Interactive History Displays

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

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

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

Canadianization of Zotero: Results

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.

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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?

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

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

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?