that much more user-friendly.

I'm sure in a few years everyone will be on board and this style of navigation will be the norm. But for now, it's a nice step in the right direction.

Stonehenge Videos

2008-04-10T11:39:00.004-04:00

Here are the two videos I created for our class digital history project.

Originally, Stonehenge was aligned with the Summer and Winter solstices. On the summer solstice at sunset, someone standing at the central "altar stone" would see the sun rise and appear to float between two "slaughter stones" 80m from the centre of the circle. (The names "altar" and "slaughter" are modern tags and don't represent the stones' actual purpose).

On the winter solstice at sunset, a person standing at the central "altar stone" would see the sun set on the opposite side of the monument. The result is a dramatic display of shadows.

This sunrise and sunset are the only two of the year in which the shadows line up in this fashion. Contrary to what you may have been told, the sun does not merely rise in the east and set in the west. It moves throughout the year. And the builders of Stonehenge were able to capture that.

The videos were created using "Bryce 3D".

These stills show the shadows formed.

Deliberately Writing to Future Historians

2008-03-29T11:33:00.001-04:00

Dear Future Historians and English Professors,

I am writing to make your job easier. I know how difficult and frustrating it can be to figure out what people in the past may have been doing or thinking, so I present you with this letter that imparts all the facts (free of bias) about the history of Harry Potter’s readership.

As I’m sure you already know, Harry Potter was the most famous protagonist of the early 21^st century. His author, J.K. Rowling, went from rags to riches from the enormous success of the series; children and adults around the world read of Harry’s adventures. But what you may not know is who didn’t read Harry Potter, and why they refused to join in Harry’s magical world.

There are three kinds of people in the twenty-first century that have not read Harry Potter. The Cannot’s, the Must Not’s and the Will Not’s.

The Cannot’s are people too poor, too busy earning a living, illiterate, or unable to read one of the many languages into which Harry Potter has been translated. This group is large and is spread across the world. The absence of Harry Potter in their lives comes of necessity and nothing ill can be spoken of them. The latest estimate is that 4.5 billion people fall into this category.

The Must Not’s are people who are able to read Harry Potter, but choose not to on moral grounds. These people are often – but are not exclusively – Evangelical Christians. They believe witches and wizards are evil and homosexuality immoral; consequently these people choose not to read the books. If you would like to see the passion with which these people reject the series, please see the documentary Jesus Camp. Because I – being an unbiased presenter of plain facts – believe people are entitled to their freedom of religion, I will speak no ill of their decision not to read the books. At this time approximately 300 million people are Must Not’s.

The Will Not’s are people who have the time and money to read the books, have no moral objection, but choose not to read the series because they think this decision makes them unique. They love to tell you how proud they are that they have never read the books. How childish it is to read books targeted at adolescents. And how much they hate what they have never experienced. These people – factually speaking – are unhappy with their lives. Their refusal to read Harry Potter is a cry for help. What they’re really saying is, I want to read them. I want to join the club of fans, but I’m afraid it will rob me of the only thing that makes me unique. The Will Not group is quickly diminishing as they break down, one by one, relinquishing themselves to the wonder and magic of the Harry Potter series. By the time of your reading this note, far off in the future, the Will Not’s will almost certainly not exist. At last count, there were 47 of these people.

You now understand all there is to know – just the facts – about the readership of the Harry Potter series. I hope this letter has helped you in your endeavour to understand what we of the early twenty-first century were like.

Respectfully yours,

Adam Crymble

P.S. Historians write of the past in the hopes that people in the present will understand.

Journalists write of the present in the hopes that people in the present will understand.

Who writes to the people of the future? Ridiculous content aside, can we talk to future historians? Or will we just be considered another source amongst a sea of sources? Is there a difference between a contemporary account (such as a newspaper article), written for contemporaries, and an account specifically generated to explain ourselves to people not yet born?

And more importantly, have YOU read Harry Potter yet? You don’t want the next generation of historians to categorize you as a “Will Not.” I’ve just seen to it that the future will see these people in a negative light.

Our Public History Blogs: a Waste of Time?

2008-03-21T20:48:00.004-04:00

I know a few of my classmates think blogs are a waste of time. Some complain that nobody reads them, others think it's an outdated format, a couple don't want to contribute to the growing amount of crap already on the internet, and some just don't feel like it.

There's not much I can say about the don't feel like it crowd; however, I do agree with one criticism: a lot of people do write at least some crap - myself included. But that's just why blogs are important for this program. You don't become proficient at a skill by avoiding it. History is a literate discipline, and unless you plan to be a ticket-taker at the local heritage centre, you will likely write in some capacity during your public history career. That writing might be on text panels, brochures, or in magazine articles. It might be part of your job or a supplement to your income. And if you don't practice, you aren't going to get better.

Poor grammar on a text panel will get your museum a bad review. A sloppy or ineffective style on a brochure might mean no one will show up to your event. And an inability to come up with a good angle will quickly get your magazine article shuffled to the bottom of the pile. So, why not practice now?

Chances are, you won't write anything award-winning on your blog; most of your thoughts won't be as complete as the Cliopatria "best post" written by a member of UWO Public History last year. But, a blog offers you an audience - albeit modest, and a chance to practice your writing. No matter how professional your clothing, or how friendly you are, there's a good chance you will be hired for your ideas and your ability to communicate them.

Chances are you haven't mastered it yet. I find it amusing every week when a few of the teaching assistants in my seminar class complain about how terrible their students' essays are, and then these same teaching assistants proceed to read aloud a terribly written presentation, word-for-word from their notes. I can only imagine our professors, sitting in the lounge, are making the same comments about the overconfident Masters students' poorly written papers. You can always improve.

And, while you might think it's a waste of time to blog because nobody reads it, who, I wonder, was reading your academic essays? Was that a waste of time? If your blog traffic is anything like mine - which is nothing to brag about - more people have read your blog in the past month than all the people that have ever read one of your academic history essays. While I concede that what you write on your blog may never get you a job, or even an interview, it will give you a chance to work out a few kinks in an important skill. For that alone, the blog is not a waste of time.

Assignments and the Internet

2008-03-17T08:18:00.002-04:00

I had an assignment earlier this year to use the internet to find archival materials relating to the beer industry. It was a lot more frustrating than I had expected because the wording of the assignment hadn't made it quite clear if I was doing what was expected. Then, I went to google, and typed in the professor's exact question in quotation marks.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a former student's responses to the same assignment popped up on my screen. I already had more than enough to submit my response, but I was able to use what I found from my search to reassure myself that I was doing the assignment correctly.

The fact that the answers to this assignment are on the internet rather compromises the integrity of it as a learning experience. But, who is to blame in this case?

Is it the student, who has self-published an answer key to an assignment? Or is it the teacher who has tried to save time by reusing something that is now obsolete?

This year, I have been encouraged to publish everything I write on the internet or otherwise. It is certainly an excellent way to produce a portfolio of work that could be used to get further in academia or in the writing industry. Yet, I know in many cases, by posting my work I will ruin an assignment for a professor and force them to either do more work and think of something new, or continue to use what is now a poor test of critical thought.

Right now, I am working on an assignment that asks me to write a compare and contrast review of the only two histories written on the eighteenth century trial of Mrs. Rudd for forgery. These two histories also happened to be written within a year of each other, and it appears neither author knew what the other had been working on. This certainly doesn't happen every day, and it provides a unique and important exercise for students trying to learn more about historiography. But, if I post my review, next year students will be able to use it as a guide. Be able to quote it even. The assignment won't require the same level of critical analysis.

Journals won't publish an article that too closely resembles something they've already published, because it's already been done. Scholarship exists to fill in the gaps in knowledge, not to repeat it in slightly different words. And if I publish it, I will have done this topic.

But, is this my concern?

It has become very clear this year that many students are better with the internet than are their professors. I'm sure my professor this year was entirely unaware that a google search of his question would lead me to someone's responses. But, if unchecked, a problem like this can practically ruin an entire course.

I know of a course this year in which the professor was unaware that the students had access to the textbook's solution manual through the internet. The students had been copying out all their responses without learning a thing (as their failing midterm marks made abundantly clear). And yet the professor did not seem to catch the signs. Not only were the questions from an old textbook, but the students were strikingly efficient with them. Even though the questions were handed out at the beginning of lecture and should have taken 2 hours to complete, many students had no problem perfectly completing the assignments while taking lecture notes by the end of the 1 hour class. Of course, they had just been copying out the answers and ignoring their professor.

Is this the student's fault for being lazy and cheating? Or is it the professor's for using teaching material that is obsolete and fails to engage the students?

Or, is anyone at fault?

The internet now means questions are no longer recyclable. And while I know many students are more comfortable with the internet than are their professors, that's going to have to change pretty quickly or assignments are going to become obsolete.

Will I post my double review?

I guess we'll see.

Women and Family History

2008-03-10T21:42:00.005-04:00

In my on-going search for my family history, I've noticed one striking absence: the Women.

In my previous post, Researching Family History: It's Really Just a Title, I noted that for the most part, genealogy is just the history of a surname as it is passed from male to male in an unending line.

But, what about the histories of the women who marry and whose history is utterly ignored? It is easy to follow a male line. For me, anyone with the last name "Crymble" is almost certainly somewhere on the family tree and I need merely to find the common male in both our pasts to know what the relation is. But what of my grandmothers? Where did they come from?

I realized I know eleven generations of my family tree on the male line, dating back over four centuries.

I know two on the female, and both of those are still alive.

Even on my maternal grandfather's side, I know the history of his family name back to the 18th century. Of my grandmother: I know she was born Gertrude Wendt on August 1, 1927. Beyond that, it is lost to me. Who were my grandmothers?

Perhaps it is they whose history I should be pursuing? Whose stories I should be seeking to uncover.

Maybe I will.

Researching Family History: It's Really Just a Title

2008-03-08T11:17:00.004-05:00

I've been looking into the Crymble family history the last month or so, and I've found the experience pretty exciting. I am lucky in that my name is very uncommon, and I know exactly from which part of Ireland my ancestors emmigrated, so I can pinpoint my search to very specific regions.

I'm also lucky in that a distant cousin of mine has already done most of the legwork and has found our relatives back to 1585. I even was able to go to the Weldon Library here at the University of Western Ontario and find a brief family history that was printed as part of a regional history of Carrickfergus, back in 1823. I was pretty excited. So, I called my father and told him all about the details I had found, which I won't bore you with here. And his response was, "Yea, but, everyone in Ireland is related."

And I began to wonder what that meant for my search. In a sense, he's absolutely right, and what I'm doing is not researching my family history, but the history of a name as it was passed between men, in an uninterrupted line.

There are 11 generations between that man from 1585 and myself. That means that (based on what I learned in health class), I am directly descended from 4094 people between 1585 and now. And, my search for the Crymble family history is only concerned with the 11 of them born with the surname "Crymble." As if the other 4083 were utterly unimportant.

Mapping where you came from is not as straight forward as I once thought. Each generation you push your search back, the number of relatives you have doubles. Each came from somewhere different, with a different background, a different family history of their own. And if you only search one line, you're only scratching the surface of where you came from.

Ultimately, what you're researching is a title. The title that you still happen to carry around on your credit cards and drivers license, today. Your family history is much more complex than that.

Pre-Historic Park and Keepin' it Simple

2008-03-03T11:06:00.002-05:00

I caught a program on TVO last night called “Prehistoric Park.” It originally aired on Animal Planet, and combines Jurassic Park with Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, and adds a little time travel in for good measure.

It’s a kid’s show, but it is filmed like a nature program, where a camera crew follows around the fearless host through the wilderness. Except, rather than seeking out King Cobra’s, or Crocodiles, the host travels back in time to bring near-extinct species such as the Microraptor or the Triceratops, into the present where they are kept at “Prehistoric Park” in what amounts to a Dino-zoo. Computer graphics bring the beasts back to life, and if you suspend your disbelief, you can easily imagine that he’s actually there.

But, what I found the most intriguing, was the way in which information was presented to the audience. I’m no paleontologist, but I’m pretty sure the level of detail given by the narrator is at best theory. Last night, for instance, he caught four Microraptors, which were “half-bird, half-dinosaur.” These Microraptors had a few feathers, which according to the host, were used to keep the animal warm, as well as for use in elaborate courtship displays such as those performed by modern Birds of Paradise.

This information was presented plainly, factually and not unlike you’d expect from Steve Irwin explaining crocodile behaviour. But, the difference is, Microraptors have never been seen alive by humans. Not even close. All we have are some impressions in rocks and perhaps some fossils. There’s no way we could conclusively know this level of detail about the Microraptor’s courtship rituals. Steve Irwin, on the other hand, spent a lifetime studying crocodiles, and was able to see first-hand how they react to various stimuli.

Does this program lie?

We, as viewers, know that the dinosaurs aren’t real (even though the graphics are pretty good). We also know he isn’t really time-traveling. So, are they merely trying to entertain us with some graphics, and some dramatic scenes in which the host routinely almost doesn’t make it back alive? Or are they trying to teach us about these creatures in an intriguing and innovative way?

I’m more inclined to say it’s the later. The content is important.

But, evidently – at least for the producers – the fact that the information presented are theories and not 100% for-sure truths is unimportant. Certainly, we cannot expect children watching this show to understand this distinction between academic theory and certitude. Even most adults probably wouldn’t pick up on the distinction.

But, does it matter?

Is the purpose of shows like these, or even of paleontologists, to brief the world on the latest research and theories? Or, is it to broadly educate those interested in some part of paleontology that they might never have known before, and to do it in an exciting and entertaining way?

There’s something to be said about simplicity.

Make Your Own 3d Graphics

2008-02-27T17:06:00.015-05:00

One of our major assignments this year is to create interactive content for Museum London to use with their grade 5 students, on a Smartboard. The Smartboard is a lot like a Power Point presentation that allows students to move things around and click buttons on the screen. Essentially, it's a fancy blackboard.

In designing the content, I decided to make use of a graphics program I'd learned a few years ago called Bryce 3D to spice things up a bit and make my own graphics rather than relying on those created by others. Bryce is a bit outdated now (You won't see Disney using it in any of their upcoming movies), but it still makes some pretty nice pictures - especially landscapes.

The difference between Bryce and the Paint/Draw programs we all have on our computers, is that everything in Bryce is made up of geometric shapes that not only have height and width, but depth as well. In paint, you make an orange by drawing a circle; in Bryce, you make a sphere.

And unlike in Paint/Draw, where you can only look at your picture from one point of view, in Bryce, you can walk all around your objects. From the front, side, above, below, or from any angle imaginable. This freedom (though tricky to master), allows you to create some pretty detailed pictures. And once you've tried it, I doubt you'll ever want to go back to the clunky interface of Google Sketchup.

For my project, I needed an image of three vendors. One from 19th c India, Japan and Egypt.

I did some quick research on the types of clothes men wore in these countries during these times, and using dozens of individual little geometric objects, and a little help from Photoshop to add the sepia tones, I was able to come up with the three you see here.

So, if you like art, or need to make some graphics of landscapes, buildings, or even objects (people are doable, but there are better programs out there), give a 3d modeling program a try. You might like it. And you might be impressed with what you can come up with.

Note: I don't work for Bryce, it just happens to be the program I'm most familiar with. If you don't want to pay for a program, you might try "Blender," which is free and open source.

Go Ahead and Touch the Artifacts

2008-02-22T08:54:00.002-05:00

I saw a documentary on TVO a few weeks ago about exhibits put on by the British Museum. The documentary was a couple years old, but one of the exhibits in particular was rather intriguing to me. It was a traveling show of stone tools that was at the time set up in Norwich Castle. The oldest of these tools was 1.8 million years old.

So far, all pretty standard.

What was different, however, was that Jill Cook, the woman in charge of the exhibit, had decided to allow visitors to handle some of the artifacts. Even young children were encouraged to pick up the million year old objects.

Granted - stones are a bit more resilient than old documents or tapestries, but the idea is the same. Cook thought that the minor damage caused by oils in the skin from a few weeks of being handled was worth it for the engagement that such an exhibit provided viewers.

It was amazing to see the uncertain looks on people's faces as they picked up the tools. Many of them looked as if they felt they were doing something wrong and treated the objects with the utmost care. As far as I know, none of them were dropped or damaged.

So go ahead. Touch the artifacts. Connect with them.

Putting a History Essay Online

2008-02-11T20:13:00.000-05:00

A colleague of mine, Tim Compeau, wrote a few months ago about an essay of his that he reformatted for the web as part of a Digital History internship. For Tim, it was his first website.

I decided to follow in his footsteps and try to do the same myself. I also had never even attempted to write any HTML. But, armed only with w3schools.com's online HTML and CSS tutorials, and some patient Google searching when I got stuck, I was able to learn enough HTML and CSS to hand-code my first web page. It was a 7 part process, every bit of it free.

1) I chose the paper I wanted to encode: in my case, it was my undergraduate thesis: The United Irishmen's Allies.

2) I read Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's, "Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web" (available totally free, online).

3) I added all the necessary HTML tags so that the browser could read my paper. (free at W3 Schools.com)

4) I snazzed it up a bit with some CSS, so that my page wasn't merely a wall of text. (free at W3 Schools.com)

5) I uploaded my pages to my webspace (available totally free, if you are a UWO student)

6) I had W3C Markup Validation Service check my code to make sure it was written properly so that various kinds of browsers would all be able to read it. (available totally free and instantly online - all you need is to provide the site with the URL address of your page).

7) I put a link to my website on my blog so that Google and the other search engines out there can find it!

You can take a look at what I came up with Here.

It took me about 50 hours of fiddling with HTML and CSS to put the equivalent of a 50 page paper online. But I'm confident it will be easier in the future, now that I've taken the time to learn how it all works. It's still got a few bugs (especially if you're viewing it with Internet Explorer), but it was definitely a worthwhile exercise.

Formatting your Family History: Referencing

2008-02-10T15:20:00.000-05:00

This post follows up on my previous two posts regarding family history: “Put Your Family History in Context” and “Formatting your Family History: Images and Documents.” This time, I will look at the different style-guides used for referencing where you got your information to help you decide which one is right for your own family history.

If you don’t reference where you got your information from, your reader has no way to tell if your research is correct, nor can they find the same evidence you found if they were working on a project that needed to use one of your documents in their own research. While it’s true that most general readers prefer no references, since they sometimes get in the way of the narrative, I’d certainly encourage anyone writing their family history to use them. After all, you’ve carefully researched your history, why not lend credibility to your efforts by laying all of your evidence out for people to see?

There are many different referencing systems used throughout scholarly writing that you could use in writing your family history. The most popular of these for humanities writers - as I would argue, family historians are, are the Modern Language Association (MLA) style-guide and the Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago). The major difference between them is that MLA calls for the author to put its references in the body of the text, and Chicago puts the reference either at the bottom of the page (footnote) or at the end of the book/chapter (endnote). First, let’s have a look at MLA.

MLA style has advantages and disadvantages. Many people like the fact that the reader doesn’t have to turn the page, or even look to the bottom of the page to find out the author’s source. It’s time consuming to flip pages just to check a reference. Also, aesthetically, many people dislike how footnotes can sometimes take over a page. I’m sure everyone who has read academic history has come across many books where the footnotes are longer than the work itself, which can be distracting and cluttered. MLA also has the advantage of being nearly invisible, if you’re a talented writer. For example:

“The record of Great Grandpa John’s marriage on May 18, 1894 is held in marriage registers in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England.”

The preceding sentence contains all the citation information you’d need for an MLA style reference. It tells the reader what type of document was used (marriage registers), where in the document the information can be found (May 18, 1894), and where it is held (St. Paul’s Cathedral, London England).

However, more commonly, MLA tends to be invasive for the reader, much like my last sentence. Whereas most readers can choose to ignore the superscript little number that’s connected with an end note, it’s much more difficult to ignore the parentheses that MLA often demands:

“Great Grandpa John’s marriage in 1894 was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London England (St. Paul’s Records). He married our Great Grandmother Mary, who had moved to London in 1890 from Manchester (Mary’s Letters, June 14, 1890). She had met our Great Grandpa John while attending the opera (John’s Diary, August 19, 1893).”

These constant citations are important if anyone wanted to check your references in the future, but for the reader they make the narrative rather choppy and difficult to enjoy.

This is where Chicago Manual of Style has its advantages. As mentioned above, the reader can easily choose to ignore your footnotes or endnotes, but if they desire, they know that the information of where you got your resource is readily available. To my knowledge, all academic historical publications use a referencing system based on the Chicago Manual of Style, largely because it is so flexible. Footnotes or endnotes give the author the freedom to add extra information that would otherwise stifle the fluidity of the narrative that could be important to ensure readers can understand your history, and when using lots of sources that are tucked away in Archives or Museums all over the world, Chicago style makes it clear exactly where each document is held. The above paragraph written using MLA style would look something like this in Chicago Manual of Style:

“Great Grandpa John’s marriage in 1894 was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral, in London England.[1] He married our Great Grandmother Mary, who had moved to London in 1890 from Manchester.[2] She had met our Great Grandpa John while attending the opera.[3]”

----

[1] “Marriage of John Smith to Mary Jones, May 18, 1894” St. Paul’s Cathedral, Marriage Register. (London, England, 1894).

[2] Mary Jones. “June 14, 1890,” Letter from Mary Jones to Sylvia Cooper. Courtesy: Greater Manchester County Record Office.

[3] John Smith. “August 19, 1893” Diary of John Smith. Courtesy: Public Record Office. Mary also wrote about the occasion in a letter to her friend Sylvia, the same day. Mary Jones. "August 19, 1893" Letter from Mary Jones to Sylvia Cooper. Courtesy: Greater Manchester County Record Office.

----

To the untrained eye, the footnotes can be a mass of confusion. However, if you don’t care about the reference, it’s easy to skip over it and just focus on the narrative. Your references may never get looked at by your readers, but they do leave a trail of your research in case you or anyone else in your family ever wished to pick up where you left off and continue the search for your family’s history.

Ultimately, it is your family history and its your hard work that will get it written. It’s up to you if you decide to use MLA, Chicago or no reference system at all. It’s also up to you if you take any of my advice about “Putting your Family History in Context” or about when and where to include “Images and Documents” in your book. But, by keeping in mind the needs and desires of your readers, you will be able to produce something that is worthy of your hard work; something that will be easier and more enjoyable to read and something that will act as a tribute to the family in whose name you wrote.

Formatting your Family History: Images and Documents

2008-01-29T13:30:00.000-05:00

This post builds upon my previous post regarding Putting your Family History in Context. I’ve learned over the years that not everyone thinks the same way I do, which makes for some frustrating moments as I try to explain a concept in a way that makes perfect sense to me, but seems disjointed and hastily put together to someone else. The same goes for a family history. If you’ve put it together the way you think it should be, without thinking of the way other people might prefer to intake the information, you’re going to disappoint a lot of your readers who might then be tempted to stop reading all together. And that’s a waste of all your hard work.

You’ve done all your research and written up an engaging account, but how to present it?

Sometimes it’s best to follow the crowd. The format of books, and more importantly, history books, has slowly evolved over the past few hundred years. There’s a reason that most history books you pick up are formatted so similarly: because time and reader experience has shown that these formats are most effective at getting information across to readers.

Some of the most important questions you should ask yourself when deciding how to format your family history should be related to format. You should think carefully about 1) how best to present photos or reproductions of documents (images), and 2) how you are going to tell your reader where you got your information (sourcing).

This post will discuss how to present photos or reproductions of documents.

It has become increasingly easy to get high quality reproductions of documents and photos that you can include in your family history. A two-hundred year old signature of a relative in a church register can be scanned, as can old family photos. But, where should they go in the book? You have a few fairly solid options for this: you can place them in an appendix, or you can place them on the page of the narrative that discusses the image.

I know many people dislike appendices precisely because most people won’t bother to flip to the back to look at it, or if they do, it won’t be until they have finished reading the narrative entirely. However, appendices have benefits as well. If you have a lot of documents or images, sometimes it’s best to keep them all together – especially if they tend to be full page size. This makes it easier for the reader to digest all the images at once and they don’t have to flip through all the pages, looking for them. If the number of images you have, stacked in a pile, rival the thickness of your narrative, consider placing them in an appendix. This will give your family history a much more professional, clean look.

If, however, you have a spattering of interesting, small images, perhaps just your Great-great-grandfather John’s signature, consider placing it in the body of the text in the spot where you make reference to what information you have about John. As long as you keep your images sparse, small and close to the relevant point in the narrative, you will enhance the story you are telling. This will give your family history a much more intimate feel for the reader.

What you should try to avoid is a seemingly haphazard array of documents and photos stuck into the book in a manner that the reader has trouble understanding why you are showing them this at this particular spot. If you want to include a full page reproduced document, but you don’t have room near the point in the narrative where you discuss this document, place it as an appendix - anything more than a couple lines away from the relevant narrative point and you're going to confuse your reader. If you have room and you feel it enhances the story, place it in the text. Choose carefully, and your reader will thank you.

*Note: random pictures of ducks in your blog post do not enhance your message. Neither do poorly formatted images in books.

Put your Family History in Context

2008-01-27T18:35:00.000-05:00

I’ve become increasingly interested in my family history of late, and it’s become abundantly clear to me that I’m not alone. Even within my own family tree, there are multiple people researching independently and cooperatively over the internet. And people all over the world are doing the same, tracing their own family histories.

However, after all those years of researching are done, you’ve got to write it all up and leave the best possible record of your work, and of your family. But, this isn’t easy. Many people out there aren’t the best writers and in an effort to stick to the facts, the family history that you treasure often comes out dry and boring to another reader – even to your children. Part of the problem might have to do with your methods.

Most people who are writing family histories tend to want to single out their family. You dig through archives and church records and you find your most distant relative. Let’s say, John from Suffolk county, England, born in 1765. But, you probably don’t know very much about John, beyond his name and where he lived. So you start your family history something like this:

“The first known member of our family was named John. He lived in Suffolk County, England and was born in 1765. We know this because his name is written in a Church register.”

Typically, this is followed by who John married, what children he begot, and then proceeds to the more recent family history for which more information is available.

It can be frustrating, faced with only one little signature in a church register, and seemingly nothing else to go by to find out who your ancestor was. However, John didn’t think of himself as a man who left a single record for future generations, he thought of himself as a part of a community, living in an even wider community. So, when faced with this shortage of information, put your family in context.

You know John lived in Suffolk in the late eighteenth century. What else happened there during that time? Was there a war that affected the people of Suffolk? A religious movement? A political battle? Who was the local lord? What was he like? Who was the minister at John’s church? Can you find a copy of a sermon given by that minister? What did the people of Suffolk want out of life? What was the landscape like? How did they differ from other Englishmen? What did they tend to eat for dinner?

Questions like these can bring to light new information about John and his neighbours that can bring him to life. The brief and boring factual account becomes:

“The first known member of our family was named John. He lived in Suffolk County, England and was born in 1765. We know very little about John, but we do know quite a lot about the county he lived in. At the time of John’s birth, it was known as a center of weaving, and produced mainly for the European export market. Most rural families were in some way connected to this cottage industry, and it is quite possible John’s family was too. Around the time John turned twenty-five, Napoleon blocked this export trade and the people of Suffolk fell on hard economic times…

The major religion in Suffolk at the time was still the Anglican church, however compared to many regions of England, Suffolk had a very high dissenting population, mainly Quakers and Methodists. We know from the name of Church John attended, that he was one of these Quakers. Quakers at this time were known for their strong belief in…”

This context lets us feel like we know John just a little bit better. Even though we don’t know exactly what he did, thought or said, we know what his home might have been like. And you’re not doing him a disservice by lumping him in with his neighbours, you’re giving him life on the pages of your family manuscript that a one-time record of his signature does not.

Our ancestors thought of themselves as a part of a broader community. So there’s no harm in representing them as such. And hey, with a little context, you might even write a history that someone else might want to read it.

Visualization of UWO library's historical holdings

2008-01-23T12:08:00.000-05:00

I decided to create a visualization using IBM's program, "Many Eyes." This site allows users to input any kind of data you could imagine, and then graph or chart it in one of fifteen different ways.

I chose to look at the number of books on history that the University of Western Ontario library had on each country. To get this data I did a subject search for each country and "history" in the library catalogue and recorded the data. The result is this many eyes map (minus Colombia, Scotland and the USSR. I misspelled it "Columbia" and therefore got no results - my apologies to all those Colombians out there, and unfortunately Scotland and the USSR do not fit into the Many Eyes map so I elected to leave this data out).

It's interesting to see what countries get the most historical resources. Some results are surprising (123 books on Australia, but nothing resembling an Australian history course taught at the school) and some not (1,261 on Canada)

The Open-Stack Archive: Museum of Anthropology, Vancouver

2008-01-16T09:52:00.000-05:00

I was recently out west in Vancouver and while I was there I went and visited the Museum of Anthropology located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. The museum is most famous for its west coast native art, including large totem poles and wood carvings done by west coast native groups. The art is truly beautiful and impressive, however it was the access to the collection that I found astounding. The curators had realized that the amount of space required to put everything out in the open was well beyond what they had. So, they developed what they call “Visible Storage” units, which allow visitors to inspect over 13 000 artifacts at will. Almost half of their massive collection of artifacts is accessible through this system.

The museum also contains traditional displays of well-lit pieces out in the open, or in display cases, however most of the smaller artifacts are at first invisible to the eye. That’s because they are in the “Visible Storage.” These “Visible Storage” units are essentially a series of chests with sliding drawers. In each drawer is a collection of artifacts of similar provenance. One drawer might contain pipes used by the Kwakwaka'wakw people, another, shoes worn by the Haida. Unlike so many museums I have been to in the past, the Museum of Anthropology was packed with these treasure chests, which lined many of the walls. Each was sheltered from careless visitors by a protective sheet of plexi-glass, and visitors are encouraged to look at as much or as little as they desire.

My girlfriend and I chose which drawers to open based on how unlikely we thought it was that the average person would choose that drawer. We looked at quite a few of the drawers close to the floor, in an attempt to get a less traveled tour of the collection. As a researcher, I don’t think I could have asked for more in terms of accessibility. The concept of open stacks so familiar to goers of libraries has been brought into the world of material culture by this museum. An open stack archive, that both protects and provides the option of browsing.

I have become accustomed to expecting upwards of 90% of a museum collection to be hidden in some underground vault, for lack of display space. It was so refreshing to see it all out there at the Museum of Anthropology. The museum was promoting research of its collection by making it accessible. It was peaking curiosity by tempting me to open various drawers to see what was inside – not unlike a kid at Christmas, and it was allowing me, the visitor to decide how much I wanted to see during my visit.

Kudos to the Museum of Anthropology for such a great idea.

------
Reference:

Artwork is by Bill Reid. Photograph by Adam Crymble.

Make the Museum More Like the Science Centre

2008-01-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

I am always disheartened when I hear from people that history is boring. History is not boring, it’s an adventure through imagination that the literary, television and film worlds have all realized and taken advantage of. Every cartoon with princesses and dragons is really just a play on medieval history, as are fantasy novels such as Lord of the Rings and even Harry Potter. It’s our desire to go to a world that doesn’t exist but in our imaginations that makes both fantasy and history so exciting for people.

And that’s why I’m so disheartened when I hear from people that history is boring. What they’re really saying is that we’re not telling them a good story. We’re not involving them. Unfortunately, in many cases, the hands-on involvement that places like the Ontario Science Centre are famous for with their scientific marvels and gizmos is just not possible in traditional history museums. You can’t have twenty thousand people playing with rare artifacts and expect no damage to come to the items.

But, just because it’s not possible in traditional history museums doesn’t mean it’s not possible. Pack up the fine china from 1753, take the satin ropes down from around the exhibit and the “do not touch” signs, and make history interactive; imaginative. Kids don’t want to look at things. They want to do things. Even I want to do things when I’m at a museum. Give me a button to press, or an over-the-top actor wandering around creating atmosphere. Give me gadgets to play with. I don’t want to see a rug that Charles I once walked on; I want to see his head fly off as the executioners axe comes down and get splattered with fake blood. Don’t give me text-panels, give me activities. But most of all, tell me a story. Because that’s what history is. A story. Our story.

And we shouldn’t expect people to memorize our story. Instead, we should make it something worth listening to; worth participating in.

Why does the mission statement of the Ontario Science Centre say it aims first and foremost “to delight” whereas the Royal Ontario Museum seeks to “be a world leader in communicating its research and collections”?

Delight me!

Wikipedia article on "Public History"

2008-01-06T15:34:00.001-05:00

I'm a big fan of Wikipedia and I've been known to edit the odd article or two, but I'm having trouble with the "Public History" article. As of the time of writing, I am the latest person to have contributed to this article, but it's still not very good.

I thought it would be easy to spout off a few hundred words on what a public historian was, what they did, and conversely, who is not a public historian, but when I sat down to write I found it rather difficult to summarize. Should I explain what public history is by defining it as different from academic history? Or is this even true? Are history professors not also public historians, spouting history to undergraduate students with little or no previous academic background on the subject?

Is Mel Gibson, who has portrayed historical figures in films, a public historian?

Do you have to be associated with a museum or an archive to be a public historian? Do you have to be a paid professional, or are amateur geneologists practicing public history?

Do you have to publish to be a public historian?

So, I'm sending out a call for help. Please contribute to the "public history" article on Wikipedia. With your help, I may soon have a solid answer to give every time someone asks "what's that?" when I explain I'm in a Masters of Public History program.

How to Get Feedback from your Exhibit Viewers Without Their Realizing it.

2007-11-29T11:05:00.000-05:00

One of our class assignments this year was to mount a history of medicine display in the Medical Sciences building here at the University of Western Ontario, which used some of the medical artifacts from our vast collection. We mounted the exhibit, but when I left that afternoon I was skeptical that anyone would bother to look at what we had created. Personally, I never bother to look at the contents of exhibits mounted in hallways, so why should I expect the general public to be any different?

I decided to do a couple tests to see if there were inexpensive ways you could draw people to an exhibit and to get feedback on whether or not your gimmick had worked. Over the past month, I have mounted two unauthorized displays in the hall of the History department using two different interactive techniques. The case in question had been left empty all year but fortunately was unlocked, so I took the initiative to add some history to the history department.

I decided on a theme: “the History of Traditions” and created my first display. The content was unimportant since I was really just testing the interactive component, so I surfed the internet and created a few text panels and images related to the History of Wearing a Poppy as an act of remembrance. Since the Royal Canadian Legion was in the middle of their November Poppy donation drive, I contacted them and got a donation box along with 100 poppies – one for each person I estimated would see the case, given its location deep within the history department. This was to be my interactive component.

I secretly mounted my display, leaving one of the sliding glass doors open to encourage viewers to donate or to take a poppy. For just over a week it sat there on the wall and on Remembrance Day, I took it down and counted the poppies. 34 had been taken by viewers and I had collected about ten dollars which I returned to the grateful Legionnaires. Undoubtedly some people took two and some people who read the display didn’t take one at all. However, I was able to get a rough idea of how many people were looking at what I had created, with a simple interactive component – one that most people probably never even thought of as interactive.

I wondered if it had been the poppy box that had attracted viewers who wanted a poppy that would not otherwise bothered to look at the display. In an attempt to determine if my interactive component was attracting the viewers or merely recording them, I decided to come up with something a little more gimmicky that would attract people: a voting system. Keeping with the theme of the History of Traditions, I created a display on the History of Why We Send Fruitcakes.

This time, rather than ask for money, I placed a brick, a photograph of George Bush and a fruitcake on the bottom shelf of my display and numbered each item. I then posted three small sheets of paper with corresponding numbers and a bunch of stickers for people to use. I asked viewers “Can You Spot the Real Fruitcake? Indicate with a Star.” The interaction was merely a play on words of the various meanings people associate with the word “fruitcake” but what was important wasn’t that people could spot the true cake – most people got that wrong. What was important was that I was able to draw them in with a silly exercise and I provided myself with feedback from the viewer. The fact that people voted at all meant they were interested enough in the exercise, and that they took at least a moment to see what was in the case so they could make their choice.

The first day the exhibit was mounted, a crowd of my classmates gathered around to see what it was. The sheets quickly filled up with stars, and my colleagues asked me unknowingly, “Have you voted for the fruitcake yet?” For less than a dollar and with no gadgets, I was able to create a simple interactive component that drew in viewers and a feedback forum for myself. All while maintaining a traditional style display case that presented a history to the viewer.

The idea was popular enough that one of the other students in my class used my sticker-voting idea in a class assignment we recently completed to design an exhibit of medical history. She borrowed the idea for her own proposal as a way to get viewers involved and to get them to approach the exhibit.

If no one objects, I’ll continue the “History of Traditions” displays in the new year, or if one of my classmates would like to create an interactive display of their own, I would be happy to cede the case. After all, I didn’t ask if I could use it anyway. But in a department with a Public History program, no display case should ever remain empty!

Thanks to the Duchess of Kent Royal Canadian Legion for trusting me with their poppies, to Corey Everrett and Aaron Day for the idea about a display on Fruitcake, and to everyone who participated in my experiment.

Taking Notes on .PDF files Without Printing

2007-11-21T11:15:00.001-05:00

I’ve noticed a lot of my classmates still prefer to print off articles and chapters that are available freely online to read them in hard copy rather than on their computer screens. I’m not sure if this is because they inherently hate reading off a computer screen, or if it’s because they like to scribble notes to themselves in the margins.

If it’s the later, I have a few suggestions that can let you take those notes, without having to use all that paper and waste your ink cartridges.

First, let’s assume the reading in question is a .pdf file. For example, one I have found on the internet: S. Smale’s Differentiable Dynamical Systems. Don’t worry I don’t understand what it’s about either.

Instead of clicking on that tempting print button, click on the “Select Tool,” click on any point in the text and type CTRL A, then CTRL C. You can then open up your favourite word processing program and paste the entire document into your word processor where you can manipulate it.

Now, to take all those notes you so love. (The following suggestions are tailored to users of MS Word, since that’s what I use).

If you’re a person who likes to highlight as you read, you can do so with this tool:

If you like to write text in the margins but you don’t want to mess up the formatting of the document, click on the INSERT menu, and then click “Add Comment” (Don't worry it's less invasive in a real Word.doc)

And there’s so much more flexibility with a word processor that you just can’t do after you’ve printed that article out. You can Bold the important words. italicize the article’s thesis statement. Want the article double spaced so you can read it better? Piece of cake. Don’t like the column width? Easy to change.

Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a laptop you can bring with you to the class discussion, you can type CTRL F and search the entire article for that quote you just know is in there somewhere but you can’t remember where and then everyone will think you’re a genius for having the perfect contribution to the discussion.

I know some of you out there love the smell and feel of paper. So to quell that concern as well, Please feel free to print off this article and take it with you everywhere you go. That way, if while reading your articles on your computer you begin to pine for paper, you can pull out my article, give it a big hug and continue your work refreshed.

Because really, are you going to read that article you just printed off ever again? Save a tree, save yourself some money, and experiment a little with what your computer can do. You might even like it.

*Note, this only works if the person who created the document has used the full version of Adobe Acrobat and has let Acrobat use Optical Character Recognition to convert the contents of the document to text. Unfortunately, as many of you have found, the only way to get some .PDF documents into text is to have your own Optical Character Recognition software.

I've Been Translated

2007-11-15T09:29:00.000-05:00

I was browsing Technorati this morning, a site on which you can search for blogs and I came across my own. Beside my blog’s title was a little green bubble with a magnifying glass in it labeled, “Authority” and a number beside it. This number refers to the number of other blogs in Technorati’s database that link to your blog. I was curious to see who was on there, so I clicked it.

Most of them were the blogs of my colleagues, but one in particular stood out because it was in German. I clicked on the link titled, Gedanken auf Öffentlicher Geschichte durch Adam Crymble: Themed Tonführer Bereist Museum.

To my surprise, there was my post about Themed Audio-Guide Museum Tours, complete with the photo I had taken this summer on my vacation, however, the text had been completely translated into German on a website titled “Tourism Projects.” (Stehlen ist schlecht. Wenn Sie möchten, dass die Übersetzung meiner Arbeit fragen, und ich werde sagen, ja)

I guess I should put that on my C.V. now: “Work translated into German.”

References (Because theft is morally suspect)

Technorati. “http://www.technorati.com”

“Gedanken auf Öffentlicher Geschichte durch Adam Crymble: Themed Tonführer Bereist Museum,” Tourism Projects. “http://tourismprojects.blogspot.com/2007/10/gedanken-auf-ffentlicher-geschichte.html

Make Your Grandpa Tell You His Story

2007-11-13T17:35:00.000-05:00

Before he died, my Opa (Grandfather) wrote a family history with the help of my mother and her sister. I think he wanted to leave us with a sense of who we were and where we had come from since he and my Oma (Grandmother) had immigrated to Canada from Germany in 1953 and almost all ties to our past had be left behind in a war-torn Germany. I finally read the memoirs this past week, and it was the war-torn part that affected me most. Even though I had known my Opa for over twenty years and had spoken to him countless times, I never once heard a story about the war or his experiences after he was drafted into the German army.

Thanks to his efforts writing it all down, I now have not only a clearer vision of why he was the man he was, but I have a one of a kind primary account of what the war was like in the German army during the Second World War.

I read of the Master Sargent who liked to make sure the men guarding the munitions dump weren’t goofing off, so he’d climb the fence and try to break in. If he was able to get to the guards, they were thrown in the brig for three days. Apparently the man did this on a regular basis to the chagrin of the soldiers until, “this routine ended one night when one of the guards shot [and killed] the Master Sargent in the process of climbing the fence.” According to my Opa, the guard was exonerated of wrongdoing and, “We were all happy with the outcome.”[1]

He also wrote in some detail about the lockjaw he contracted after he had his jaw shattered by a Russian bullet and subsequently wired shut for six weeks. To cure the lockjaw he said, “Over the next two months I ran around with a pair of clothespins in my teeth. The spring inserted between my teeth put enough pressure on the teeth to gradually loosen their grip.”[1]

Finally, I learned that his father, my great-grandfather had spent his last days in a Russian forced labour camp, where he contracted typus after being forced to drink the blood-soaked water of the Oder River, which he and other prisoners were clearing of dead bodies under the stern eyes of their Russian Masters.[1]

Since reading these memoirs, it has occurred to me that it will soon be too late to collect any more. Various projects at organizations such as the Center for History and New Media collect the stories of those who went through more recent events such as Hurricane Katrina or 9/11;[2][3] such a project is commendable, but the veterans of the Second World War are every day diminishing, and with them the invaluable stories vanish forever. Veteran’s Canada has a dozen or so stories of Canadian War Veterans.[4] The Digital Memory Project Digital Archive has many dozens more.[5] But given the thousands of veterans still around, why have so few given us their stories in these online repositories?

Perhaps my Opa’s memoirs provide the answer. I mentioned at the beginning that my mother and her sister helped him write the memoir. What they actually did was type it into a word processor, because he couldn’t use one himself. He never owned a computer. Even until he died his watch was analog, his typewriter produced one copy of whatever he typed, and he never owned an answering machine.

If we want these stories, we have to find a way to get them. Those that have already been written were likely done in pen and ink. And while I’d love to be able to sit down and collect everyone’s story, one by one, I’m just one man. So, until I figure something else out, a little help, if you please. If you still have grandparents, please, go talk to them. Get those stories written down. Because they’re wonderful. They’re who we are.

References:

[1] Herbert Eichler. The Eichler Family History. (2002?)

[2] “Hurricane Digital Memory Bank” The Center for History and New Media. http://www.hurricanearchive.org/

[3] “The September 11 Digital Archive” The Center for History and New Media. http://911digitalarchive.org/

[4] Veterans Affairs Canada http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/general/sub.cfm?source=links

[5] “The Memory Project Digital Archive” The Dominion Institute. http://www.thememoryproject.com/digital-archive/main.cfm?nointro=true

Remembrance Day: a day of rest?

2007-11-11T15:55:00.000-05:00

Remembrance Day should not be a public holiday.

In most of Canada, today is a public holiday and had it not fallen on a Sunday this year, workers would have had the day off work and students would be playing their video games – or whatever it is kids are into these days. Only in Ontario and Quebec do kids go to school on Remembrance Day. And I’d be willing to bet, Ontario has the largest percentage of school-aged children who observe the traditional moment of silence at 11am on November 11.

The reasons for the holiday seem good-intentioned; the Nova Scotia Remembrance Day Act, declares:

“Our heritage of freedom and human dignity has, under Providence, been preserved through the unselfish devotion of those who sacrificed health, limb and life itself in World War One, World War Two and the Korean Conflict;

The eleventh day of November has traditionally been set aside throughout Nova Scotia as a day to be kept and observed in each and every year under the name "Remembrance Day";

It is fitting that on Remembrance Day the people of Nova Scotia should pay grateful tribute to the memory of those who have died, cherish those who have suffered grievous injury, and dedicate themselves anew to the maintenance and furtherance of the great ideals hallowed by those sacrifices.”[1]

That’s a nice theory and all…but I find it hard to believe that your average students (let alone his or her parents) are passionate enough about Remembrance Day to go to a ceremony, or even to tune the television to CBC where they can watch the official Canadian observance. So, if Remembrance Day is worth observing, why not send the children to school where they spend the morning listening to the types of sacrifices soldiers and their families made through stories, skits and poetry, before ultimately listening to the haunting notes of the Last Post, before observing a moment of silence with their teachers and peers?

If, on the other hand, we decide Remembrance Day is not worth observing, why is it worth taking a day off work and school? It seems rather ironic that we would celebrate the tireless efforts and extraordinary sacrifices of young Canadians, by sleeping in.

References:

[1] "Remembrance Day Act" Government of Nova Scotia.

Public History on the Streets

2007-11-04T10:49:00.001-05:00

If you live here in London, Ontario, you may have noticed these. They're all over my neighbourhood and as the image suggests, they mark the city boundary as it appeared in 1855.

They are quite large (2.5m/7 feet across), and painted directly on the road. They appeared three or four years ago after the streets were repaved in the area, but I wasn't able to get a response from City Hall as to who put them there or what motivated them to. Most people probably never notice them; thousands of cars drive over them every day. But I have to say, I think they're a great idea.

They do what academic history cannot. They are so tangible. They present history at the exact point that it occurred. Even most museums cannot boast such a feat. We all know that the mummy at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto was not an early Torontonian, he was brought there from Egypt. Yet that's where we go to experience Egyptian history.

Not so with these paintings on the road. To experience a piece of London's history, all you have to do is go stand on one of these paintings and you're at a spot historically significant in 1855. Sure, it's not as cool as the mummy, but it's cheap, noninvasive and it's simple enough that even a young child could begin learning about the history of their city by merely asking, "Mommy, what's that?"

Themed Audio-Guide Museum Tours

2007-10-29T08:42:00.000-04:00

I was in Paris this past summer at the Musée D’Orsay, the gallery holding French art from 1848 to 1914. I have to admit, I know absolutely nothing of this period in art history. So my girlfriend and I shelled out the €6 each for an audio guide. The guide was pretty well done and gave between two and four minute descriptions of most major pieces in the gallery, detailing who the artist was, why he or she produced the work and how it was received by the public.

Sure, it was interesting to learn about the various pieces of art, however it would have taken a year to listen to every single recording and my feet got tired far before we reached that end. Even if I had listened to every recording, I still feel I would have had only a rudimentary understanding of nineteenth century French art. Nevertheless, we listened to quite a few of the descriptions, and still, I left only knowing tiny fragments of the bigger picture. One fragment about impressionism, one about sculptures depicting Napoleon, one about Gauguin, but nothing to weave it together. I almost wished I could have taken a class or two in the museum that would have helped me make sense of what I was seeing.

And really, that’s not a huge stretch for the museum. After all, they’ve already got thousands of functional audio guides. So why not introduce a themed audio tour? Then, instead of a fragment about impressionism, I could have listened to a twenty minute guided lecture of impressionism. Isn’t that exactly what every art history lecturer dreams of? Being able to lecture students in front of the masterpieces themselves? I would have taken away so much more than I did from my fragmentary experience, and still more than I could have hoped by sitting in a lecture hall.

For those who don’t want to take the guided tours, they could still listen to the individual recordings – they’re already on the audio guides and there’s no reason that needs to change.

All such a project requires for Musée D’Orsay is someone to write some lectures that tie together the various works, someone to translate them into the half-dozen languages supported by the audio guides of the museum, and someone to record the dialogue. For a one-time cost, the Musée D’Orsay could provide an extra dimension to the understanding their visitors come to of the collection, without the need to hope you could find a guided tour in your language, speaking about a specific topic you’re interested in, that happened to be started at the moment you arrived.

The Historian's Inferiority Complex

2007-10-23T22:40:00.000-04:00

Imagine watching Superman with a physicist who can't help himself but to tell you that "That's physically impossible" as Superman leaps over a tall building in a single bound.

Imagine watching Pirates of the Carribean with a geographer who keeps insisting that the Isle de Muerte is not located where Captain Jack Sparrow says it is.

Imagine watching Finding Nemo with a zoologist who won't shut up about the fact that fish can't speak English.

Now, imagine watching Braveheart with a historian who can resist the temptation to tell you that actually, Wallace and his followers were Lowlanders and wouldn't have worn kilts, that Wallace couldn't possibly have sired the future King Edward III - who was born 7 years after Wallace's death, or that the Irish's role in the film is totally fictional - to name but three of a thousand complaints historians have with the film.[1]

Imagine.

Notes:
[1] Elizabeth Ewan. "Braveheart" American Historial Review 100, no. 4 (October 1995):1220 (And there are a hundred more where that came from).

Bringing Publishing into the Computer Age

2007-10-22T11:18:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago in an undergraduate seminar class about the Enlightenment, my professor told the class most academic books published by historians are lucky to earn their author $100. I was a little surprised by this. Why spend the hundreds of hours to produce something that will bring you no monetary gain? A labour of love (tenure seeking), no doubt.

Then I wondered, if you are not going to earn any money for it, why not give it away?

That's exactly what some people have done. Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's book,Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web is the perfect example of this. The book appears on the Center for History and New Media website, which is an ongoing project of Dan Cohen's at George Mason University. If you enjoy the book and are interested in purchasing it, the site tells you places where you can do this, however, if you're a cheapskate, there it is for free.

So why don't more professors give away their work? Perhaps it's because they fear the internet's impermanence, have been taught not to trust it, or routinely teach their students not to trust it. Perhaps they have always wanted to see their name on a hardcover. Or, maybe they have a secret hope that their book will fly off the shelves and they'll be the lucky ones who make money off their efforts.

Then I wondered again; if the author isn't making any money off of the book they wrote, why on earth did I just pay $43 for it?

Either someone is making money on this book (though I can hear the publishing industry crying out that it's not them), or there is far too much overhead involved in producing these academic works. So I have a suggestion, inspired by Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig's book - which is an excellent example of online book-formatting, and by JSTOR, the online, password protected academic journal repository. If Universities can and do buy access to huge repositories to add to their collections, why does the publishing industry not produce and protect new academic works in the same way?

It seems so simple. The author researches and writes. The publisher edits and formats and uploads an unchanging version of the work to a repository. The university buys rights with instructions to password-protect the content from outsiders - just as JSTOR and other repositories such as Early English Books Online are protected. Academic integrity is maintained because the publishing house applies its logo just as it would to a hardcopy version of a book and promises not to alter the content.

RSS feeds could be set up to search the internet for randomly selected sentences from the work; any time the sentence was found on an unauthorized website, the publisher could quickly check the site to see if copyright had been infringed upon. And for those private citizens who are interested, e-copies of the book could be sold online much as MP3 files are sold.

Libraries already have budgets for purchases, and by the sounds of things, libraries and a few professors around the world are the only ones likely to buy your book anyway. So in stead of a research library spending $50 on one book, they could spend $50 000 to have access to all works published by a certain publishing house. Library content would swell without taking up space; the future generation of increasingly computer savy researchers will be happy they don't have to trudge into campus to go to the library to get a book for their research; the publishing industry doesn't disappear; with less overhead, there might be more money to pass on to the author. And, there might be a few more trees.