The Perpetual Student

"Learning About the Holocaust is More Important Than Ever"

2011-05-31T13:34:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of May, the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) held our 36th Annual Symposium on the Holocaust. Over two days, the Symposium brought nearly 1000 senior secondary students from across British Columbia to UBC to hear from historians, experts, and eyewitnesses of the Holocaust.

The event went amazingly well and I was so proud to have had a hand in helping to organize and emcee an event which, over the years, has had a proven impact on the students who attend (the VHEC's own Nina Krieger and Kazuko Kusumoto both attended the event as students).

I could write an entire blog post about the event itself, but Basya Laye of the Jewish Independent has already written a fantastic article which you can find here.

Perhaps one of the most unexpected aspects of this year's Symposium was finding out that afterwards a number of students were using Twitter to tell their social networks about what they had experienced and how the day had impacted them. It was great to see this sort of spontaneous, unsolicited feedback about the program. In many ways, it was much more candid and real than the feedback that they had given us on our carefully created evaluation forms. These tweets also had the added bonus of creating excitement among the VHEC staff (the majority of whom were largely unfamiliar with Twitter or didn't see the appeal) for using this type of social media more actively to promote our organization and the work that we do here.

Echoes & Reflections: A Multimedia Curriculum on the Holocaust (Shafran Teacher's Conference)

2011-01-17T07:32:00.001-08:00

As part of my new job at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre I am responsible for planning, organizing and promoting many of the Centre's educational events, including the upcoming Shafran Teacher's Conference (February 11, 2011).

Although a great deal of planning and organization for the conference was already underway when I joined the team at the VHEC (thank you, Nina Krieger!), one of the ways that I have been able to contribute so far was in promoting the event online. Last week I approached Joel Ralph at Canada's History Magazine about the event and he was kind enough to post our conference flyer on his website and put it in the magazine's newsletter which is distributed to teachers and interested historians across Canada. I was also able to write a blog post for ActiveHistory.ca about the event, combining the conference's existing publicity materials with my own experiences as a teacher (in order to better fit the style of writing for that publication).

To be honest, I'm not sure that promoting the Shafran Teacher's Conference in either of these publications will have an impact on actual conference registration numbers. After all, the VHEC is promoting this event to a very select group of people: teachers in British Columbia (specifically those in Vancouver and surrounding areas) with an interest in Holocaust Education. The audiences for both Canada's History Magazine and ActiveHistory.ca, on the other hand, are nationwide and not entirely made up of educators. Thus, a large number of people who read the announcement for the conference will either a) not find it applicable to them or b) find it applicable but be unable to attend due to travel and/or time constraints.

Despite all that, I don't think that my time was wasted in choosing to publicize the event in this way. Now, two national audiences with readership in the thousands, have had some exposure to the VHEC's name and a little taste of the type of programming that we do. Even if this specific event wasn't up their alley, perhaps future ones will be. Or, maybe the next time they need something Holocaust-related, they'll think to approach the VHEC for referrals, resources or information. You just never know. :)

Advertising Standards Canada PSAs

2010-12-21T18:50:00.000-08:00

Last week, Advertising Standards Canada launched its newest ad campaign to promote truth in advertising. The campaign is composed of a number of print and television ads that prominently feature the slogan "Dressing it up doesn't make it true." The majority of the ads are cute, colourful and clever (utilizing almost Pixar-like animation to catch the eye and engage the imagination). While all of them are entertaining in their own right, I've included my favourite below:

If you're interested, the rest of the ASC PSAs can be found here.

According to UWO, I Have Now Mastered the Arts

2010-11-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

"I Admit You."

When the Chancellor of the University of Western Ontario held my hands and said those three little words to me this past Friday, it was like music to my ears. In fact, after completing 8 months of course work and a grueling summer internship, the only thing that would have made this moment better was if he had followed with, "...and you're hired" (a girl can dream, can't she?!).

But alas, that wasn't to be. Instead, I begin my job search in earnest today, confident in the knowledge that my time at Western has helped prepare me for a multitude of career paths in history, heritage and beyond (provided, of course, that I can choose just one!).

I don't usually include photos of myself on this blog, but this is definitely one for the record books! Allow me to present UWO's Masters of (Public) History, 2010:

Back row, from left to right: Jordan Goldstein, Dana Johnson, Tim O'Grady, myself, Braden Murray, Tasha DiLoreto, Megan Arnott

Front row, from left to right: Sara Sirianni, Shelagh Staunton, Becca Rahey

Reading the Newspaper with a Public Historian's Eye

2010-10-25T08:57:00.000-07:00

Newspapers. I'm my house, they're everywhere. They lay on the floor in my entryway, folded neatly and encased in coloured plastic. They're piled precariously on chairs and stairs by our side door. They overflow the blue recycling bins in the garage. They litter our kitchen table, the family room table and even the living room table. Articles are clipped, highlighted and/or written on and stuck on the fridge, filed away for future reference or slipped under my bedroom door as I sleep. As a three-newspaper family (receiving The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the Whitby This Week on a regular basis), it's quite possible that we are single-handedly responsible for creating a very large hole somewhere in the Amazonian jungle.

So, this morning when I went downstairs for a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I was not at all surprised to see various sections of The Toronto Star covering nearly every square inch of the kitchen table. Nor was I particularly shocked to see that my father had "conveniently" left the paper open to an article announcing that the "Spadina House [had been] restored to its glory days." Yeah, my father's about as subtle as sledgehammer, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up and start reading.

At first I read the article like I have always read articles of this type: I skimmed the story, interested to learn a little more about Toronto's built heritage (e.g. Spadina House was built in 1866 by James Austin, one of the founders of the Dominion Bank and later, a president of Consumer's Gas Company) and intrigued by the more minute historical details (like the fact that different quadrants of the city used to have designated days on which the muckety-mucks could fashionably receive visitors). I was also mentally adding Spadina House to my ever-growing list of places to visit in Toronto.

But, as I finished reading the article, my inner public historian started to work...

I found myself looking critically at the photograph which had accompanied the article. The photo shows one of Spadina House's newly refurbished rooms in all its glory. With its cheerfully striped furniture, luxurious silk wallpaper and dramatic chandelier, the house looks beautiful and the care that the museum staff put into the new renovations is evident. That said, I couldn't help but cross my fingers and hope that the photographer had restricted herself from using a flash. Heaven forbid we overly expose the new furnishings to intense lighting.

Next, my eyes turned to the title of the article and I just couldn't help my knee-jerk reaction: Glory days? What glory days? Why does everyone always assume that the past was more 'glorious' or simple than the present? And what good does idealizing the past at the expense of the present do for a historical site or for the historical knowledge/consciousness of the public at large? I know, I know... I'm being nit-picky, but that sort of oversimplification drives me batty.

The final paragraph of the article briefly related the types of public programming that the newly reopened heritage site would offer. As someone interested in museum education, I was pleased to see that the site was going to offer three types of tours, "Meet the Austins" for those that are more interested in the history of the family, "It's a Kid's Life" for school-aged children, and a restoration tour for those visitors more interested in the architectural significance of the house and the process that went into repairing one of Toronto's historical gems. It really seems like the staff at Spadina House has thought about their site and their visitors and have made significant attempts to appeal to and service the widest possible audience.

Of course, all of these 'criticisms' are relatively minor and more than a little tongue-in-cheek. In fact, I've only included them in this posting to illustrate a small bit of the thought process which sent me into this metacognitive spiral of a blog post. I have to admit, it's a little disconcerting to wake up one day and suddenly realize that a single year of school has significantly changed the way that I do a task I've been doing since the fifth grade.

* Photograph is for dramatization purposes only and does not represent the actual condition of this blogger's home. :)

Medical Collections Not for the Faint of Heart

2010-06-23T06:23:00.001-07:00

Earlier this year my peers and I in the Public History program had the opportunity to examine UWO's Medical Artifact Collection under the instruction of Dr. Michelle A. Hamilton. As all of us can attest, this collection was equal parts fascinating and grotesque; it was amazing to be able to get our (gloved) hands on 19th century medical artifacts and learn how to handle and examine them as true historians and/or museum curators would, but I'm sure few of us can forget the dried blood that remained on the blades of some of the saws and scalpels, even after nearly a century of disuse.

In my position this summer as the Archives Assistant at the Sunnybrook Health Science Centre Archives my first task was to catalogue all of the archive' s photographic holdings. The majority of the collection consisted of aerial views, interior and exterior shots of the hospital under construction and various departments, equipment and staff from the 1970s. To be honest, for the most part the photos were a bit of a snooze. Thankfully, every once in a while there was a photographic gem (like the black and white shot from the 1940s of an Italian prisoner of war who was undergoing physiotherapy after having one of his legs amputated from the knee down) to keep things interesting.

This week, however, I've moved on to cataloguing the archive's Medical Art Collection. While this means a fair bit of wading through past hospital brochures and stationary layouts for printers, it also means discovering some really beautiful and detailed anatomical sketches that were originally commissioned from the hospital's Art Department by doctors for teaching or learning purposes.

My favourite find so far - hands down - is the file of facial sketches that were done for a doctor that was about to undertake reconstructive surgery of a patient's nose. The file contains various reference materials (e.g. Polaroid's of a human skull, anatomical sketches from a textbook of the underlying structure of muscles, veins, etc. in a human face, and photographs of the actual patient before surgery). The artist then used those items to complete a series of sketches of the patient himself, what the patient's skull structure likely looked like and what certain nerve systems, veins and/or arteries looked like. The artist then layered all of these sketches over each other to complete a final sketch of the patient which showed all of these different parts in relation to each other.

After the drawings were complete, the doctor who had commissioned the sketches then added his own notes about the surgery overtop of them, indicating where arteries and veins were layered closely together, where certain systems were buried under deeper layers of tissue and cautioning himself to not "put the incision too close to the margin of [the] nostril."

As the title of this blog posts suggests, the final pieces of the file were considerably more graphic than pen and ink sketches and doctor's surgical notes and definitely not for the faint of heart or the squeemish: included in the file were photographs of the patient taken during the procedure when part of his nose had been removed and immediately post-op when stitches and bruising were evident.

To see the artist's process from beginning to end was fascinating enough on its own, but then it was also really neat to see evidence of the use to which the sketch was put. It definitely added another layer to my appreciation of medical art and how items from the archives could/should be used to educate and engage the public at the hospital. With its combination of art, education and enough of the "grotesque" to fascinate without sensationalizing or exploiting the patient (sometimes a thin line for the public historian to walk), the file in its entirety would make an excellent exhibit for one of the hospital's display cases. In fact, this might be exactly the type of public history-related project that I suggest to my supervisor that I take on by the end of the summer.

We'll see. I'll keep you posted.

[Note: Artwork by P. Cunningham, posted with permission from the Sunnybrook Archives]

Toronto Opens Its Doors

2010-06-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

Last weekend 150 buildings of architectural, historic, cultural and/or social significance in the City of Toronto open their doors to the public for their 11th Annual Doors Open Toronto event. This year’s theme revolved around architecture within the city and offered the public a number of opportunities to focus their attention on the craftsmanship of some truly extraordinary local buildings and historic sites. And, if my own sore feet and sunburned head are any indication of the kind of time that everyone else had, I’d say that this year’s event was a rousing success.

In past years I’ve participated in Doors Open events solely as a spectator; clutching the Toronto Star Program Guide in one hand, I’ve targeted an area of the city with plenty of properties within walking distance of each other and set off (usually by myself) to enjoy a day of free sight-seeing, something people rarely take time to do in their own backyard.

This year, however, was a little different than most. As part of my internship with the Ontario Jewish Archives, I volunteered to help out at the OJA’s Doors Open Toronto site, the Pape Avenue Cemetery.

Established by Judah Joseph and Abraham Nordheimer in 1849 on a ½ acre of land on what was then Centre Street, the Pape Avenue Cemetery was Toronto’s first Jewish cemetery. As such, it is the final resting place of a number of the city’s first and most prominent Jewish residents, including Judah Joseph’s own son, whose illness first prompted Joseph and Nordheimer to seek out a more local Jewish burial site (in the 1840s the closest Jewish cemeteries were in Montreal and Buffalo, nearly a full day away by horse and buggy). Unfortunately, over the years many of the cemetery’s early stones, including the one for Joseph’s son, have toppled over and sunk into the ground so that they are no longer visible.

Due to space restrictions in the city, the cemetery was closed to new burials in the 1950s. Since then, the beautiful iron gates which lead to the property have rarely been open to anyone other than the property’s Christian caretaker and a thick cover of ivy on the gates have kept even the most curious Toronto resident from being able to sneak a peek. This year’s Doors Open event marked the first time in decades that the cemetery was open to the general public and as such generated quite a large interest from the public (a mention in both the Globe and Mail and the National Post as a site of special interest didn’t hurt either, I’d assume).

While a number of Doors Open sites allow the visitor to wander freely or provide them with a pamphlet of some sort, Ellen Scheinberg, Director of the OJA and one of my internship coordinators this summer, instead chose to organize a 15 minute tour of the site for visitors. This allowed members of the public to interact directly with or ask questions of knowledgeable volunteers and members of Toronto’s Jewish Community, including a representative of the Holy Blossom Synagogue (which is responsible for the site) and Susan Brown, a local artist and art teacher who was able to speak about the significance and history of the carvings on the headstones.

Throughout the day, my main role was to act as a gopher, helping to register visitors to the site, have them sign legal waivers before they could enter the cemetery and then organize them into manageable tour groups for the guides.

Although my role was a supporting one, it was very interesting to observe and talk to members of the public that came to this event. Through this, I was able to get a feel for the type of people in Toronto that are interested in local history and heritage, especially with that which is specific to the city’s Jewish community. As well, I was able to sit back and notice the types of people who were missing from the cross-section of visitors (mainly twenty-somethings) and think about ways for the Ontario Jewish Archives to engage this section of the population in future events. Finally, the event also exposed me to the realities of running this type of initiative and all of the work that most go into it months in advance in order to ensure that it is successful.

It was a long, scorching hot day, but a fun one nonetheless. I definitely can’t wait to do it again next year!

Facets of Fame

2010-05-27T13:00:00.000-07:00

During my meeting with Ellen Scheinberg of the Ontario Jewish Archives this week, she suggested that I may be interested in seeing the Facets of Fame: Portraits of Toronto Photographer Al Gilbert photography exhibit which is currently on display at The Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market on Lower Jarvis Street, Toronto. Although the exhibit runs until September 11th, 2010, Ellen suggested that I visit it as soon as possible as a way to expose myself to one of the OJA’s most recent projects and to see first-hand one of the various ways that the archive is seeking to engage the public in unexpected public spaces.

Although what I know about the art of photography could barely fill a thimble, I’ve always admired the work of those who have the ability to look at people, places and things and capture them on film in unique and bold ways. Since my mother also had the day off work, I suggested that she come with me and off we went to see the work of one of the country’s most respected portrait photographers.

The exhibit begins – quite suitably, I think – with the work of Al Gilbert’s father, Nathan, the man who first exposed Al to the world of photograph and taught him the basics of the trade in their family’s photography studio during the 1920s and 1930s. Nathan’s work included dozens of clever family photographs of bar mitzvahs, birthdays, vacations, holidays and everyday life that all seemed just a little bit cheeky.

My favourite photo from this section of the exhibit would have to be the photo in which Nathan layered a photo of himself over a photo of President John F. Kennedy to make it appear as though the two men were having a discussion in the Oval Office. In the days of Adobe Photoshop, this might not seem like a big deal, but when you think about all the work that had to go into creating this absolutely seamless image in the 1920s, the outcome is astounding.

The majority of the exhibit, however, featured more than 75 portraits taken by Al Gilbert over the course of his career and was broken down into sections which included luminaries from Toronto’s Jewish and non-Jewish communities (e.g. Michael Lee-Chin, Mel Lastman, Ed Mirvish, etc.), as well as figures of national and international importance (e.g. Pope John Paul II, Frank Sinatra, Prime Minister Diefenbaker and others). And, under each photograph, the OJA has mounted not only a description of the accomplishments of the person in the photo, but also the techniques and equipment which Mr. Gilbert used to achieve the final product, a two-pronged tactic which, in my opinion, gives the exhibit more depth and appeal to a wider audience than if they had only included one type of detail or the other.

Although a number of photos made me stop and take an extra moment to fully admire them, there was a small handful that simply gripped me by the throat and demanded my attention as true works of art. For example, the black and white photo of jazz legend Oscar Peterson, which was used for the brochure of the exhibit’s launch event was breathtaking. The lighting and composition were simple enough, even classic, but there was something about the way that Gilbert captured every crack in the man’s skin and the light in his eyes that moved me. Another favourite of mine was the one of Ed Mirvish taken in one of his theatres. Mirvish was wearing this really bold striped suit and a more subtly stripped tie in yellows and black and he contrasted amazingly with the pure red of the rest of the frame (the seats, walls and carpets were all the same shade of red, although patterned differently). It was definitely more playful than the Peterson image, but no less striking.

A few of the images (like that of Frank Sinatra and the Pope), I could have done without but I think that was because the rest of Gilbert’s photos were so amazing that I was absurdly let down when they were merely good. Also, I wasn’t always of fan of the photos in which he layered a dignitary overtop of a print of a place which had meaning to them (e.g. combining a photo of Mel Lastman with one of Mel Lastman Square at night or the bishop and his church), but I’m sure that says more about my personal aesthetic than Gilbert’s abilities as a photographer.

The exhibit is free and easy to get to. I highly recommend that anyone living in or visiting Toronto this summer drop by and enjoy the photographs before they disappear back into the archival holdings at the OJA.

Public History is Alive and Well in the Archives

2010-05-25T19:24:00.000-07:00

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I’ve always been enamored with museums. As a child my parents made sure to expose both my brother and I to as many museums as possible. And, whether these were traditional or living heritage, large or small, they were a staple of family vacations, day trips and parentally-supported school outings. Occasionally, my parents even managed to schedule museum visits for after games when we’d travel for soccer tournaments (they were sneaky like that). Most of the time, I loved wandering from room to room looking at artifacts and dioramas. And when I didn’t? Well, I still learned something. More importantly, I learned to appreciate the important role that museums play in caring for the history, heritage, culture and values of a place and/or a people.

Even with all that interest in museums, I had never given much thought to archives and the role that they play within a community. In fact, I’m almost ashamed to admit that the first time I ever stepped foot into an archive I was already in my fourth year of university. I certainly never envisioned myself – a scant 8 months since starting the Public History program at UWO – working in one archive and volunteering at another. But, this summer I’m doing both.

The main portion of my internship this summer will take place at the Sunnnybrook Archives (SBA) in Toronto where I’ll be an archives assistant to a graduate of UWO’s Public History program, Phil Gold.

The Sunnybrook Archives exists primarily to collect, organize, describe, make available and preserve records materials of historical, legal, and administrative value to Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. As the Archives Assistant, I’ll be working in all areas of the archives, including working first-hand with print and graphic records, and with medical artifacts and other college memorabilia. My primary duty will be to assist Phil with the arrangement and description of the collection (specifically the archive’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs Fonds) according to RAD standards in preparation for the submission of a fonds level description to ARCHAEION. It’ll probably be a tedious and exacting process, but one that I’ll learn a great deal about archival practices from.

Since my contract with Sunnybrook Archives is only part time, I’ll be making up the remaining hours of my internship by volunteering at the Ontario Jewish Archives working on a number of archival and public history projects. To begin with, I’ll be helping organize/work “front of house” activities at the archive’s Doors Open Toronto site this weekend. From there I’ll move onto doing an inventory and some digitization of the archival holdings belonging to R.H. McGregor Elementary School in Toronto in preparation for a more extensive school history section on their webpage and a display for the school’s entryway. I’ll also have a hand in a few smaller projects, including helping to organize the OJA’s summer tours, helping update one of the Holocaust Education Centre’s displays and working on a number of item level RAD-compliant descriptions and digitization of some of the archive’s photographic records.

There are two other major projects that I’ll be working on at the OJA this summer and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to have a hand in both of them. The first is a podcast to accompany the OJA’s Facets of Fame: Portraits by Toronto Photographer Al Gilbert display at the Market Gallery in the St. Lawrence Market (see Facets of Fame blog post). I’ll be responsible for setting up interviews with some of the artist’s subjects for inclusion in the podcast, scanning images from the exhibit and helping to create a script for the podcast (Look Ma, I’m writing for the public!). The second major project that I’ll be working on is the continuation of the OJA’s huge oral history project. The project aims to record the stories of WWII veterans and I’ll be responsible for scheduling interviews, conducting pre-interviews and accessioning the videos once they have been recorded.

The summer’s barely begun and already I’m feeling very lucky to have the opportunity to work with the Director of the Ontario Jewish Archives, Ellen Scheinberg, who has been kind enough to include me in so many of the institution’s public history projects. The wide variety of projects she has schedule for me to help on will surely broaden my exposure and practical hands-on experience with public history in the “real world.”

If I Had a Million Dollars... Camp X Artifacts Up For Sale

2010-04-10T18:30:00.000-07:00

The Camp X Exhibit at the Oshawa Airport is full of neat stuff: a dagger hidden in a lipstick case, a fountain pen that shoots poisonous gas and a revolver concealed in a hollowed out book, to list but a few items. As Toronto Star reporter, Carola Vyhnak, points out in her March 4th article, this is the stuff of fiction. In fact, it's exactly these type of gadgets that you might expect to read about in a James Bond novel.

This comparison between fact and fiction is hardly surprising when you consider that Bond author, Ian Fleming, spent part of WWII in Camp X, a spy training facility on the Oshawa-Whitby border near the shore of Lake Ontario.

The collection, which was compiled and largely owned by history buff Robert Stuart, has spent the past 33 years exhibited to the public, most recently in the Ontario Regiment building at the Oshawa Airport as part of the Robert Stuart Aeronautical Collection. Poorly advertised and rarely open, I only discovered the existence of this collection 3 or 4 years ago. Since then school, work, and a year spent in Korea has kept me from visiting the exhibit. And now, the opportunity may be lost to me forever - a pretty harsh lesson in "(s)he who hesitates" for an historian to learn.

On February 24th, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson (mentioned in my February post on the Battle of Bowmanville at Camp 30) contacted local papers after discovering that the entire collection of Camp X artifacts were poised for an internet auction block. Since then, a flurry of controversy has surrounded this usually obscure collection.

Since Stuart's death nearly seven years ago, the collection has been privately owned by his wife, Lois, and his daughter, Deidre, two women who are about to become responsible for selling off a significant piece of Durham Region's (and Canada's) rich wartime history "for personal reasons."

Like many private collections, the Camp X artifacts came together relatively organically over a period of several decades, with many of the pieces attained through private sales and auctions. Other items were accessioned into the collection through donations or long-term loans from veterans or the families of those that had worked at the Camp. Many of these donations and long-term loans were made in good faith in the form of a "gentleman's agreement" and a handshake between Mr. Stuart and the donor. Little, if any, paperwork was ever completed to outline the terms of these transactions.

Now, with the impending sale of the collection, a number of donors and family members have come forward to demand their family heirlooms back. As far as they were concerned, the items were on loan only so long as they were being displayed locally and in a respectful manner; they never intended for the Stuart family to profit off of their history and memories.

Deirdre Stuart has little sympathy for the people who donated to her father's collection. In an interview with the Toronto Star she was quoted as saying, “[i]f you didn’t put it in writing, you pretty much gave it to us... Like, hello? How stupid are people. We’ve had this museum for 33 years. It’s ours.”

Clearly, Ms. Stuart is no gentleman.

Although the loss of local history that would accompany the sale of this collection is immensely disturbing to me and it saddens me to say this, it is my understanding that the Stuart family is well within their legal rights to sell the artifacts however they see fit (provided that they adhere to all applicable laws concerning the sale of cultural artifacts). Public museums are legally restricted from selling artifacts unless they can provide extensive paper records proving their ownership of the item(s) (e.g. a receipt of purchase or a deed of gift). In instances where items are found in a collection but lack proper paperwork, these museums are legally required to keep and care for the artifacts for several decades before they may deaccession them. Unfortunately, private collections are not bound by the same standards. And, since theirs is a private museum, the Stuarts, in the absence of paperwork, have implicit legal right to items in their possession.

Thankfully, it at least seems as if the Canadian government isn't going to let this collection leave the country without a fight. As of March 20th, the Canadian Department of Heritage has "opened a dossier" on the artifacts and is looking into whether some of these items may be able to be protected from international sale under restrictions outlined in the Cultural Property Export and Import Act. For Canada's sake, let's hope this is so. Better yet, let's hope that a Canadian cultural institution (*cough* Canadian War Museum *cough*) steps up and buys the entire collection so that Ms. Stuart is not allowed to break it up and sell the unprotected items piece by piece.

On a local level, Hodgson and other concerned members of the community (including a number of local veterans from the aptly named Sir William Stephenson Branch of the Royal Canadian Legion) have stepped forward to coordinate fundraising efforts in order to save the collection. The Legion is currently accepting donations that will be used to purchase and house the collection permanently in Durham Region (an outcome that I selfishly find most favourable). If the campaign is successful, not only will the collection remain in Canada, but it will remain in Durham Region and on display to the public.

If you'd like to donate and ensure that the collection stays together and in Canada, you can do so by sending the Legion a cheque with "Save the Collection" in the memo section (see their website for more details). You may also want to follow this issue as it develops via the Save the Collection group on Facebook.

Sources by order of publication:

Whitby This Week - "Camp X artifacts up for sale"
The Toronto Star - "Historian fights to keep WWII spy-school collection in Canada"
--- "Veterans families angry over bid to sell wartime artifacts"
Canwest New Service - "Sale of historic espionage gear draws Ottawa's attention"
National Post - "Selling Secret History"

Visualization Tools Revisited

2010-04-10T15:34:00.000-07:00

Six months ago I used Wordle to create a visual representation of my blog (see October's Wordle Wordle Wordle). By looking at the word cloud of my labels that was generated by Wordle, it was easy to see that I wrote quite frequently about public history, digital history, UWO, museums, human rights and the Holocaust. None of that is a big surprise when you consider that I'm a student at UWO in the Public History MA Program and that I am taking courses which deal with public history, digital history and museums and that I have a strong interest in human rights issues and the Holocaust.

In that entry, I wondered what a similar visualization would look like in six months or a year. Would it change drastically and reflect new interests and experiences? Or, would it remain the same, reflecting a constant interest in certain topics?

As you can see by looking at the word cloud at the top of this blog post, the visualization has gotten considerably more complex and diverse over the last six months (I have added dozens of new labels to the cloud). However, I would argue that it still largely reflects the initial trends of my blog. The single exception to this relative continuity is the inclusion of new labels which show an increased awareness of and interest in topics relating to local history and heritage (who knew Durham Region had such fascinating history?!).

That's a mildly interesting observation to make, but so what? What can a visual representation of my blog tell you that a quick skim of my labels list cannot? Sadly, I'm afraid the answer is probably nothing.

In October I had a cautious optimism for the use of digital visualization tools as techniques to help with the data mining process. Now, I am thoroughly unconvinced as to their usefulness. It might take me 2 or 3 seconds longer to scroll through the alphabetized list of labels that I have used in my blog since its inception than it does to glance at word cluster like the one above, but it tells me exactly the same thing. In fact, scrolling the list of labels actually saves me considerable time when you consider that I had to first go to the Wordle website and input my data before I could create the word cloud in question. Also, I can't help but notice that the picture that was produced by the generator is now so crowded with new, low-level labels that it has become an eye strain to try and extract any but the most obvious data from it.

In my humble opinion, Wordle and similar word/tag cloud generators may create pretty pictures, but they are a bust as far as their usefulness to the study of history goes.

But what about other visualization tools? Surely I can't paint all tools with the same brush, can I? You wouldn't think so. The esteemed Dan Cohen certainly doesn't. He used different visualization technologies in his research to map whether Americans prayed or watched CNN after hearing about the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Cohen stands by the fact that it was only through mapping the results of his survey onto a satellite image of the USA provided by Google Earth that he was able to observe that people in rural areas of the United States were far more likely to pray after hearing of the attacks than they were to watch CNN. Conversely, people in urban areas were far more likely to turn to CNN for information and solace than they were to pray.

So it was with this conflicting ringing endorsement by Dan Cohen (digital history guru) and growing personal skepticism that I attended the Historical Geographic Information Systems (Historical GIS) lecture given several weeks ago by Don LaFreniere, a colleague from the Geography Department. Don is a huge fan of GIS and the objective of his lecture was three-fold:

1) To teach us the basics of navigating GIS software
2) To introduce us, as historians, to the potential applications of GIS programs to our research questions and future careers in public history
3) To explain how he is currently using GIS visualization tools in his research process

Extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic, Don did a fantastic job of patiently leading even the most technologically challenged of us through his tutorial. But even Don's enthusiasm couldn't convince me of the usefulness of visualization techniques. In order to get to the point of visualization Don and a team of undergraduates had to spend more than two years compiling a database of census materials from which they drew the information they mapped using the GIS software. For my money, it was the database that was truly the incredible feat, not the mapping we were able to do with the data points. Using the spreadsheets that he had created, we were able to search for specific criteria and filter the overall findings according to our desired specifications. At this point we were able to see all of the relevant details and make (in my opinion) the same observations that we were able to make after applying the visualization tools to the data set.

I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe, as Sara Sirianni suggests in her blog post about the workshop, visualization techniques are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Maybe.

For now I remain skeptical.

Fallout on the Farm: Blueprint for Survival No. 3

2010-04-10T11:38:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I came across this thin, yellow booklet on the shelf of a combination antique store/swap shop in Dunnville, Ontario, a small farming community on the banks of the Grand River where my father grew up. Crammed between thick coffee table books on gardening and brightly coloured romance novels, I almost didn't see it. What a shame that would have been! A few minutes later and $2.00 poorer, I was the proud owner of Blueprint for Survival No. 3: Fallout on the Farm (as opposed to Blueprint for Survival No. 1: Your Basement Fallout Shelter and Blueprint for Survival No. 2: Basement Fallout Shelter, a guide for use in the design of new homes).

Produced by the Canada Department of Agriculture at the request of the Emergency Measures Organization in 1961, this booklet is a wonderful encapsulation of early 1960s nuclear knowledge and fears. The book aims to answer several questions about how nuclear fallout will affect Canada's farming communities, including why farmers need to know about the dangers of nuclear fallout, how their crops and livestock may be affected by it, who will warn farmers of an impending nuclear attack, where they should find shelter and lastly, if it will be safe outside after fallout.

Reading it now, the whole document comes across as simplistic and naive. The general consensus of the pamphlet seems to be that in as little as 14 days after fallout, it will be safe to leave your shelter. But, if you have to leave your shelter before that to milk your cows or take care of your livestock, you can safely do so as long as they are in a barn. Just don't forget to wash all that nasty fallout off of your skin afterwards with soap and water! Also, don't worry, it's totally safe to slaughter and eat animals that were left outside during the fallout just as long as you don't use the bones or offal (because that's the only part of them that will retain radioactive materials, you know). And, even though you should be shielded by 12 inches of concrete (or 15 inches of brick or 18 inches of earth) during fallout, peas and beans will be safe to eat because only their pods will be contaminated. Riiiiiiiight.

Reading this booklet, I'm alternately amused and horrified. Knowing what we do now about the outcome of the Cold War and the effects of nuclear radiation and fallout, it's funny to look back and see how "quaint" the understanding of our parent's generation was. On the other hand, it's also incredibly frightening to think about how little they knew about a weapon that had such deadly potential.

I've never come across a booklet like this before or since and I'm constantly thankful for the stroke of luck that helped me find Fallout on the Farm that day in the swap shop. It never ceases to amaze me the kinds of insights an historian can gather when they are able to look firsthand at documents from the past.

Since I'm currently working on an essay for my Understanding Archives course about the Baker-Cox debates of 2001-2002, I found myself considering Fallout in a completely new way: What if I had never encountered the physical copy of this book? What if, to save shelf space, some librarian somewhere had microfilmed this booklet, destroying and discarding the original in the process? Would my experience with the document have been the same?

I'm not convinced that it would have. On the surface the material would have remained ostensibly the same as the physical copy. That is, unless the person doing the microfiliming had carelessly skipped a page or misaligned one so that it cut off the beginnings of each line. Sadly this is a common microfilming error and one that is usually not caught until several years later when some intrepid researcher needs that exact page. By then, the originals have often been destroyed or lost and there is little or no way to rectify the error.

Then there's the fact that microfilm is largely a black and white medium. Many tones of grey and all colour are lost during the microfilming process. In the case of Fallout, much of the greyscale in the sketches would probably have been lost, and thus their effectiveness as visual aids would have been irrevocably diminished.

Also, on a good day microfilm machines tend to make me feel slightly nauseous (something about the text whipping across the screen at high speeds). On a bad day, using the machine gives me a monster headache and makes me feel like I'm on the verge of a seizure. Also, the forward/reverse button on most of the machines are ridiculously finicky - I want to be able to spend my time researching the material I need, not fiddling with making it aligned, focused and readable.

I think, with all of these extraneous things going on, I'd have a more difficult time focusing on the actual document itself than if I were reading the original paper copy. This could potentially affect my observations and thus my conclusions about the source. It would most definitely affect the overall pleasure that I get from reading a primary document like Fallout on the Farm.

Admittedly I have yet to research the Cox half of the Baker-Cox debate, but right now, Baker has me sold. Saving shelf space is not worth the loss of history and aggravation that goes with microfilm.

[Update: While I continue to sympathize with Baker, my own views on the Baker-Cox debate have definitely become more firmly aligned with Cox after completing additional research on the topic.]

"To Infinity and Beyond!" (Or, "Houston, We Have a Problem")

2010-04-07T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest things about studying history is that there is literally a history for everything; if someone has been there, done that or invented whatever you’re interested in, it has a history. Sometimes the discovered past of individuals, events, inventions or movements can find a wide interest base in popular consciousness (e.g. the Titanic, the World Wars, 1960s counterculture, etc). Other times, a few hundred or a few thousand enthusiasts might come together to discuss their love of a particular subject (e.g. Civil War re-enactors, local historical societies or members of the steampunk sub-culture). And then there are those times when it seems like you are the only person in the whole world that appreciates the history of a certain thing...

Case in point:

A few years ago, my father introduced me to the Fisher Space Pen (pictured at the top right of this blog post). In his opinion, this is the greatest pen that has ever been invented. I’m serious. The way that my father loves this pen is akin to the way most parents love their children (except, come to think of it, I can hardly remember the last time my father praised me quite so effusively in front of complete strangers). Anyway, he carries his with him everywhere, never missing an opportunity to loan it to someone. Unfortunately, this also means that he never misses an opportunity to relate the pen’s virtues and its history to the user. Over the years this has been a constant source of embarrassment for me as he extolled the virtues of his Space Pen to everyone from waitresses to my best friend to our optometrist and the entire population of his waiting room.* His spiel usually goes a little something like this:

“Oh, you say your pen isn’t working? That’s a... shame.”

(At this point he gets a gleeful twinkle in his eye as he reaches inside his jacket pocket for the infamous pen.)

“Here, use mine. Neat, isn’t it? It’s a Space Pen. Seriously, it’s the only kind of pen that American astronauts have used in space since the Apollo missions. It’s amazing! It writes upside down, underwater and in -40°C temperatures!”

Now, my father (as a salesman) doesn’t spend inordinate amounts of time hanging upside down in his daily life. Nor does he scuba dive. Nor does he often travel to the Arctic Circle. Why he would need a pen that performs under all of these adverse conditions is simply beyond me.

I just didn’t get the appeal.

Of course, this all changed the day that my father gifted me with my very own Fisher Space Pen. On that day I held this small grey box with a picture of a space shuttle on it in my hands, read the accompanying brochure on the history of the pen, perused the historical facts on their website and was hooked. Now, every time someone asks to borrow a pen, I can’t just grab one from my pencil case at random and hand it over. No, now I deliberately choose to loan them my Space Pen so I have an excuse to launch into my very own spiel about the history of the pen. I’ve tried to refrain, but I just can’t help myself. Spreading my knowledge of the history of this tiny object has become a compulsion with me.

The moral of this post: Unless you’re really interested in the manufacturing history of a ballpoint pen, you might want to ask someone other than a member of the Caughell family the next time you need to borrow a pen.

* This statement may have been exaggerated for dramatic effect.

Note: The Fisher Space Pen is so impressive that there's even an entire episode of Seinfeld ("The Pen") devoted to its awesomeness.

Blurring the Lines Between Fact and Fiction: Can Historical Fiction be Unethical?

2010-03-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

If you've read my previous post on historical fiction, you know that I've long been a fan of the genre. Well, I may be more than a decade older now, but my taste in literature for pleasure reading has remained largely the same; I still read almost anything in the genre that I can get my hands on.

For example, I most recently completed Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, a novel about slavery, identity, power and self-determination in the early nineteenth century and found it a thoroughly enjoyable read right from the first page. Overall, I found Hill’s prose powerfully written and his main character both sympathetic and inspiring. I would strongly recommend this book to any lover of good fiction, historical or otherwise.

With Book of Negroes finished, my current novel of choice is Jenna Blum’s Those Who Save Us. On its most basic level, the book is about the lives of two women, a mother and a daughter, their relationship with one another, and the experiences which have shaped the way that they each view and interact with the world and each other. The narrative of the story bounces between the perspective of Anna, as a young Aryan girl living in Germany during the Second World War, and the present-day United States where her daughter, Trudy, is a professor of German History at an unnamed university somewhere in Minnesota.

The book’s dust jacket hails the novel as “a profound exploration of what we endure to survive and the legacy of shame,” a summary which I think is actually pretty accurate thus far (I’m only about half-way finished the book at this point). So far, I’m finding the plot engaging and the characters complicated and flawed enough to be interesting. I certainly look forward to reading each new chapter.

That said, I think that I would have been better off not reading the blurb about the author at the back of the novel before finishing the book. Blum’s author bio states “Jenna Blum is of German and Jewish decent. She worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years, interviewing Holocaust survivors. She currently teaches at Boston University and runs fiction workshops for Grub Street Writers.” That’s it, just three run-of-the-mill sentences that pack a lot of punch. In fact, these seemingly innocent details about Ms. Blum’s background are enough to make me, as a student of history, more than a little uneasy.

I’m sure that the details about her heritage were strategically included to legitimize her role as a storyteller whose work focuses on Second World War Era Germany and German history and culture more generally. Some of the issues dealt with by the characters in this book are of a sensitive nature and it’s understandable that the publisher would have wanted to underline Blum’s “authentic” voice as much as possible so that the readers would have confidence in Blum’s ability to speak for her characters. That’s fine. That’s not the part I find disturbing.

What does get under my skin is the fact that Ms. Blum worked for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation for four years before writing this book. This experience, combined with mentioning her current teaching position at Boston University, were undoubtedly her publisher’s way of placing Ms. Blum within academia, a position which many may perceive as giving her more “authority” over the historical aspects of the novel than the majority of the public reading it. A good thought, but Ms. Blum’s association with the Shoah Foundation ultimately leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Fair or not, I find myself wondering exactly when Ms. Blum began conceptualizing her novel and how/if she went about conducting background research for it. For instance, I can’t help but wonder how many of the details of her interviews with Holocaust survivors made it into this novel either consciously or unconsciously. Or, if these survivors had any inkling when they took part in interviews with Ms. Blum how some of their most painful memories might be used beyond the agreed upon Shoah Foundation oral history projects.

Like I said above, it might not be fair of me to question Ms. Blum’s integrity like this without any concrete evidence, but I feel I that have to acknowledge at least the possibility for the exploitation of Holocaust survivors to occur when an historian’s academic work is also reflected in their works of fiction. It all seems just a little unethical to me.

Too Rich For My Blood

2010-03-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

In September 2009, our Public History class was introduced to Adam Crymble of NiCHE (Network in Canadian History & Environment), Eve Duchesne of EcoKids and the major group project that we would be working on over the course of the upcoming year: that is, conceptualizing, researching, planning and completing several environmental history lesson plans which would be compliant with the Ontario elementary school curriculum and fit for online display in the teacher's section of the EcoKids website. The idea was to create engaging, informative, interactive and historically nuanced lessons plans that took into consideration both multiple intelligences and different learning styles.

For our part of the project, Shelagh Staunton, Tim O'Grady and I chose to focus our efforts on creating a lesson plan about Samuel de Champlain's contact with the Hurons for the 6th grade Social Science unit on First Nation Peoples and Early European Explorers. It has taken us seven months of blood, sweat and tears, but I think the end result is that our group has put together a pedagogically sound lesson plan for teachers which is engaging for students and accomplishes the stated goals of both of our clients.

But, with just over two weeks until the final project deadline, our group is struggling to put together the copyright permissions for the images that we need to supplement the written materials of our lesson plan. Our difficulties with this aspect of the project are two-fold: 1) since the copyrights for our desired visual materials are held by third-party cultural institutions we are at the mercy of their schedules (which is not nearly as pressing as ours, it seems) and 2) some of the best images are prohibitively expensive and we're being forced to seek cheaper and somewhat less authentic alternatives, a solution we feel has the potential to compromise the integrity of our end project.

Although difficulty #1 is frustrating, it's also understandable - archives and museums are busy, chronically understaffed institutions which likely have more pressing in-house concerns to attend to than completing our image requests. Difficulty #2, however, is another matter entirely.

In order to give our students as much exposure to primary sources as possible, we decided to utilize a large number of photographs of Huron artifacts from the Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Unfortunately, when it came time to get copyright permissions for these items we hit a rather large brick wall: the price of purchasing the permission to show a single image that had already been digitized on a website was $50/yr (or $200 for 5 years). That's INSANE! Since our group originally wanted to use 6 or 7 photographs from the Museum on the EcoKids website indefinitely, that meant that our copyright costs were going to be upwards of $1500 for the first five years alone! That's highway robbery!

Because EcoKids is a not-for-profit organization and we are intending to use the materials for educational purposes, our group approached the Museum of Civilization again a few weeks ago, explaining the situation to them and received a second quote -- this time they were willing to 1/2 their original price, but even that is way out of our budget.

Now we are being forced to seek alternatives to these images, a situation which has the potential to put the integrity of our lesson plan at risk.

What I don't understand is how a national museum, like the Museum of Civilization, can get away with charging a non-profit, educational organization such ridiculously high fees for using images from their collection. Aren't two of the main goals of any museum to educate and serve their public? And aren't the teachers and students who use the EcoKids website considered part of the Museum's "public"? Therefore, shouldn't the rights to these images be more realistically attainable to these sectors of the public?

I'm not saying that the Museum should just give away its copyright permissions. I understand that there were some original costs incurred by the museum in order to photograph these artifacts and a small subsequent cost to host them on the museum's website. But these costs are minuscule compared to the cost of using a single image for a year at the Museum's regular price.

Somehow that just doesn't seem fair.

The Making of a History Nerd: Historical Fiction for the Burgeoning "Buff"

2010-03-18T17:06:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember, I have been a voracious reader. As a child I read almost anything I could get my hands on, but my favourite was always historical fiction. I can remember many a trip to the library where as soon as I had opened the library's heavy glass doors and stepped onto their truly hideous green astro turf-like carpet, I would make a beeline for the Young Adult section, skimming titles until I had discovered every last book on a historical topic or time period that I could find. In fact, my appetite for historical fiction was so great that it didn't take me long to read nearly every book of this type owned by the Whitby Public Library. (When this happened, I just begged my parents to take me to Oshawa so that I could borrow the books out of their libraries as well.)

Taking a page from previous Public History bloggers Jenna Leifso and Sophie Malek, I wanted to share with you a few of my favourite examples of historical fiction written for Young Adults.

1) Kit Pearson's Guests of War Trilogy (The Sky is Falling, Looking at the Moon, and The Lights Go On Again): It's been well over a decade since I last read these books, but something about this trilogy has stayed with me. The books are set during the tumultuous years of the Second World War and follow the lives of two English children (Norah and her younger brother, Gavin) who are forced by their parents to evacuate their country and move to Canada for the duration of the war. Centering on the coming of age of a female protagonist that was approximately my age when I first read the books and set at least partially in my own country during the historical time period that I have always been most interested in, it is no wonder these books quickly became some of my favourites.

2) Karleen Bradford's The Nine Days Queen: Sophie was a fan, and so was I. This book tells the story of Lady Jane Grey, a young woman who was a reluctant pawn in a chess game played by more powerful men than her. Set in Tudor England, Jane Grey becomes the Queen of England for only nine days before she is dethroned by Mary I and shut away in the Tower of London. If I recall correctly, this was the first book to introduce me to Henry VIII, his wives, and the ensuing struggle between Mary I and Elizabeth I and I have been hooked ever since. In fact, I took a course in 4th year undergrad on Queen Elizabeth I's court. Although a number of other more significant factors played into that decision, my interest in the topic of the English courts probably had some of its roots in my reading of this book.

3) Tie - Ann Rinaldi's A Break With Charity and Arthur Miller's The Crucible: After exhausting my library's WWII historical fiction, I moved on to many other books which prominently featured young female characters. A Break With Charity was my first exposure to the subject of the Salem Witch Trials, a topic which has interested me ever since, inspiring me to read more detailed and accurate historical monographs and to write university level papers on the Salem "witch craze".

It is no secret that traditional history - that which deals with topics such as war, conflict, monarchy and religion - often focuses on old, white men, either as the subject of the piece or as its storyteller. Conversely, historical fiction for young adults - especially books which are geared at younger females - tend to be written by women and focus on young, female characters. They often relate the experiences of middle or lower class families, resulting in a story which is just as likely to feature an extraordinary female at the centre of a conflict or controversy as they are to feature an unnamed witness to the event (an "any woman," if you will). In a lot of cases, these books were my first taste of social history and they had the ability to show me at a very young age the potential that the study of history had.

It might also be interesting to note that reading these books, combined with my subsequent interest in history, has led me to visit both London, England and Salem, Massachusetts to see first-hand the places described in the novels I read as a child. Speaking from first-hand experience, I fully believe that historical fiction has the ability to expose children to history if not in an always accurate or nuanced way, a meaningful way nonetheless. Obviously my understanding of these historical events which I originally obtained through reading these books has been refined, expanded and/or corrected in the years that followed, but the fact remains that this early exposure was critical to the development of my interest in the discipline.

The Future of Publishing

2010-03-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

Since September, my peers and I in the Public History program have spent considerable time contemplating the future of publishing in a digital world. Prompted by discussions about Kindles and other e-book readers in our Digital History course, we have often wondered what increased digital technologies means for the historical monograph specifically, and for the book and printed publishing more generally. Some of us (myself, included) have gushed over the ease and portability of e-book readers, but few of us, as staunch lovers of history and the written word, are ready to see printed books phased out entirely any time soon.

Although they aren't ready to do away with hard-copy books just yet, the publishing industry has clearly come on board where electronic publishing is concerned, especially when it comes to hooking younger audiences who may never have known a world without the Internet. In fact, the management team at U.K. educational publisher Dorling Kindersley has used digital media to reach out to students born in the digital era and encourage their love of reading, however they might prefer to consume it.

Watch their ad below:

The medium, the message and the method of delivery are all spot on. Pretty clever, eh?

A House on Talbot Street

2010-02-07T19:39:00.001-08:00

Since our historic homes project officially came to a close last week with the installation of the exhibit for ARCC, I thought I would also include my 250-word summary about my property (585 Talbot Street) here as yet another example of how the Public History MA Program at UWO is preparing us to write for the public. It wasn't easy to get 2500 words of research notes into a 250 word summary. I definitely had to leave out salient details in order to create a cohesive blurb, but I think the final product works. You be the judge.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

Built in 1877, 585 Talbot St. became the family home of Laurence Gibson. A successful entrepreneur, Gibson, along with William Yates, was the proprietor of the London Machine Tool Company (est. 1873) which manufactured engines and iron-working tools for machinists, boiler makers and brass finishers. At its peak, the London Machine Tool Company employed between forty to fifty people, making it a significant local employer. In addition to his work as a manufacturer, Gibson also worked as an accountant, an insurance agent and a manager of the Huron & Erie Loan and Savings Company during his lifetime.

The centred gable style of the building at 585 Talbot St. represents a subtype of Italianate architecture which is typical of only 15 per cent of Italianate buildings. The simplicity of this design, combined with the white brick that is characteristic of many of London’s buildings, lends the structure a sense of understated elegance. Typical of the style, the building is largely cubic in shape, has a low-pitched roof with exaggerated eaves and tall windows with gently-rounded tops. Among the building’s most notable features are its intricately carved verge board, elaborate Gothic trusses and the cut stone work of the window crowns. Interestingly, the building only sparingly uses the most common feature of Italianate architecture, paired roof-brackets, to accentuate the top of its pilasters. Considered one of the City of London’s finest examples of the Italianate style of architecture, 585 Talbot St. is an integral part of the area’s aesthetic value and historic streetscape.

First Foray into Exhibit Design

2010-02-07T18:28:00.000-08:00

Recently our Public History class put the finishing touches on a major project by installing an exhibit in the Schweitzer Gallery, which is located in the entrance to the Archives and Research Collections Centre (ARCC) inside of the Weldon Library at UWO.

Beginning in September, each public history student was assigned a historic home in the Talbot/Ridout Street area. Our job was to research the historical, architectural and contextual values of the homes, evaluate them according to a numerical rating system designed by members of LACH and present both our findings and our recommendations for the homes at a LACH meeting in December. In addition, we were required to write a 250-word description of the home and its significance that could be used as the text for a walking tour booklet or for a heritage plaque. The culmination of this assignment, of course, was creating a exhibit for ARCC which would highlight our research on some of London's historic gems.

Having never worked in a museum or archive before, this was my first true foray into exhibit design; it was considerably more challenging and time consuming than I had expected it to be.
Thankfully, it was a total team effort and we managed to get the display installed without too many headaches.

Although I am pleased with the end result, there are definitely areas for improvement. For instance, we had far too much text and some of it was repetitive. This could have been solved by taking the time to edit the written portion of the exhibit more carefully. As well, what text we did have needed to be displayed in a larger font so that it would be easier for visitors to read. In our defense, however, our font choices were limited by the amount of text we had and the size of the displays cases that we were using. In such a limited space we could not have possibly gone larger without overwhelming the photographs and further cluttering the design. The aesthetics of the display were also hampered by the numbers, size and type of display stands available for our use (many were already being used in ARCC's other three display cases). Without them it was difficult to vary the height and depth of the mostly 2-dimensional materials.

In an ideal world, I also would have liked to include more items that highlighted how we used the resources that are available to the public at ARCC. From city directories to local histories, fire insurance plans, diaries, artwork, pamphlets, walking tour guides, architectural dictionaries, etc., our public history class relied heavily on both the resources cared for by ARCC and the expertise of their staff. Unfortunately we were once again hampered by issues of space. If we had been given a third case in which to display our work, I am confident that we could have followed through on this aspect more thoroughly.

Controversy Over Heritage Designation Grows

2010-02-04T13:24:00.000-08:00

2020 Lambs Road in Bowmanville is the site of the only battle of the Second World War to be fought on Canadian soil.

What would come to be known as the “Battle of Bowmanville” began on Thanksgiving weekend 1942, when hundreds of German prisoners of war at Camp 30 rioted in response to a federal government order that 100 of their highest-ranking officers be shackled. Using a variety of makeshift weapons including jam jars, baseball bats and hockey sticks, the German PoWs seized control of the camp, taking one guard hostage and barricading themselves in the main hall. The three-day standoff ended only after guards stormed the building, using fire hoses and tear gas to subdue the inmates.

While the Battle of Bowmanville isn’t likely to make it into many history books, historian Lynn Philip Hodgson believes Camp 30 to be a critical piece of Canada’s wartime history. Now in a state of disrepair, this collection of 18 buildings in rural Bowmanville is thought to be the world’s last remaining German prisoner of war camp. A small camp, it housed 880 of the Third Reich’s high-ranking officers during the Second World War. Hodgson believes that by containing these officers and denying Hitler some of his most strategic minds, Canada did its part to ensure Allied victory.

This belief has been at the centre of Hodgson’s ten-year campaign to preserve the site and to turn one of the buildings into a small museum.

Sadly, it has been an uphill battle. Over the years Hodgson has faced uncooperative property owners (Kaitlin Group, a housing development company), demolition plans, vandalism, property damage and, most recently, arson that gutted the camp’s administration building and damaged two others.

Fortunately, a new year has brought new progress. Sort of. In January, in the wake of intense backlash, Kaitlin Group offered the Municipality of Clarington a third of the property to develop as a park.

Victory was short-lived, however. A splinter group, led by Clarington councillor Charlie Trim, has emerged among preservationists. Trim believes that highlighting the war history of the site honours the German officers and could offend veterans living in the area. Instead, Trim wants the site to preserve the history of the training school for delinquent boys that occupied the site for the majority of the time from 1925-1979.

But this proposal is not without its own controversy. In fact, members of the community have stepped forward to remind Trim that the school has its own dark past of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that some may not wish to commemorate either.

It appears there is no easy solution for the preservationists in Durham Region. The Municipality of Clarington has the land. Now the question becomes, what are they going to do with it? Whose history should be privileged? Whose buried? Perhaps the answer lies in finding a compromise that would use the site to interpret all aspects of the area’s history.

Notes:

* This post was originally written as an assignment for my Public History class. The focus of the assignment was to learn how to write a 500 word article about history that would engage and inform a public audience. As it stands, this post represents a significantly altered second draft of my original article and includes corrections I made in response to the constructive feedback of Dr. Jonathan Vance and my peers in UWO’s Public History program.

* Although few people remember it, more than 37,000 German prisoners of war once forcibly called Canada ‘home.’ CBC Digital Archives has done a wonderful job of compiling both contemporary and subsequent news footage about German and Italian POWs here.

* To see what Time Magazine had to say about the Battle of Bowmanville at the time, see this article.

* Click here to see Hodgson's proposal for the site.

Creating a WWI Military Records Pathfinder

2010-02-03T19:52:00.000-08:00

Our assignment this week in Dr. Don Spanner's Understanding Archives course was to create a one page (double-sided) pathfinder that would be useful to genealogy enthusiasts searching for records of Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) soldiers who served during WWI (1914-1918). The assignment further stipulated that we must highlight only 3 relevant resources and that we must address finding the soldier's full military service record as well as his burial information (if relevant).

The assignment was an interesting one -- not only did it require me to familiarize myself with a number of wonderful archival and genealogical resources on the web, but it also forced me to work on the rather difficult and little utilized skill of technical writing. I had to focus my usually long-winded writing style in order to be clear, concise, orderly and informative. I must admit, writing for a technical purpose is much harder than it sounds. I definitely have a whole new appreciation for those that write How-To manuals after this assignment!

Although it's text heavy, I've decided to post the finished result of my assignment here in the hopes that it might be useful to someone out there in their search for information about their ancestors.

~ * ~ * ~ * ~

WWI Military Records Pathfinder

This genealogy pathfinder has been created to help make the search for the WWI military records of your loved ones easier. It will help you to understand where to look and what information is available in the archives and on the web concerning the military records of those who served as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) from 1914-1918.

A great place to begin any genealogical search is through the Canadian Genealogy Centre available via Library and Archives Canada (LAC) (their homepage can be found here).

For WWI military records you will want to consult the First World War topic within the Military section of this website. Here you will find the personnel records of more than 600,000 Canadians who enlisted and served as nurses, chaplains and soldiers during the Great War (1914-1918) as either part of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces or the Royal Newfoundland Regiment and Newfoundland Forestry Corps.

Under the section marked “Canadian Expeditionary Forces” click on the Soldiers of the First World War database and search by surname, given name(s) or regimental numbers. This database is indexed to the personnel records of CEF soldiers and contains copies of nearly 800,000 Attestation papers that have been digitized and made available for viewing online. Once you have located the desired soldier, you can access their full service record either on-site at LAC in Ottawa or by ordering a copy of the complete service file to be shipped to you (further details about both of these options can be found here).

According to the LAC website, a soldier’s full service record should include the following documents: his attestation paper, record of service, casualty form, discharge certificate, war service gratuity, hospital cards, medical history sheet, medical case sheet, temperature chart, last pay certificate, dental history sheet and medical examination certificate upon leaving the service. For help with interpreting these documents and others, please see the How To Read a Record of Service or Casualty Form, How to Read a Memorial Cross Card and How to Read a Medal Card guides available under the Canadian Expeditionary Force section of the website.

Once you have more information about your desired WWI soldier, you may want to revisit the Military section of the Canadian Genealogy Centre’s website and consult the sections on Military Medals, War Diaries and War Graves to check for applicable resources and/or details.

LAC Pathway Recap: Library and Archives Canada --> Canadian Genealogy Centre --> Military --> First World War --> (Canadian Expeditionary Force) Soldiers of the First World War --> Search

A second resource that you may wish to consult when looking for military records is Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) (their homepage came be found here). Under the VAC sidebar you will find a link for Canada Remembers which is a program that aims to “keep alive the achievements and sacrifices made by those who served Canada in times of war and peace.” This program provides a wealth of background information about various wars and battles Canada has been involved in, links to archival documents and film footage, and a number of VAC remembrance initiatives. Those links most applicable to the majority of genealogical searches are the Canadian Virtual War Memorial and the Books of Remembrance.

The Canada Virtual War Memorial contains information about the graves and memorials of 116,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders who lost their lives serving their country. This database is searchable by surname, given name(s), initials and/or year of death. A soldier’s record in the CVWM will provide information concerning their military service (service number, age, force, unit and division) and additional information including date of birth, family connections, hometown, a link to view the page on which they have been memorialized in the First World War Book of Remembrance (1914-1922), and any available digital images (including copies of obituaries, photographs, etc.). The CVWM also provides burial information where it is known (often courtesy of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission).

VAC Pathway Recap 1: Veterans Affairs Canada --> Canada Remembers --> The Canadian Virtual War Memorial --> Books of Remembrance --> First World War

VAC Pathway Recap 2: Veterans Affairs Canada --> Canada Remembers --> The Canadian Virtual War Memorial --> Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Finally, you may wish to consult the Canadian Military Heritage Project (homepage found here) which contains a large section on Canada in World War I, including a How to Find Your WWI Soldier pathfinder and a link to the CEF Nominal Rolls (which are available for viewing online or download via Archive.org). CEF Nominal Rolls are lists of soldiers that are part of a unit on a particular date (thus they are broken down by battalion and year). The first page of any nominal roll contains a list of officers, arranged in order of rank. Enlisted soldiers are listed on succeeding pages (arranged alphabetically). Nominal rolls show a soldier’s full name, rank, and regimental number. Most of the nominal rolls found on Archive.org can be viewed in a searchable PDF format.

The Canadian Military Heritage Project also contains links to the Courts-Martial of the First World War database (via LAC) and a large list of WWI databases available in partner with The Canadian Great War Homepage.

CMHP Pathway Recap 1: Canadian Military Heritage Project --> CEF Nominal Rolls --> Archive.org

CMHP Pathway Recap 2: Canadian Military Heritage Project --> (Find Military Ancestors) Courts-Martial of the First World War

CMH Project Pathway Recap 3: Canadian Military Heritage Project --> (Quick Links) The Canadian Great War Homepage

Where the Ontario Curriculum Meets Local History

2010-01-26T09:47:00.000-08:00

I recently read an interesting article by Ian Milligan on the ActiveHistory.ca website entitled “‘Local Effort Brings Our Past to Life’: Halifax Chronicle-Herald.” The article briefly related the efforts of a Nova Scotian historical association to put out a book of local history and donate it to children in grades 4, 5 and 6 in their area (a similar initiative was carried out by my local historical association several years ago). Using this act of charity as a springboard for discussion on the importance of local history, Milligan posed a number of thought-provoking questions in his article, the first of which being “[s]hould local history have a bigger role in history curriculums?”

The truth is, the role of local history in our curriculum (at least at the secondary level in Ontario) is already well-established. Although we currently only have one mandatory history credit in high school (don’t get me started -- that’s a rant for another day!), it does include a strand entitled “Communities: Local, National, and Global” which explicitly includes the study of local history. The larger description for this strand is as follows:

Communities may be viewed from local, regional, national, and world perspectives. Communities interact with one another through commerce, cultural exchanges, colonization, war, and international agreements. These interactions are the basis of today’s globally connected world. Over time, communities and their interactions have changed because of factors such as changing technologies and patterns of human migration. It is through the study of communities that students begin to understand who they are in time and place.

And, while the inclusion of local history is explicitly laid out in the Communities strand above, there are multitudes of opportunities for teachers to include it when covering the expectations in the other strands (Change and Continuity, Citizenship and Heritage, and Social, Economic, and Political Structures) as well.

Since teachers are legally bound to the curriculum as laid out by the Ontario government, it is not a matter of should but of must; it is part of our responsibility as secondary school teachers to include local history in our lesson plans in order to ensure that all curriculum expectations for the province are being met. The problem is that few teachers do and those that do often don’t do so effectively. Usually, as Milligan points out, the inclusion of local history within the majority of history courses is done on a purely superficial level, achieved by tossing a short anecdote or trivial fact into a larger discussion. Rarely is local history given centre stage.

Perhaps the question that we should really be asking is “how do we, as teachers and historians, go about incorporating local history in more meaningful ways within history curricula?”

I believe that one way to do this is for schools and teachers to allot time not only for discussing history on a local level with their students, but also showing it being done. I realize field trips are difficult and time consuming to organize, but as educators we should be exposing students to local archives, historical societies, historical architecture and historic sites and/or monuments. This type of exposure to local sources of history would fit seamlessly (I think) into the Historical Inquiry section of the curriculum and is therefore easily justifiable to administrators.

At the end of his post, Milligan wonders if local histories are only important when tied into the larger narrative of provincial or national history or, if by approaching local history in this way we are undermining its importance in the lives of everyday people. I think this is a valid concern. But, for now, in a time when high school teachers should be including local history in their lesson plans, but often get away with ignoring it altogether, I think we have to take the inclusion of the topic wherever we can, and build on that.

When You Look Into a Digital Abyss, Does It Also Look Into You?: A Look at Historical Abundance on the Internet

2009-12-19T11:56:00.002-08:00

It seems fitting that this blogging assignment on the abundance of materials available on the internet will be my last post of the semester. Assigned in September, it’s taken me nearly four months to get past more than a sketchy outline of what I wanted to discuss in this post. It’s not through lack of trying though – I’ve probably sat down at my computer to write it more than a half dozen times only to find myself quickly distracted by an errant thought or query which led me to an internet search for information which led me to a hyperlink for a related topic which led me to either another hyperlink or another question and so on and so on until the time that I’d set aside for writing that day had run out.

Over the course of the semester I have likened this process of traveling from hyperlink to hyperlink to that of Alice falling down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – you never know what weird and wonderful things you’ll see during your trip, nor do you end up quite where you expected to when all is said and done. I’m not complaining; I’ve come across hundreds of amazing websites, useful tools, interesting articles and countless pieces of fascinating information this way. In truth, I think that my education and knowledge base are probably significantly broader as a result.

But this “infinite archive,” [1] as the internet has been described in recent years, is something of a double-edged sword, especially for academic and public historians. In the words of Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig [2]:

The digital era seems likely to confront historians—who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past—with a new “problem” of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form, seems like an incredible opportunity and gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in the mouth... (2005)

As Cohen and Rosenzweig point out, in the past historians had to build their craft on the sometimes tenuous threads of the surviving evidence, a harsh reality which certainly restricted historical research. I also think that the caveat “that they could get their hands on” needs to be added to the aforementioned quote. Historical records and artifacts did not rest in a single, central and easily accessible location. As a result, historical research was often regional, not necessarily in terms of topic but in terms of sources used to support the arguments of historians. It’s not unreasonable to think that historians in the past could become acquainted with all of the materials available to them on their subject in their area and still be missing that critical document or artifact that had the potential to either cement or refute their claims.

Thankfully, these constraints of time and distance have largely been removed by improvements in technology. With the growth of the internet and the sheer abundance of information that is now available online, academics in even the most remote regions of the world suddenly have access to primary and secondary sources they may have previously been unaware even existed. For instance, the internet and massive digitization efforts have made it possible for students of history, like our own Megan Arnott, to be able to research and write on the Medieval Era without ever having to leave her home in Canada. Further, through email, chat rooms, Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and any other number of social networking tools, Megan (and historians, in general) are better equipped than ever to quickly and easily communicate and collaborate with colleagues around the world.

Unfortunately, this is where the “‘problem’ of abundance” that Cohen and Rosenzweig speak of comes in. Those same digitization efforts that seem amazing at the outset do have their drawbacks – even as early as 1996, the internet had become “a sprawling megalopolis that no one person could fully explore” [3]. With thousands, if not tens of thousands of new websites added to the internet each day, how does an historian keep up?

The short answer is, we can’t. Instead, we must do as Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest and work, as historians in concert with computer programmers, website designers, researchers, publishers, museum curators, librarians and archivists to create “sophisticated statistical and data mining tools to do some of the looking” for us [2]. And, while the internet currently acts as an amazing archive of human record, no singular database has yet been created in which all historical records within it are stored. Because of this, I believe that it is the job of public historians to support the creation and use of these data mining tools and smaller databases in order to help make as much of the digital record as possible both knowable and useful to academics and the public alike.

Another issue that must be considered in connection with the growing abundance of historical sources on the internet is that of authority within the study of humanities and social sciences. As we discussed in class earlier in the semester, while the constraints of time, distance and availability no doubt frustrated historians in the past, they also helped to make the professionalization of history what it is today. For instance, with the scarcity of information came a tight control on existing intellectual materials; museums, archives, and libraries, especially those housing extremely rare items, were often restricted to only the most respected historians in the field (and largely only those associated with a trusted institution). This resulted in the control of scholarship resting in the hands of the few. It likely also served to privilege certain interpretations of historical events.

But one of the more amazing “gifts” to come out of the abundance of materials on the internet is the growth of democratization of the historical process. As more items that were previously inaccessible to the general public are digitized and compiled in databases like the Internet Archive, more grassroots historians are popping up each day. They read, research and comment on what they see and learn, adding a unique perspective and voice to literature on a variety of historical topics. They now have not only the ability to share their interpretations of historical events, but now they also have the primary and secondary sources to support it.

Don’t get me wrong, even the internet hasn’t been able to overcome the entrenched intellectual hierarchy which privileges the contributions made to the field by professional scholars in universities and other elite institutions [3]. I’m not even arguing that it necessarily should. After all, academic historians have spent years training in proper research methodology and historiography. But neither should the amateur historian be dismissed out of hand. As someone who is untrained in this type of research, I believe that there is a lot that historians can learn from these amateurs about how those outside of the ivory tower interact with history, what they need and want from it, and perhaps where academic research needs to go in order to satisfy the interests of the wider public.

And that’s where I believe public historians come in. I think the task now falls to us to mediate between the two groups (the public and the academics) in order to ensure that the contributions of both sides are acknowledged, valued and made accessible to the other.

Sources:

[1] Turkel, William J. Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). [Weblog.]

[2] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Web of lies? Historical knowledge on the Internet,” First Monday, Volume 10, Number 12 - 5 December 2005, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1299/1219.

[3] Cohen, Daniel and Roy Rosenzweig, “Exploring the History Web,” Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting to Past on the Web, http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/exploring/1.php.

Reflections on a Semester of Digital History

2009-12-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

Growing up, whenever I had a problem with the computer, I would go to my big brother and ask him for help. Far more tech savvy than I, Dave (who later went to school for computer programming) usually had the answer or at least an idea of how to go about finding it. However, in the way of big brothers, he also quickly lost patience in my constant requests for help and eventually resorted to pointing at the DOS manual every time I asked him a question and telling me to figure it out for myself. At 12, 15 and even 18 years-old, I stubbornly refused to go anywhere near those 1000+ pages of incomprehensibly techno-babble. That’s likely how I ended up in the Public History program at UWO faced with a course in Digital History, only passably competent with computers and the internet and with not the slightest idea of how either of them really worked. More importantly, nor did I have the first clue about how I could make either of them work for me in my future career(s) in public history and teaching.

Fortunately, over the course of the semester my understanding of and competence with digital tools has increased enormously. As has my understanding of how these tools can and should be used by academics and public historians to inform and improve upon the practice of history. Through readings, assignments and class discussion, I have had the opportunity to learn skills such as HTML, CSS, website design, image manipulation, data mining, visualization techniques and digital mapping skills. I have reconnected with my love of blogging and resigned myself to using social networking tools (like Twitter) as a method of staying connected with peers and colleagues and as a way to quickly access and/or share information about developments being made in the field. I’ve learned more about copyright than I probably ever needed to know and took part in conversations about the merits of open versus closed sources, augmented versus virtual realities, web 2.0 tools, crowd sourcing, mashups, the Deep Web and dozens of other topics that I didn’t even know existed before I took this course.

But learning is rarely a linear or simple process and along the way I encountered my share of frustration with the course material. Some of what I read flat-out remained outside of my grasp of understanding (like those pesky APIs I just couldn’t visualize). Or, like Braden, some of what I thought I had grasped through readings proved fleeting as I listened to my peers discuss what they had taken away from this or that author’s work. Still, just being exposed to some of that material was learning enough... for now.

Of course, my most constant frustration during the semester was the roadblocks I always seemed to hit when working with the digital tools for one of our mini assignments on the basics of digital history. Even on those tasks that seemed simple at the outset, I knew that there was something there, lurking, lying in wait to trip me up the instant I got smug and thought I had it nailed. But, while understanding why historians should use something is great, actually being able to apply that understanding to the manipulation of the tools for the betterment of the field, is critical. This is why, even though several of these assignments made me want to join Shelagh in throwing my laptop across the room, I applied a considerable amount of what I like to think of as plucky “stickwithitness” (“stickwithitness” being the homely cousin of “truthiness”) and (usually) came out with something concrete to show for my efforts.

Except for this one time...

For good or for bad, I often used writing or editing posts for this blog as a way to put off doing other, more pressing work for one of my classes this semester. I’m not sure what assignment it was that I was putting off, but at the end of October, I suddenly decided that it was the perfect time (read: the worst possible time) to redesign my blog layout. Inspired by a fancier layout used by one of last year’s crop of PH students, Krista McCracken, I decided to hunt up a new, more artistic layout for my blog. The one I eventually settled on was Notepad Chaos (although, as a history nerd, the cheeky ‘40s pinup-inspired Hello Sailor was a close second).

Although it took me the better part of an evening to choose my desired layout (something fun yet reasonably professional), that was the easy part. After downloading the file, I realized that it was zipped and I didn’t have any software (like WinZip) on my computer with which to unzip it. I got that problem squared away and overcame several other minor hurdles to get the layout up on my blog only to discover that I wasn’t able to personalize the darn thing like I could with standard Blogger templates.

Before our Digital History course, this type of obstacle would have been it for me; I didn’t have the tools, knowledge or confidence with which to troubleshoot this type of problem. As a result, my past inclination would have been to throw in the towel and either accept the template as is or revert back to my original Blogger layout. However, after being introduced to the basics of HTML via the W3 School’s HTML Tutorial for our first webpage assignment, I was now able to take that shaky next step.

I viewed the page source for the layout and tried to scan it for code that looked familiar, altering pieces here and there and then previewing the results to see if I’d managed to change the design elements that I was hoping to. The process was one of painstakingly slow trial and error, but I eventually got the superficial stuff (font colours, sizes, date-stamps, etc.) the way I wanted it.

My satisfaction was short-lived, however. I loved the colourful background of the layout, but I wasn’t happy with the 3-Column design. Compared with the 2-Column design that I had previously been using in my blog, I found the new layout crowded and distracting to the reader. I wanted to get rid of that third column (both in terms of its content and the coloured square that differentiated that space from the rest of the page’s background). I also wanted to extend my text boxes so that I could write in lines that were more than 3 inches wide, thus visually shortening my often lengthy blog posts. I struggled with it for longer than I care to admit, fixing the text problem but remaining stumped by the background issue. Eventually I had to admit that I was euchred – I could slap some make-up on her, but I still didn’t have the skill to give the old broad a facelift.

(Note: I’m pretty sure that the piece that I needed to be able to manipulate was in an image file rather than in the HTML code and therefore out of my reach).

In the end, I decided to go back to a clean and simple Blogger template (which is not as easy a process as one might think). At one point I was forced to delete my blog in order to reinstate the original format and then spent the next forty nearly heart-stopping minutes unable to find the file and fearful that I had lost the entire thing. Thankfully, I eventually managed to recover it.

I didn’t relate the above anecdote in order to pat myself on the back but as an attempt to illustrate how useful I feel this Digital History course, especially its more hands on aspects, has been. In just under four months I was able to learn, understand and utilize basic principles of HTML and apply that knowledge within a new context with confidence. Even more surprisingly, I now had not only the skill but also the inclination to troubleshoot in areas I never would have thought myself capable of. It’s these more intangible outcomes that I know I will carry with me into future historical or educational endeavors. And the best (and perhaps most daunting) part is that this is only the beginning; even after taking this class, I have barely scratched the surface of what historians are capable of using the internet for.

One of the things that I will definitely take away from this course is the belief that the internet is not an unknowable and scary place that historians should avoid at all costs. In fact, those that retreat back into their cramped offices filled with dusty books and use computers only as a modernized typewriter on which to peck out their latest article, are doing themselves and their field a disservice. Thankfully, as time passes more and more historians seem to be embracing the internet and everything that one can do with it - the future is looking bright.

My Inner Feminist Hates Jane Austen

2009-12-17T15:10:00.000-08:00

I know that as historians we are not supposed to judge the past by the standards of the present, but in this instance, I just can’t help myself; the piece of my personality that’s a little bit feminist hates Jane Austen novels. I think her male characters could benefit from being socked in the jaw a time or two and I dislike her female characters enough to think that they might actually deserve the idiots they end up married to.

This week’s experiment in data mining reminded me of a paper I had to write for my first year English Literature course on the theme of love and marriage in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. After reading the novel, I ended up going through the book page-by-page and physically highlighting all of the sections pertaining to either love or marriage before I began to formulate my arguments and write my essay. Needless to say, it was an extremely tedious process and one I’m not eager to repeat.

But now it seems there’s a simpler way to gather the same information using a free, Canadian-made digital data mining tool. Using a plain text copy of the novel available on the Project Gutenberg website, I copied the URL into TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research)’s Word List and Concordance Tools, and ran three different word/pattern searches for “love,” “marriage” and “money.” I was interested in seeing how many instances of each word were present in the novel, if the words were used in relation to each other, where in the novel the majority of these three words were used, and if that would help me to come to any new conclusions about the themes of the novel.

The first thing I found out from using TAPoR’s Word List Tool was that the word “love” was used 91 times, “marriage” 66 times and “money” only 29 times in Pride and Prejudice. Considering that we know money was a major factor in the marriages of the period in which Jane Austen was writing, these results were somewhat surprising. I then used the Concordance Tool to tell me where and in what context each word was used. “Love” was used most often in the first third of the novel, with a small spike again towards the very end. “Marriage” spikes mildly towards the end of the first third of the book but is practically off the charts in the last quarter of the book when Austen is working to tie all of the relationships between the characters into neat little bows. And “money”, of course, is mentioned most often just as the discussions about marriage start to heat up.

My favourite aspect of the Concordance Tool is that although you can set the program to only return the specific words you are looking for, it also lets one look at their search results in terms of the context of the words, lines, sentences or paragraphs surrounding the specified words. Essentially the tool allows a historian to look at a text both quantitatively and qualitatively.

The one downfall, as Sara mentioned in her blog post about TAPoR, is that the returned search results lack page references. I understand that this is due to the fact that one can currently only use a plain text copy of a text with the TAPoR tools, but it does seem like an aspect of the program that could benefit from some improvements. This improvement would be especially beneficial for those in an academic environment who must be careful to adhere to copyright protections and site all of their sources in footnotes/endnotes and bibliographies.

Putting Out the Welcome Mat

2009-12-16T15:26:00.000-08:00

Several months ago I used Google Sites to create a professional webpage for myself and forgot to post the web address (http://sites.google.com/site/catherinecaughell/home). The information on the webpage is pretty bare bones at the moment and it's not exactly what I want stylistically, but it should provide a solid start for any similar effort I make in the future to expand my professional presence on the web.

However, should I decide to move forward on this project and correct some of the things about the website that I'm not happy with, I doubt that I'll be using Google Sites for it. Yes, the process this time around was easier than writing HTML code from scratch, but I found the whole website clunky to work with and their layout options were unforgivably boring. I also found their FAQ/Help section largely unhelpful. I'm usually pretty enthusiastic about Google and all of the techno gadgets that their people come up with, but this time I just found my whole interaction, as well as the end result, underwhelming.

Achieving World Domination One Website at a Time (Or, My Procrastination Destination)

2009-12-12T19:04:00.000-08:00

Look at the logo to the right of this sentence and say it with me, now (I know you know what I'm about to say): "Wikipedia is not a reliable source."

How many times have I heard that one from teachers, professors, the media, etc.? In fact, I think I may have even been guilty of saying this to my high school students once or twice during my teaching blocks (all the while feeling hypocritical because I typically use the website on a weekly - if not daily - basis to look up all kinds of trivial information). But the trouble with that attitude is, Wikipedia, as our class has discussed numerous times over the course of the semester, is a decent source of information depending on how one uses it and what they are using it for.

Interestingly, it seems like corporations and organizations might actually be beginning to buy into this new vision of Wikipedia as a "worthy" source of information.

Traditionally, the direction of hyperlinks has flowed from Wikipedia to outside websites like official homepages (for bands, businesses, etc.) or sites recognized as being authorities on some subject or other. But, as I was searching for upcoming concerts for the city of Toronto, I came across the homepage for the revival of Lilith Fair. The "About" section of this page offers a very brief history of the concert series and finishes with "For the complete history of Lilith Fair, please visit our page on Wikipedia" (hyperlinks emphasis is theirs). This is the first time that I've come across an official website that has linked from them to Wikipedia, essentially giving their stamp of approval to the content of the page that bears their name.

I checked to see if maybe the organizers of Lilith Fair had been able to arrange for their page to be closed to outside editors or if they had veto power over the information that was added, but that page doesn't appear to be different from any other page on the collaborative digital encyclopedia project. This development seems to suggest that those in charge of Lilith Fair have faith that the wisdom of crowds will prevail and any errant edits suggesting that Sarah MacLachlan is an alien (or other similar nonsense) will quickly be corrected.

Examples like this give me hope that as Wikipedia becomes more ingrained as part of our regular internet information-finding routine more trustworthy sources of information (e.g. historians or other experts in their fields) will feel compelled to come forward and participate as contributors in order to ensure the accuracy of the information on the site. And if this happens, maybe we can finally put a stop to those people that outright dismiss Wikipedia as a source, while at the same time improving its content.

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2009-12-10T08:03:00.000-08:00

I made a fantastic discovery yesterday while reading for Digital History (totally unrelated to the subject of the readings -- it's that "rabbit hole syndrome" again): Kindle 2 is now available in Canada!

A wireless reading device from Amazon, the newest incarnation of the Kindle has 3GB of space and can hold up to 1500 books. At the moment the Kindle Store on Amazon.ca has just over 300 000 books available for readers to choose from with more being added every day (a product review of the Kindle 2 written in Feb. 2009 indicated that Amazon had 230 000 titles available at that time. That means that more than 70 000 new titles have been added in just under 10 months! The thought of how many more titles could be available by this time next year is mindboggling.)

What makes the machine even more enticing is that you can download most books wirelessly in less than 60 seconds which makes it both quicker and potentially much more environmentally friendly than the other print-on-demand (POD) options (like Espresso) that are out there. And, unlike Espresso (which is still awesome despite being less than environmentally friendly), Kindles are now readily available to the public in more than 100 countries worldwide. Book prices aren't standardized, but the majority seem to sell for $9.99 which is significantly cheaper than the cost of a new hardcover, and even most paperbacks. Admittedly though, charging $9.99 for a book which no one has to print, package or ship in the traditional sense (and won't ever take up shelf space in a bookstore or warehouse somewhere) is uncomfortably close to highway robbery. On top of that, the $259.00 price tag for the reader makes me hesitate before buying a Kindle. I mean, a person can buy a LOT of paperbacks for $259.00.

That said, Kindle 2.0 has some pretty fun features. At the moment, Amazon is experimenting with a text-to-speech feature which allows any book for which the publishers have given them the audio rights to to be read aloud (in either a male or female voice, depending on what floats your boat). I'm not a fan of audio books, myself, but I can see where this feature might be useful in those situations in which you need your hands free to do other things (driving, cooking, etc). Plus, the Kindle 2 also lets you annotate the books that you’re reading, which is a pretty handy feature to have, especially for anyone using the reading device for work or school purposes. And I know it’s a relatively minor feature, but I also love the dedicated Wikipedia application; just think how helpful it is to have all of that information at your fingertips, wirelessly and without charge, at all times.

The Kindle 2 isn’t without its shortfalls. Customers have complained about numerous aspects of the product from its physical design and font sizes to the compatibility with various wireless service providers and the fact that you can’t arrange your books into organizational folders. Still, that last one can be partially resolved by tagging your books by genre or subject matter.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m still a confirmed “old school” bibliophile – I love the look, the feel, the smell of print books. I cringe when I see dog-eared pages and I’m not above buying a new copy of an old favourite that suffers from torn covers, yellowed pages or water damage. I don’t see the Kindle as signalling the death of the print book, but I do appreciate its portability and sheer storage size. I guess I see the Kindle as complimenting my collection of books, not as a replacement for them.

Note 1: I realize that this post came uncomfortably close to sounding like a cheesy infomercial, but can you really blame me? Kindle = awesome.

Note 2: I also realize that Kindle has competition in the form of a Sony product (the somewhat clumsily named Reader Digital Book). But, from what I can tell, it's currently an inferior product (holds less books, screen size is smaller, no annotation feature, etc.) so I feel safe to reiterate: Kindle = awesome.

Mapping Whitby's Past

2009-11-23T20:37:00.000-08:00

The last few days have been a whirlwind of microfiche, architectural terms and heritage priority ratings as I worked on the heritage designation research project that I am putting together for the London Advisory Committee on Heritage (LACH). As a reward for finishing my Building and Property Evaluation Sheets and my 250-word summary (suitable for use on a historic plaque or in a walking tour pamphlet), I decided to give myself a break from school work.

Of course, 10 minutes into the newest episode of Dexter, my curiosity got the best of me. How many heritage structures had been designated in my own town? How many others had been inventoried as being of historical, architectural or contextual value to my town but had not yet been designated? More importantly, what - if anything - was the Local Architectural Conservation Advisory Committee (LACAC) Heritage Whitby doing with this information?

The short answer to those questions is this: 55. Roughly 350. And not a whole heck of a lot.

Well, okay. Maybe I'm being a little harsh. LACAC Heritage Whitby does seem to be hard at work doing a number of things in the community. Its members help out with Doors Open Whitby, as well as host displays at a number of community events such as the Brooklin Spring Fair, County Town Carnival, Harbour Days, Harvest Festival, and Heritage Day. Right now they are working on a few more designations, monitoring renovations and alterations to houses that have already been designated and are doing their best to make sure that the planned extension of the 407 into Whitby doesn't irreparably destroy anything worth preserving.

What they don't seem to be doing is making a presence for themselves on the internet in a way that is user friendly or interactive.

One thing that the website does provide is a LACAC Self Guided Walking Tour. Unfortunately, while the PDF file provides the reader with a significant amount of information on local movers and shakers and buildings of historical or architectural importance, it's map leaves a lot to be desired. Faded, crowded and generally difficult to read, I found myself looking at it and thinking: there's got to be a better way.

Eager for an opportunity to experiment with Google Maps and Google Street View, I decided to take the information in LACAC's Heritage Structure Inventory on homes that had already been designated, combine that with the background information provided in the walking tour guide and plot all of this information on a Google Map.

As this was my first time working with Google Maps, I took a few minutes to watch the video tutorial and then I was off and running. The following map is the result of my efforts:

View Designated Heritage Structures - Whitby in a larger map

Although the program is so easy a literate toddler could handle it, I encountered some frustration when I realized that I had plotted a point on my map (416 Centre St. S) that was supposed to represent the location of the Centennial Building (c. 1799). Problem was, Google Maps had already integrated this landmark onto the map of my city... and placed it a full inch and a half away from my location marker. It's not a big deal, but I could see how it could be confusing to someone viewing the map. Also, since Google Street View is still in its infancy, it has a number of kinks to work out, especially in terms of accuracy. Oftentimes the program fails to accurately take you to the location of the marker you've clicked on. Other times it takes you to the correct location, but labels the building with an inaccurate address, once again confusing the viewer.

The final result is far from perfect, but I think that it's a pretty decent start. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Digitizing Books Faster Than the Speed of Copyright

2009-11-21T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Internet is arguably the greatest thing to happen to reading since the invention of the printing press (I can’t help myself – here I have to give credit to the Koreans, not the Germans, for their invention of the first metal printing press in 1377). While some detractors might rail against the fact that the Internet is changing the way that we read, it’s also true that efforts in digitization have forever changed (in a positive way) how we access that content.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last seven or eight years, you’re likely aware that websites such as Google Books, the Gutenberg Project and the Infinite Archive (to name but a prominent few) have been working to digitize millions of books that have entered the public domain since they were originally published. Our Digital History assignment for this week is to peruse the books section of the Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914, choose a half dozen books and attempt track down full online copies of them.

I decided to start my book search with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty: the autobiography of a horse and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. My reasons for starting with these books were two-fold: first, I’ve always had a soft spot for classic children’s literature. Secondly, I have a sneaking suspicion that anything in the Western canon that has had its copyright protection expire is going to be relatively easy to find since, according to Choudhury et al., the more widely quoted the text, the more likely it is that a well-transcribed digital version exists.

Sure enough, Google Books returned a search for “Black Beauty” in 0.17 seconds, with the top result a full-view of its 1922 printing. A search for Carroll’s book was similarly simple. The novel was found easily enough in Google Books (as plain text only), but out of curiosity I also typed it into Google’s search engine just to see what I could come up with. Oddly, the second search result (even before that on Google Books) was for a full copy at Literature.org and the third was the complete text as found on Project Gutenberg’s website.

Still within the Western canon, my next book was Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Originally published in 1850, it was a snap to find a copy of an 1869 printing on Google Books. Presumably with a classic such as this, it would be just as easy to find it on a multitude of other websites as well.

After Dickens I decided to branch out and try to find some of the more obscure titles that were advertised in the Eaton’s Catalogue. I’d never heard of Rosa N. Carey’s Not Like Other Girls before, so I tried to look it up on Wikipedia to see if I could find a basic plot outline and original publish date. No such luck. As far as I can tell, Wikipedia doesn’t have this information available. But apparently this book isn’t nearly as obscure as I thought it was as I was able to find copies in Google Books, the Internet Archive and Open Library.

My fifth book was Robinson’s Book of Conundrums, a book that claims it’s a “veritable dispenser of cheerfulness and dispeller of the blues.” As much as I wanted to find this book, I couldn’t have done it if my life depended on it. A number of similarly titled books come up Google Books, but none that fit exactly. The search was made a bit more difficult by the fact that I was only able to make out the author’s last name (Allen) in the Eaton’s catalogue. Alas, maybe my blues just weren’t meant to be dispelled.

My sixth and final foray into the world of online books was to look for Fred T. Hodgson’s Modern Carpentry: A Practical Manual (Vol. 2) (1917). Despite (or maybe because of) being reprinted several times, only a snippet view is available of this book on Google Books. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, had links to two full-length digital copies of the book, one more effective than the other. The first version was plain text only, something that puzzled me a bit considering that a carpentry book without pictures and diagrams seems a little counter intuitive. But I.A. came through in the end and linked me to a page-by-page scanned version of the original text, diagrams and pictures included.

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I love books. I like their look. I like their smell. Call me old-fashioned, but I like physically holding an object as I’m reading and being required to turn pages as I progress. In my day-to-day life I read a lot of content online, but I’m still somewhat of a sceptic when it comes to reading entire books using the Internet. It just doesn’t feel the same.

Having used the Google Books website before, I was relatively familiar with the site’s layout and the fact that their books are page-by-page scans where each page is presented individually to the reader who will then scroll through them “vertically” (for lack of a better word). With all of the money Google has to put into projects such as this, it isn’t surprising that their website has a slick, user-friendly design. That said, I still feel as if there is something missing from the reader’s experience when I view content in this format. Project Gutenberg’s “read online” option is positively stark in comparison to Google Books’ flashier site. It still allows you view pages individually, but its plain text approach is perhaps just a little too plain for my liking; it feels a little soulless.

Open Library, on the other hand, is positively “homey” in comparison to the other two sites. It doesn’t seem to have the same selection as some of the bigger websites in terms of number of titles available, but I enjoyed that they’ve designed their scans to look like real books. Readers get to see two pages presented side-by-side and animation gives the effect that you are flipping through the pages just as you would in a real book. On top of that you still get the visuals like wear and tear, stains on a page and writing in the margins that you would from any well-loved print book. This format was definitely friendlier to this user.

Still, it’s not the same.

And it’s because it’s not the same that I don’t think that ebooks and the digitization of existing books are going to make print books obsolete any time soon. They may eventually, but I doubt that it’s anything I need to be afraid of seeing in my lifetime. But who knows, as quickly as technology is moving, I may be eating my words by 2050. Of course, by then they’d be nothing more than words on a computer screen, so eating them might prove rather difficult.

Searching for Sophie Scholl Online is Like Trying to Find the Smallest Kid in a Game of Hide-and-Go-Seek

2009-11-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

For the purpose of our latest Digital History assignment, our class has been asked to write a brief introductory guide to some of the sources and tools that are available online about any subject of our choosing. The only stipulations are that the topic must be something we are personally passionate about, has a historical dimension and can be boiled down to just a handful of essential websites or methods of information trapping.

In honour of this year’s Holocaust Education Week theme of defiance and resistance, I decided to focus my Digital History assignment along the same lines. I understand, however, that there’s no possible way to concisely treat the topic of defiance and resistance without doing an injustice to the millions of people affected by the Holocaust and their tens of millions of acts of resistance, both large and small. Instead, I decided to narrow my focus to Sophie Scholl’s participation in the White Rose, a non-violent organization made up of students from the University of Munich and their philosophy professor, Kurt Huber. In brief, Sophie and her brother, Hans, were caught distributing anti-Nazi leaflets on university property. They, along with their friend, Christoph, were then arrested, tried for treason, found guilty and executed within a week. Soon after, most other members of the student group were arrested, tried and executed. Few survived the war.

Now that we have the basics, it’s time for the research:

Like any good student, I know that I’m not supposed to admit to using Wikipedia as my “go-to” source for quick introductory searches. But I do. Sue me. As long as the person using Wikipedia is aware of its downfalls and refrains from sourcing it (just as you would any other encyclopaedia), I think that it is a pretty good starting point, if for nothing else than for mining the footnotes and helping to develop stronger research questions. With that in mind, you may want to check out the Wikipedia pages for Sophie Scholl and/or The White Rose.

If this were any other research topic I would likely head from Wikipedia to Google to continue my search. However, since this particular search concerns personalities and organizations concerned with the Holocaust, I prefer to make the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website my next visit. Although I was disappointed in the lack of biographical information that the USHMM provided, I was pleased to see that they had included a list of print resources to consult at a later time, links to FAQs about the group, a short memoir by one of the surviving members (which I will get to in just a moment) and educational resources about resistance during the Holocaust. The general affect of the USHMM site is to give a reader an inclination as to how Sophie and the other members of the White Rose fit into the narrative of the Second World War as a whole.

The aforementioned memoir by one of the few surviving members of the group, Dr. George J. Wittenstein, is reached via The History Place website (specifically its Points of View section). This source offers the reader a unique opportunity to see the effect that time has had on the recollections of someone who was in the thick of things and somehow managed to escape with their life. In his memoir Wittenstein introduces many of the key members of the White Rose, discusses the leaflets written by Hans Scholl, Alex Schmorell and Kurt Huber, the trials and the aftermath. He also includes selections from the leaflets, as well as partial trial transcripts from their sentencings.

The Shoah Education Project is also a helpful site when looking for unique information on the White Rose that I haven’t found anywhere else on the web. That is, Dr. Elizabeth Kirkley Best provides a list of the members of the White Rose and what became of them. It is interesting to see from the chart the different ways that men and women were charged for their involvement in the same organization.

The last website that I would like to suggest anyone interested in Sophie Scholl or the White Rose organization look up is the one run by The Holocaust Research Project. This website has a number of pages devoted to Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, but its biggest triumph is that it has translations for all six leaflets in their archives. That one’s a gem.

In addition to my usual search techniques, I thought I would try a few different avenues this time around and see if any of them were effective for the purposes of this assignment. Turns out, they’re largely not.

The first thing I tried was imputing my search terms into Google Search and then attempting to use the Google Wonder Wheel to see what, if any, different search results it would lead me to. I use the word “attempt” because as soon as I would click on the Wonder Wheel option, Google would bounce me out of the specialty search and back onto their main page. Strike one.

Next I tried image searching via Flickr (instead of using my old, reliable Google Image Search). and found that this worked with mediocre results – I found some images, but it was inefficient, largely disorganized and the results were underwhelming in terms of numbers. In short, my results using Google Image Search were both faster and better. Strike two.

Out of sheer curiosity, I then tried Google Timelines for Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and the White Rose to see if I could unearth any new information. All of the timelines were sparse and largely unhelpful. Strike Two... and a half.

I also thought it might be neat to search for “Sophie Scholl” in different blog search engines, so I put the term into Google Blogs and into IceRocket’s blog section. I got very different hits on both search engines, but neither one was very satisfactory. With IceRocket I was bombarded with foreign language web pages. After I waded through the majority of those and through the Google Blogs results, I discover that the majority of people that are blogging about Sophie Scholl are doing so in response to the movie that was released in 2007 entitled Sophie Scholl: The Final Days. Strike three.

I suppose I can admit now that this movie was actually my introduction to Sophie Scholl. After watching the movie I wanted to know more about this girl who had acted so courageously in the face of such strong opposition and such dire consequences. But then, just as now, it was extremely difficult to find a substantial amount of information on this small group of German students and their most famous female member.

Additional sources you may be interested in:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/rose.html

http://roses-at-noon.blogspot.com/

http://www.raoulwallenberg.net/?en/holocaust/articles/sophie-scholl-white-rose.2786.htm

[Note: The picture seen above is of one of the White Rose monuments in Munich, Germany. This one is located in front of the Bavarian Government building and includes the text one one of the group's anti-war leaflets. The photo was taken in May 2007].

Tags: Sophie Scholl, The White Rose, WWII, Holocaust

Remembering the Shoah

2009-11-02T16:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday marked the beginning of the 29th Annual Holocaust Education Week in Toronto. From November 1st until November 11th, members of the Holocaust Centre of Toronto and affiliated Jewish organizations are hosting over 170 programs designed to honour the memory of those murdered in the Holocaust and to celebrate the survival of those who were not. The lectures, operas, films and exhibitions offer a perfect opportunity for the Jewish community to educate and promote understanding and remembrance of this tragic event among Jewish and non-Jewish community members alike.

While I think that the majority of the programming is worthwhile attending, I find myself especially drawn to the “My Personal Testimony” segments that run several times a day at different locations around the city. Each testimonial features a survivor of the Holocaust recounting their personal experiences from the war. The stories cover a range of experiences, from living in hiding, to fighting with the partisans in the forest, to struggling to survive in ghettos and concentration camps, during deportations and on death marches. They cover liberation, the aftermath and the decisions made by these survivors to immigrate to Canada.

I think that this is part of the magic of oral history; each testimonial is unique, just as each survivor is unique, and yet their accounts combine together to create a single narrative with common elements, themes and outcomes. During Holocaust Education Week dozens of people will come together to say, “This is who I am. This is what I did. This is what was done to me. This is how I survived. This is how I triumphed.” But what they will come away with is a communal narrative that says, “This is who we are. This is what we did. This is what was done to us. This is how we survived. This is how we triumphed.”

I believe that the survivors of the Holocaust, just as veterans of a war, have a responsibility to recount their stories for the generations that come after them. Their testimony is their opportunity to have a voice, to be understood, to understand. In return, we, as their audience, have the privilege of bearing witness to their stories, gaining insight from them and taking the next step to preserving their memory.

Museum London Goes Digital (and It's Not On The Web!)

2009-10-19T19:46:00.000-07:00

While working on my museum visit report for Museology I stumbled across a special event going on at Museum London this week that I thought might be of interest to some of you considering the content of our Digital History discussions over the past few weeks.

This Thursday, October 22nd at 7:30pm, Museum London is showing RiP! A Remix Manifesto as part of their film series.

The following is taken in its entirety from the Museum London website (although the hyperlink emphasis is my own):

"In RiP! A Remix Manifesto (Brett Gaylor, 2008, 86 min, 14+), Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and breaking down the wall between users and producers. The film's central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film."

Admission for the movie is free, but Brett Gaylor has also set up a pay-what-you-want approach for US residents at ripremix.com. It's nice to see that not only is he walking the walk, but he's talking the talk as far as open source and accessibility go.

"You're So Vain" - Google & the Vanity Search

2009-10-18T18:39:00.000-07:00

Tim's tweet last week about finding himself during a vanity search sparked my curiosity - what would a similar search for my own name reveal about me?

I should be upfront and tell you that this isn't my first vanity search. I vaguely remember typing my name into the Google search bar a few years ago to see if there were any other "Catherine Caughell"s out there. It turns out that there were only two, both born in the 1800s and they are long since deceased, so it's possible that I'm the only living person with this name.

Anyway, the only results I remember that came up pertaining to me was an OHASSTA reference and a broken link to a project that I did in my OAC chemistry class back in 2002. With that in mind, I was curious to see how my electronic footprint had changed over the last few years.

Here's a list of what comes up when you Google my name now:

A lesson plan containing a virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau that I created in my first teacher's block and posted on the OHASSTA (Ontario History and Social Sciences Teachers' Association) website two years ago.
My Blogger User Profile
Minutes from a GLTBQ Youth Advisory Committee Meeting that I attended as part of my extracurricular responsibilities during my first teaching block. The meeting was part of the research that the school's guidance counselor and myself were doing in consideration of setting up a GLTBQ support group in the high school.
Entries from my blog The Perpetual Student
Room and bus confirmation for a cultural excursion I went on in South Korea
Links to comments I posted on Dana and Tasha's blogs
my name on a list of PhD and MA students currently enrolled in the History Department at UWO
Description and results of an experiment I did in high school as part of an ISU
A thank you for a minor contribution I made to The Brock Press a few years ago

I was completely surprised by all of the new links my search turned up. In the last two years, my presence on the web (or at least in Google's search results) has skyrocketed. Instead of only a few small references buried underneath a mile-long list of unrelated 'Catherine' or 'Caughell' results, I am now the top search result for my name. And thankfully, my increased exposure didn't come about as a result of being tagged in dozens of embarassing Facebook photos; the majority of them are evidence of the electronic footprint that I've been making professionally over the last few years, something that I'd be happy for any employer to see. I look forward to all the ways that the rest of our public history year will allow me to continue to make my mark on the world wide web.

As a side note, it's also interesting to see Google search results at work. Three different types of results came up attached to my blog - my user profile, example blog posts and comments that I have left on other people's blogs. I'm sure that all of these results were broken down into separate elements and pushed forward because Blogger is powered by Google and I used the Google engine for my search. (Running a similar search in the Yahoo! engine, the only blog result that comes up is the main page, itself.)

Wordle Wordle Wordle

2009-10-14T18:30:00.000-07:00

It's amazing what you can find and/or learn when you're surfing the web on a whim rather than as a means to an end.

Sandra's mention of Twittersheep today in Digital History got me thinking about Wordle, a similar tool that I discovered a few months ago. Like other word/tag cloud generators, Wordle takes any given text (from a website, a blog or a list you input) and uses it to create a colourful and attractive visual design. The program uses font sizes and colour to show you those words that are used most frequently in the text. Once the inital generation of the image has been done, most programs will allow the user to tweak colour schemes, add or delete words, fiddle with the layout (presenting the words vertically, horizontally, both, or placed randomly), etc. Pretty neat idea, right?

Wanting an excuse to play with this technology, I decided to use the labels that I had attached to my blog entries so that I could see what a more visual representation of The Perpetual Student looked like (the image at the top of this blog is the result). It's amazing to be able to see at a glance the breadth of topics that I've been inspired to blog about as a result of class discussions, course readings, newspaper and magazine articles, etc. It's immediately apparent that my studies this year are concerned with public history, digital history and museums. It's also pretty obvious that I'm a student at UWO and that I have a personal interest in human rights issues and the Holocaust.

I'm curious; what would a similar Wordle look like in another month? Six months? A year? Would it show the same trends or new ones? Would it be an accurate visual representation of my Public History interests, or might it reflect a conscious effort on my part to include new topics in order to diversify my posts?

I also found myself wondering about other ways data clouds could be used. I remember reading a blog post when I first discovered Wordle that suggested that data clouds might be used to visually display the slant that newspapers take on particular topics. For instance, by taking an article from the Globe and Mail and and using Wordle to compare it to coverage of the same event in The Toronto Star, one might be able to visually discern the journalist's or newspaper's bias depending on the words that are given more or less emphasis. Or maybe the image could be used to determine the focus within an event - is it on the people involved? The politics? The geography? Wikipedia also provides an example of a word cloud that used information that might traditionally have been expressed in graph form (in this case population data) and re-imagined it as a cloud, with population densities attached to specific colours within the cluster. And I can easily imagine a student using it to determine the topics a professor has emphasized in their lecture notes (and therefore the material to study for the exam) or a secondary school teacher using it to show the themes of a novel. I suppose the options are endless for a person willing to use a little imagination.

But Wordle is not all moonbeams and roses. Due to their use of Java Script, you aren't able to save your Wordle image to your computer using the obvious cut and paste options. You have to jump through the hoops of using the "Prt Scrn" option, pasting it into a Paint document and editing it from there. (Conveniently, though, you can choose to save your Wordle image to their database and share it with the online community hassle-free)

In my case, however, the print screen option on my computer wasn't playing nice and I was forced to troubleshoot (something that I always resent, and yet feel smug about when I eventually find a method that works). Anyway, I did what I always do, which is to Google it and came up with a handy About.com entry that led me to a new and fascinating discovery - the Vista Snipping Tool. I had no idea I even had a feature like that on my computer. And from the Snipping Tool I was given the option of saving my file as a GIF, a PNG or a JPEG. I had no idea what these acronyms even meant, so I was then forced to go look that up and figure out which would be most useful for my situation.

It was like tumbling down the rabbit hole. What should have been a quick and playful experience turned into hours of playing, troubleshooting, contemplating and blogging. Before I knew it, all those wonderful intensions I had of doing my Museology readings tonight had slipped away. But, as the saying goes, "The More You Know."

Fee-Free Museums a Good Idea?

2009-10-13T13:43:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, and for me that meant coming home to Whitby to see my family, gorge myself on turkey and mashed potatoes and get my hot little hands on the newest issue of The Beaver.

Although the magazine’s front cover promised me an article about Canadian spies outwitting the Nazis in WWII (always a fun time), it was a smaller article by Christopher Moore entitled “Land of the free museum” that initially caught my attention. Just a few hours before, we’d been discussing the cost of entrance fees in our Museology seminar and Professor Sendzikas had raised the question of how much we were willing to pay to go to a museum. We all answered the question in dollars and cents (in case you’re wondering, my threshold is around $20 before I really start to question my desire), but I think the discussion should have been bigger than that. Perhaps what we really should have been asking was: how much is our history worth to us (metaphorically speaking, that is)?

Moore’s article started out in generally the same way that our class discussion did – in terms of cold, hard, cash. He went through a list of Canadian museums and galleries and quoted the prices for a family of four at each of the institutions; they ranged from the relatively inexpensive ($18 for the National Gallery) to the moderately expensive ($47 for Fort Henry) to the exorbitant ($74 for the ROM... before the addition of any of the “blockbuster” exhibitions).[1] Moore’s next step was to compare our entrance fees to the entrance fees at even more prestigious institutions in the United States and England. I have to admit, I was intrigued. Canada has some amazing museums, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that any of them are in the same league as the Smithsonian or the Tate Modern.

Do you want to take a guess at how much admission costs for a family of four at the Natural History Museum or Museum of American History in Washington, DC? How about at the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the British Museum in London, England? You could guess, but you’d probably be wrong. There is no price; admission at all of these truly remarkable museums and galleries are free. [2] That’s right – zip, zero, zilch, nada.

I was floored when I saw these figures (so much so that I went to all of their websites and double-checked Moore’s data. For the record, it’s accurate). How can those museums afford to offer their visitors free admission?! How do they pay their staff, maintain their collections, or acquire new artifacts? The more I thought about it, however, the more I began to wonder how we, as Canadians, can afford not to do the same.

As I see it, high admission fees aren’t really in keeping with the values of our society. With our ridiculously expensive ticket prices, the museums and galleries in Canada have managed to commoditize our history to an extent that puts seeing and experiencing much of it outside the reach of a large number of Canadian citizens. This fact doesn’t sit well with me. Think of the message that this prohibitive pricing is sending to Canada’s poorer sections about their present and future worth in our society. Moore even suggests that museums teach people to appreciate their country and be better citizens. Do our high fees suggest that Canadians only care about middle- and upper-class citizens becoming “good” citizens? Possibly.

What real purpose do high entrance fees serve, anyway?

Although they contribute to the running of museums and galleries, the majority of funding for these institutions comes from government grants and private donations, not their admission fees. And if American and British museums have found a way to make up the shortfall caused by free admission, why can’t we do the same?

Some would argue that paying a higher entrance fee creates a perceived value of the contents of a museum in the mind of its visitors. This view may have some validity, but I would argue that those that visit free museums still appreciate them as repositories of our history and culture. It’s not like anyone walks away from the Smithsonian going, “Man, that sucked. If only they had made me pay to see it....”

Sources:

[1] Moore, Christopher. "Land of the free museum." The Beaver, October-November 2009, 13.
[2] Ibid.

Gimme Your Two Cents... For Every Paragraph I Write

2009-10-07T06:38:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the more interesting tidbits I picked up from this week’s Digital History readings, (beyond the content itself), was to notice the form and function of the webpage Christopher M. Kelty set up for his book, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. His web pages are essentially broken down into three columns: The actual content of his book on the left, a comments overview that floats with the reader as they scroll down the page in the centre, and his book’s table of contents and a Browse Comments option on the right. I’ve never seen a website designed in quite the same way before, but I think it’s awesome and I think more people should do it.

Although I can appreciate that the parts of the web page combine to make a cohesive whole, it is the centre column, and how Kelty uses it, that I find of critical importance to his site’s success. Kelty has provided a tracking system for comments in the centre column that allows both the author and the reader to see at a glance what areas of the author’s writing are generating the most buzz or the greatest confusion. He does this by providing the means for his readers to comment on his writing on a per paragraph basis. This format not only offers a quick visual breakdown of activity on the site, but it also allows the readers and author to carry on an immediate dialogue about the pressing issues of his piece. By doing so, it engages the reader continually throughout the piece and works to stave off what I’ll call “reader exhaustion.”

This approach to web page design reminds me of our class’ discussion a few weeks ago surrounding the digitization efforts that have been going on that include the ability to cross reference different versions of a text and annotate them directly in front of you on the screen, essentially creating another version of the document with an entirely new meaning. It seems to me that Kelty is doing close to the same thing by using new technologies and design to reach out to his readership and involve them in the process of his thought creation and writing. Interesting.

"Isn't it ironic... don't you think?"

2009-10-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

And, I’m back. There seems to be yet another issue being faced by the CMHR in regards to their construction project, and I thought it was interesting.

Despite only breaking ground in April 2009, the construction efforts of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights have not been without (somewhat ironic) controversy. In June, Leigh Syms, a retired archaeologist and former curator for the Manitoba Museum, accused the CMHR of cultural insensitivity surrounding their treatment of First Nations heritage in the area. Apparently the new museum is being located on top of what Mr. Syms considers to be one of the richest deposits of First Nations artifacts in the province and he doesn’t think the museum’s 5-and-a-half month archaeological excavation of the site sufficiently preserved the wealth of artifacts present at the site. [1]

Interestingly, it is one of Antoine Predock’s design features that is providing museum representatives with their strongest defense against Syms’ claims – the entire museum will be built on piles. These piles will raise the majority of the building aboveground, reducing the pressure that will be put on the cultural layers of the site. So, while the remaining artifacts will be rendered inaccessible beneath the building, the theory is that they will not be harmed by the creation of the museum. [2]

I’m curious as to whether this consideration for cultural sensitivity played a part in Predock’s design plans or if his use of piles to preserve the underlying artifacts was just a happy side benefit of a purely cosmetic choice. Nothing in my research suggested deliberate action on his part (then again, nothing suggested that it wasn’t). And, if you consider some of Predock’s other architectural feats (specifically the Logjam House), you can see how he has used natural elements from the building’s surroundings to add to the aesthetic of the structure. So, I guess it’s entirely possible he may have taken the preservation of First Nations heritage into account as he designed the building.

One could hope, anyway.

Sources:

[1] http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/06/16/mb-museum-artifacts-human-rights.html
[2] Ibid.

The Rise of the "Starchitect"

2009-10-02T11:38:00.000-07:00

This week in museology we briefly discussed the idea of the “starchitect” in response to mixed emotions surrounding Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) original buildings in 2007.

As I understand it, a “starchitect” is an architect whose work has made them a celebrity in their own right (Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry come to mind). The argument that has been made by some is that in seeking to hire these celebrity architects, museums are placing a greater value on the aesthetics of the buildings that house their collections and the publicity resulting from the attachment of a famous name to their project, than they are on the ability of the new space to function as a museum.

Oftentimes these new museums (or additions to existing museums) are visually striking creations of glass and steel, full of clean lines or sinuous curves. As a fan of modern architecture, I have to admit to finding many of these buildings both beautiful and intriguing. And I have been known, on occasion, to take planes, trains and automobiles just to be able to see the outside of one of these buildings. [Note: The photo to the right is one I took of Frank Gehry’s Dancing House in Prague – affectionately nicknamed the “Fred and Ginger Building”]

Unfortunately, architects are not museum workers and their designs often reflect this fact. One of the biggest criticisms of “starchitecture” is that while beautiful (or an eye-sore, depending on your point of view) they fail to take into account the practical day-to-day concerns of museum staff, such as excess natural light, heating and cooling, the feasibility of easily mounting paintings or displaying their artifacts, office space, collections storage, etc.

Considering the brouhaha surrounding The Crystal, I was curious as to the approach that went into choosing the design for the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights that is currently being built in Winnipeg. Upon a little research, I discovered that Antoine Predock’s design was chosen by “an international Architectural Review Committee (ARC) comprising architects, distinguished Canadian public servants and representatives of Friends of Canadian Museum for Human Rights Inc” (none of which are explicitly museum professionals). The objective set by the committee for the architects to guide them in their creations was for them to create “an inspirational building that achieves a complexity relating to the diversity of human experience.” If this was the only criteria that the architects vying for the job were given, then it seems that Predock’s design is a worthy choice – the building certainly looks complicated enough.

But where's the consideration of the building as a museum!? I realize that the CMHR is planning on focusing on technology-based exhibits as opposed to collections-based ones, but where's the consideration of light, or office space or any of the other countless concerns that I, as someone who has never worked in a museum, couldn't possibly fathom?

As the building is not due for completion until 2012, perhaps only time will tell how functional the space is as a museum. I’ll be interested to follow this museum as it develops.

Oh, and if you would like to follow the museum as it develops, be sure to check out the museum's website, where the progress at the construction site is taped 24/7 and then edited down to a 1 minute clip that is posted once a week. It's a bit like watching paint dry at the moment, but it'll be interesting to see the changes made to the site over the next two years.

Source of Quotations:

http://www.dexigner.com/design_news/1739.html

Social Networking Tools: A Career Killer?

2009-09-18T12:54:00.000-07:00

During our first Digital History class the question of accuracy was raised in response to Kheraj’s article “Will Twitter Kill My Chance at an Academic Job?” Kheraj’s take on the subject seems to be that despite popular belief, hiring committees in academic institutions are not currently investigating online activity to screen job candidates. That’s excellent news... for those of us that wish to pursue further education or academic jobs after graduation. However, while this may be true for academic positions, it doesn’t necessarily hold up for all job positions out there. And, as my peers and I embark on the Public History program and begin to establish a professional presence online via Blogspot and Twitter, I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about the consequences (mis)using them could potentially have on our career chances outside of academia.

In class, Dana asked the question I think a lot of us were probably thinking, which is “how is it [our use of social networking tools on our personal time] any of their [employers] business?”

The truth is, depending on your job, it is their business. People who hold jobs in positions of public trust like politicians, police officers and teachers are considered to have jobs in which they are never 100 per cent off-duty (forgive me, I forget what the official term for this is). This means that when you act in the public sphere you are responsible not only to yourself but also to your employer for those actions. And, since the internet falls under the category of “public sphere,” it is possible that potential employers may look to your online presence when interviewing you.

In the June 2009 issue of Professionally Speaking (the magazine produced by the professional organization I belong to as an Ontario Certified Teacher), an article entitled “Can We Be Friends? Watching Your Electronic Footprint” addressed these very concerns. One of the many examples in the article describes a school superintendent in Missouri who asks teacher candidates if they have Facebook or MySpace accounts. If the answer is yes, he offers them use of his computer and asks them to bring up their page for him to see.

Bottom line, I don’t think that anyone should shy away from using social networking media for fear that it may damage their employability, but it doesn’t hurt to exercise some caution as you build your online persona(s).

[Note: The photo at the top of this post shows a bulletin board display put together by a class of 3rd graders at Fallingbrook PS in my hometown of Whitby, Ontario. The board was part of their teacher’s efforts to explore the public nature of the internet.]

We Are Not Alone

2009-09-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

On a recent trip to Thailand I spotted this advertisement displayed outside of the October 14th/Democracy Monument in Bangkok:

I’m glad to see that other countries and cultures are concerned with some of the same issues that our graduate program will be examining this year. I only wish I could have read the details on the poster so that I’d have an idea of what the guest speakers would be lecturing on.

Virtual(ly) Auschwitz

2009-08-02T04:52:00.000-07:00

Two years ago as a student teacher I took my tenth grade Canadian history class on a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We started at the camp’s entrance – one teacher and twenty-eight students staring at a gate with its sly promise that “Work Will Make You Free.” From there we moved into the camp and spent the next hour exploring one of the most horrific examples of man’s inhumanity to man. And, while World War II’s worst extermination camp is located on a completely different continent, my students and I made the trip without ever leaving our school’s computer lab; the tour I took them on was a virtual one.

Although my students enjoyed the lesson and seemed to learn a lot from it, using virtual tours as a method of communicating history to the public is not one without its flaws. As amazing as virtual tours are in their ability to capture the physical environment of a historical site such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, I still find that they are at their most effective when combined with other forms of learning. For instance, in my case the majority of my students had participated in a Jewish Symposium as part of the Niagara District School Board’s Holocaust Education Week efforts before taking the virtual tour of Auschwitz. At the symposium students were treated to a lecture on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust given by a guest speaker from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, they watched a film entitled Paper Clips (2004) and spent the afternoon listening to survivor testimonies. Because of their previous experience at the symposium, students were able to make connections during the virtual tour between what they were seeing and reading on their computer screen and what Bill had told them of his time in Dachau. Without that personal testimonial to draw from, however, the major downfall of virtual tours becomes readily apparent; they often lack the ability to make the sort of impact that really resonates with learners.

We should also be careful to remember that not all virtual tours are created equally. These days, most webmasters have the ability to slap a bunch of photographs together, walk a visitor through them in a particular order and call it a ‘tour’. We’ve all seen it done. In contrast, I’ve found the virtual tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau to be one of the better ones that I’ve taken of a historical site. The site’s creators at Remember.Org have thoughtfully supplemented the 360 degree tour of the physical camp grounds with art work from survivors and links to relevant photographs and information on third party websites. This allows visitors to the site to complete the tour at their own pace, choosing for themselves which aspects of camp life strike a cord and warrant further examination.

It's clear that virtual tours can never replace the experience of actually visiting a historical site like Auschwitz-Birkenau. However, they do provide a unique way for people bound by geographic, monetary or time constraints to interact with history in a modern, meaningful way.

To: Russia. With Love, the American Historical Association

2009-07-06T17:56:00.000-07:00

Surprise, surprise! Censorship has once again reared its ugly head in Russia. Fortunately, this time the international historical community isn’t taking it lying down.

In May, the president of the Russian Federation, Dmitrii Medvedev, announced the creation of the Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia, a 28 member panel charged with investigating historical works and debate and determining whether or not they are harmful to the country’s reputation. Works found to be “unfavorable” to Russia are to be suppressed and those responsible for them may face criminal charges or fines. No specifics were given as to exactly what sort of “falsifications” the commission would be looking into.

Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the commission is its makeup – of the 28 members, only 3 are historians (one archivist and 2 researchers). That means that the other 25 people responsible for categorizing historical works as “harmful” or “unfavorable” to Russia are bureaucrats and politicians. I’m sure that I’m not alone in questioning what qualifications those men and women who have been appointed by the government have to judge the merit of historical debates and pass judgement on those that take part in them.

Further, anyone who feels strongly about the freedoms of speech, thought and expression will likely take issue with this blatant attempt at censorship. In fact, historians both in Russia and abroad were quick to express their discontent with the new initiative. In the United States, Arnita Jones, executive director of the American Historical Association (AHA), has responded to the commission’s creation by writing an open letter to President Medvedev. In the letter (a link to which can be found here), she implores the president to reconsider the commission and support free and open debate amongst the members of the historical community. She argues (quite eloquently, I think) that:

"Any limitation on freedom of research or expression, however well intentioned, violates a fundamental principal of scholarship: that the researcher must be able to investigate any aspect of the past and to report without fear what the evidence reveals."

The AHA’s position on Medvedev’s commission is clear – it impedes intellectual freedom, seeks to influence the course of historical research and fosters an environment in which dissent, and therefore debate, are unwelcome. Since all of these conditions are intolerable, the commission must be disbanded.

Personally, I find the most interesting facet of the AHA’s argument against the commission to be one that I had not previously perceived as a connected issue – they have linked their stance on the commission with their stance on criminalizing Holocaust denial. While the AHA vehemently opposes the work of Holocaust deniers (as do I, just for the record), they do support their right to conduct research and enter into scholarly debate on the topic without fear of legal repercussions.

This is a fascinating argument. I have never questioned the fact that the Supreme Court of Canada and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunals have consistently found against Holocaust deniers. In fact, in the past these decisions have made me proud to be a citizen in a country that has taken a stand against what I see to be both ludicrous and hateful claims. However, the more that I consider it, the more I believe that the AHA might have it right. If we, in Canada, make certain interpretations of historical evidence related to the Holocaust illegal, how soon before we make similar restrictions against other topics? How soon before we move from criminalizing only truly hateful claims to the point where we start restricting historical debate on topics that are only mildly distasteful or tarnishing to Canada's reputation? Where do you draw the line? And, perhaps more to the AHA's point -- who should draw that line?

I worry about the work that this commission will do. It seems to me that it’s a pretty slippery slope from attempting to suppress the out-and-out fiction to calling something fiction so that you can get away with suppressing it.

Tweet at Me, I Dare Ya...

2009-07-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

Ok, I’m a nerd. I fully and freely admit this fact. I love school. I love history. And, as my time in Korea comes to a close (30 days and counting!), I find myself more and more excited for my next big adventure – the Public History MA program at the University of Western Ontario.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of the requirements of the digital history course that I’ll be taking in September is that students keep a blog related to issues of public history. It should be pretty apparent by now that I’ve embraced that part of the course wholeheartedly. Most days I have no shortage of topics that I’d like to discuss or reflect upon. But, when I sat down at my computer today to make a long overdue post, my mind was suddenly blank; the few half-formed thoughts floating around in my brain refused to become fully formed. What to discuss?

Eventually I turned to the current crop of Public History students and their blogs, hoping for a little inspiration. Sadly, when I arrived at the Digital History page today I found that Dr. Turkel had updated it since my last visit and that the links to past blogs had been removed! I was stumped for a moment. But, as I read the updated schedule for September and all of the notes about different course components, I realized that the inspiration for today’s blog was part of the update – not only would we be required to maintain a blog this year, but we’d also be responsible for creating and utilizing a Twitter account as part of an effort to “experiment with new forms of interaction and learning.”

I have to be honest. My initial reaction went a little something like this: Twitter? Really?! Isn’t Twitter mainly home to celebrities who think you care about every waking minute of their lives and businesses trying to use “the next big thing” on the internet to promote their products and increase their bottom lines? How can it possibly be useful to me?

Twitter’s homepage claims that it is a social networking tool that acts as “a modern antidote to information overload,” but I see it as being the exact opposite. I really don’t need to know when my friends or peers are eating a bagel, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8 or contemplating the meaning of life (unless, of course, they find the answer).

It’s strange, but I never would have questioned it had Dr. Turkel suggested that the Public History students use a group page on Facebook to discuss issues that arise in class, scheduling for group projects or to arrange social gatherings. I’ve used Facebook in similar ways in the past and it has worked out amazingly well. But, I’m finding it hard to wrap my head around how a social networking tool that relies solely on 140 character status updates can be helpful to my learning process. At least with Facebook you can supplement your status updates with a slew of other practical (and some not-so-practical) features.

That said, perhaps I shouldn’t be so quick to write Twitter off completely. Maybe the importance of Twitter is not in how I will use it (as a student of public history), but in how others use will use it. If you think about it, Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking sites that have blossomed in the last two decades are constantly changing what we consider to be primary documents. Records of internet activity, be it Facebook posts, Tweets, emails or chat room histories have almost become to current generations what journals and letters were to past generations. Who knows, maybe the big news in the future will be about how Facebook or Twitter can make or break a career, or how a political debate on YouTube was more influential to voters than the televised one. Maybe in a few years historians will even be citing Tweets or Wall-to-Wall messages in the footnotes of their books about our next great public figure.

Until then, however, you can "follow" me on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/ccaughell.

Grab Your Pitchfork and Torch, Dear. There's Trouble Brewin'...

2009-06-10T04:56:00.000-07:00

My father recently sent me the link to a podcast for CBC’s The Current and a short note that assured me that the show’s last segment was right up my alley. Sure enough, it was. (Thanks Dad!)

Before I begin, let me set the scene for you… The year is 1860 and you live in a small Eastern Ontario town on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. It’s summer, but despite the heat of the day you’re covered from wrist to ankle to chin. You’re taking your time, shuffling down Maple Road with no particular destination in mind when a horse-drawn carriage turns onto the street in front of you and begins to kick up dust. To avoid it, you turn down Queen Street where you can hear the clang of iron striking iron at the blacksmith’s and the sound of the muley saw in action at the mill. Your mouth begins to water as the scent of freshly baked bread wafts to you on the breeze as you pass the bakery, its windows thrown open wide to let some of the oven’s heat escape. Mmmm… freshly baked bread.

Continuing on your way, you decide to poke your head into the guardhouse to say hello to a friend. Unfortunately, instead of the soldiers you were expecting to see, the only person inside is an annoyingly perky young woman selling bottled water and Freezies. You apologize and back out slowly. Confused, you turn a corner and find yourself faced with a row of blue structures approximately 8 feet tall and 3 feet wide. They’re made out of a material you’ve never seen before and they reek to high heaven. The sign on their front declares that they are “Johnny-on-the-Spots”. Curiouser and curiouser. Hoping to put as much distance between these offensive blue huts and yourself, you stumble into the local tavern, which you now discover serves a selection of Prince Edward wines and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches. On the wall you see an advert encouraging you to come out to the medieval festival being held next weekend. Wait a second… Bottled water? Plastic wrap? A medieval festival in 1860s Canada?!? There’s something not quite right with this picture.

If your thoughts echoed the sentiments above, you’re not alone. In fact, it’s these modern intrusions and quick cash grab schemes that are at the very heart of a heated debate surrounding Upper Canada Village this summer.

Established by the St. Lawrence Parks Commission in 1961 in Morrisburg, Ontario, Upper Canada Village (UCV) is a “living museum” comprised of nearly 40 buildings and employing dozens of historical interpreters (bakers, blacksmiths, mill workers, school teachers, etc) to bring the experience of Canada in the mid-19th century to life for its visitors. Although the heritage park used to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, the number of people has declined drastically in recent years, causing UCV to run at a deficit that now reaches into the multi-millions. Clearly the situation cannot remain as it is if we want the park to remain open for future generations to enjoy. Something needs to be done immediately to boost interest in and attendance at the park.

Enter Pat MacDonald, CEO and GM for the St. Lawrence Parks Commission, and her controversial new strategies to cut operating costs, attract business and generate revenue at Upper Canada Village. Last year MacDonald added beer samplings and musical revues to the tavern as a way to increase foot traffic in what she considered an underutilized building. Sounds relatively good so far, right? Unfortunately, she also embraced more unconventional forms of raising revenue such as renting out the parking lot of the Village to the organizers of a medieval festival.

That was last year. She began this year by laying off 39 historical interpreters and setting in motion plans to add a completely new microbrewery to the tavern, as well as to serve a selection of wines, treats and sandwiches. She also plans to turn a previously unused and “derelict” guardhouse into a snack shack serving drinks and cool treats to visitors on hot days. Perhaps most controversially, Macdonald has also agreed to let the medieval festival move onto UCV grounds next weekend (the catalyst for the latest flurry of discontent surrounding her involvement with UCV).

Previously employed by Paramount Canada’s Wonderland, Macdonald makes no bones about the fact that she has embraced a more customer-driven approach to managing Upper Canada Village than past General Managers have. She maintains, however, that while she’s trying to find new ways to entertain visitors as well as educate them, she would never do anything to take them away from the 1860s story.

Not true, says a coalition of local historical societies. Spokesmen for the heritage groups have expressed concern that these changes do not remain faithful to the spirit of Upper Canada Village. They say that by turning historic buildings into modern concession stands it interferes with the authenticity that the visitors experience while on the grounds. They also argue that the layoffs have drastically lessened the opportunity that visitors have to interact in a meaningful way with the site. I have to admit that this measure strikes me as counterproductive since I’m sure that the idea of a “living museum” is likely what drew many of the visitors to UCV in the first place. Perhaps the biggest uproar of discontent, however, is over the issue of the medieval fair. The historical societies say that allowing the medieval festival onto the UCV grounds destroys the historical accuracy of the site and cheapens the visitor experience; it takes what’s supposed to be an educational experience and turns it into a day at an amusement park.

I understand the historical societies’ desire to keep the spirit of UCV intact – they want visitors to be able to step through the gates of Upper Canada Village and back into the 1860s. I think that’s an admirable goal and I support the desire to keep UCV history-driven as opposed to consumer-driven at any cost. However, I also understand the need for a business to both generate revenue and to provide services and modern conveniences for its customers in order to keep them at the site and engaged in the learning. After all, if the site remains untouched by MacDonald’s changes but stops drawing the number of visitors it needs to in order remain a viable attraction, the St. Lawrence Parks Commission will likely be forced to close its doors to the public entirely.

One of the suggestions being brought forward by those in the heritage business is to look to other heritage sites and living history museums for solutions. Places like Fort Henry have bowed to the necessity of conveniences such as modern washrooms and snack bars, but they have placed them in such a way as to be completely separate from the historical experience. Visitors know when they are walking into history driven areas and when they are not. I’m not sure which approach is better, to have these modern buildings set apart and draw the eye like a sore thumb, or to renovate previously unused historic buildings and adapt them to camouflage modern conveniences (as MacDonald seems to be supporting)? While the latter suggestion is less offensive to my eye, the thought of permanently marring a historic building hurts my soul a little. Still, it’s something to consider and it’s still my hope that Pat MacDonald and the representatives from the historic societies can find a middle ground that doesn’t irrevocably compromise the integrity of UCV.

Near the end of the segment on Upper Canada Village, Deborah Morrison, President of Canada’s National Historical Society, weighed in on the controversy. Although I feel her comments were ambiguous enough to support either side of the debate, she did make one or two interesting contributions to the dialogue. Mainly, she sought to remind the public that UCV is a heritage park, not a heritage site; all of the buildings and artifacts on the property have been brought there from other parts of Ontario and placed in their current locations for historical effect. Let me say it again: None of the buildings, tools or artifacts are original to UCV’s Morrisburg location.

Indeed, for Morrison this distinction between heritage sites and heritage parks creates a situation in which the historical significance of UCV (and other parks like it) lays mostly in the visitor experience and I tend to agree. Pat MacDonald has called her proposed changes to Upper Canada Village a “journey of revitalization and change.” But, if her revitalization efforts destroy the historical experience the village has spent nearly 50 years preserving, I can’t help but wonder: what will we be left with? And, will it even be worth visiting?

A Stroll Down Memory Lane

2009-05-29T06:30:00.000-07:00

....or, at least along the Danforth.

During some recent downtime at work I stumbled – via a convoluted series of hyperlinks – upon the website for Heritage Toronto, a charitable organization whose mandate is to “tell the stories behind the people, landscapes, and historic buildings that bring Toronto’s neighbourhoods to life.”

One of the ways that Heritage Toronto aims to heighten community interest and involvement in historical, architectural and natural heritage matters is through a series of walking tours that run nearly every weekend from April to October (rain or shine!) and focus on many of the diverse areas of the city. For example, this summer’s offerings include tours of Rosedale, St. Clair West, Leslieville, Thistletown and more. And, although you might occasionally find yourself rubbing shoulders with an MPP or a Toronto City Councillor doing a guest appearance as a walk leader in an area of the city they represent, the majority of walk leaders and assistants seem to be nothing more than local history enthusiasts, making Toronto Heritage Walks truly ‘for the people by the people’.

In addition to the walking tours, the Heritage Toronto website also offers a wealth of features that really seem to embrace the technological goals outlined by the Ministry of Culture for their recent Museums and Technology Fund initiative (discussed in my last post); the website includes a blog that features author commentary complimented by City of Toronto Archival photographs, virtual tours of areas of the city not compatible with large group walking tours and podcasts for self-guided tours. One of my favourite features on the website has to be the Heritage Exploration Map (powered by Google). It provides information for finding archaeological sites, museums, heritage plaques and the start points for all of the heritage walks that are offered by the organization. You can navigate the map by location type, neighbourhood or specific addresses if you already have a destination in mind. Further, clicking on any of the icons on the map will bring up a short blurb on the historical significance of the place as well as a “more” option that will link you to any available contact info for the site and a more detailed map of the area.

Unfortunately, as much as I’d like to take part in a Heritage Walk this summer, my current geographic location makes that a highly unlikely possibility. So, from South Korea I urge you, my readers (are there any readers yet?!) to take some time this summer and enjoy the history in your own backyard. :)

Oh, and if you’re interested, Heritage Toronto offers a wide variety of unique volunteer opportunities for those that are looking to get more involved with the preservation and communication of Toronto’s history. On the front lines, volunteers are needed to both assist and lead weekly heritage walks in different areas around the city and to act as office support staff (especially during the busy periods). But, if it’s more behind the scenes involvement that interests you, the organization always seems to be looking for experienced researchers to research and write scripts for the walking tours, podcasts and virtual tours as well as to further their Plaques Program projects.

A Step in the Right (Digital) Direction

2009-05-23T22:04:00.000-07:00

Aileen Carroll, Ontario’s Minister of Culture, recently announced the creation of a new government initiative aimed at encouraging the use of digital technologies in community museums, galleries and archives across Ontario.

The Ministry press release didn’t offer a wealth of information on the new Museum and Technology Fund, but the gist is that the Ontario government will spend $6.5 million dollars over the next four years to match the contributions put forward by community heritage institutions so that they may use new technology as a way to make local heritage more accessible to the public.

Several of Ontario’s nearly 400 community museums already offer an online component to compliment their on-site exhibitions, and this money will be put towards other institutions incorporating similar digital displays as a way to increase public awareness, education and tourism.

While $6.5 million dollars isn’t a huge sum of money when you consider that dozens – if not hundreds – of community institutions will be eligible for partial funding later this summer, the initiative certainly seems like a step in the right direction. The more that we can digitize archives and exhibitions, the larger the number and the wider the audience historians can reach with their work.

I don’t know about you, but I look forward to seeing what the smaller cultural and historical organizations do with this opportunity.

Oh, and in case you ever needed it, I’ve included a link to the Ontario Museum Association’s museum database. The website allows you to browse listings of Ontario’s museums by name, type, city and region. Happy hunting!

And Doesn't That Just Say It All...?

2009-04-29T05:45:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 2007, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a few weeks touring some of Central Europe’s most famous cities (Budapest, Vienna, Prague and Munich). And, because my travel partner was also a like-minded history major, the two of us were able to indulge in the local history and culture to our hearts content. Although I enjoyed them all for different reasons, it was the city of Munich that made the most lasting impression on me in terms of how its recent history was being conveyed to the public, both its own citizens and those visiting the Bavarian capital.

On our first afternoon in the city, my friend and I opted for a WWII-themed walking tour (I’m not positive, but I think it may have been billed on the brochure as a tour of “Hitler’s Munich” – insert *eye roll* here). Over the course of the next hour and a half, our guide pointed out dozens of things that peaked my interest as someone concerned with how history is communicated to and understood by the public. Perhaps a future blog will touch on more of these examples, but for now, I want to focus solely on the war monument in front of the Bavarian Parliament Building.

At first glance we barely noticed the monument. Its sandy colour and position (lowered into a hole in the ground and further hidden behind a small hedge) do a pretty good job of camouflaging it from visitors without tour guides as savvy as ours. The shape of the monument also helped to conceal its purpose for being - giant blocks of stone piled on top of each without easily understandable visual clues (like gigantic arcs, bronze soldiers, eternal flames, flags, etc) don’t exactly scream ‘honoring our war dead’ to me. Turns out, you have to go even further down a set of stairs to get inside the monument (hmmm… not-so-metaphorically burying your wartime history, Munich?!?).

Once you are inside the monument, there are two inscriptions carved into the walls in German, the first of which is for those that perished during WWI. Loosely translated it says, “Built for the city of Munich, Bavaria’s brave soldiers – 13 000 heroic fallen sons of the city of Munich.” I find this phrasing pretty typical of the WWI war monuments I’ve seen in the past. Use of the words ‘brave’ and ‘heroic’ show that despite Germany’s position on the losing side of the conflict, there was still a sense of pride in the individual soldiers who had acted honourably while giving their lives for their country. Further, the inscription’s use of the phrase “fallen sons” seems to show the sense of ownership the city of Munich felt towards these soldiers and their actions, just as a parent would have towards a child; they were truly a beloved part of the community and therefore deserving of a monument in their honour.

So, although the physical location of the monument doesn’t automatically convey a sense of nationalism or pride in the part that Munich’s soldiers played in the war, I could clearly see the impact that carefully chosen phrasing can give a monument in terms of the messages about the past that are being recorded for future generations to read and interpret.

Underneath the inscription in honor of those who died during the First World War is the dedication to the soldiers and citizens of Munich who were lost during WWII. Although both inscriptions were written under similar circumstances (that is, the German loss of a world war), the second inscription is markedly different than the one for WWI. Roughly translated, it reads:

“Built in memory of the
99 000 fallen
11 000 missing
6 600 victims of the air war
of the city of Munich
1939-1945.”

The differences between the two inscriptions are striking. Compared with the word choice of the WWI inscription, this one is cold, clinical even. Gone are phrases such as “heroic sons” and “brave soldiers.” In their place are emotionless numbers and one word descriptors. Essentially, the inscription boils down years of hardship and loss, tragedy and horror to a pile of emotionless statistics. Reading the inscription more than 60 years after it was first inscribed, the shame that this phrasing captured was still palpable to me.

What caused this change in the tone of the two inscriptions should be no mystery to anyone reading this blog, but it did bring to my mind the larger question of commemoration. Specifically, how do nations commemorate wars and how does the approach of a nation towards commemoration change depending on the outcome of the conflict? More to the point, perhaps, how does the approach to commemoration change when a portion of the soldiers and citizens of the nation in question participated in or benefited from such a horrific genocide?

I think the inscription that was added to the Munich war memorial following WWII is an interesting example. It strikes me as an obvious attempt by the city’s leadership to distance themselves from the ugly role Munich played during the 1930s and 1940s in regards to the Holocaust. Soldiers are now referred to only as “fallen” or “missing”; no longer are they the beloved “sons of Munich.” They are mentioned, not glorified. At the same time, however, it is clear that the city still tried to honour the sacrifices that their citizens and soldiers had made on their behalf (the fact that Germany had participated in and lost a second world war couldn’t exactly go unmentioned on German soil).

That said, I find the statistics dehumanizing. Presumably there were many people in Munich at the time who disagreed with or even acted against their government’s policies during WWII. I’m sure that they went missing or died in air raids with equal measure to those that supported Hitler and his regime. Perhaps they deserve to be remembered more fondly than they have been?!

I guess the question that I am posing is this: how does one, as an historian, find the balance between acknowledging the loss of the nation during wartime without glorifying the reprehensible actions that the country’s leadership put into motion?

Any thoughts?

[Note: For the purpose of this blog, I attempted to translate the inscriptions as closely as possible. Please be aware, however, that I don’t speak German. :) The translations above are a combination of my tour guide’s efforts two years ago in his second or (possibly) third language and an online translation program that I accessed as I was writing this post earlier this morning.]

What Gordon Lightfoot Taught Me

2009-04-27T01:01:00.000-07:00

What do you remember about what you learned in the fourth grade? If you’re anything like me, chances are, not much. One of the things I do remember, however, is that once a week like clockwork, my teacher would have everyone take out these thick, musty-smelling music books that looked like they hadn’t been updated in the last decade and she’d choose a song for us to sing. Now, if you’re even half as tone deaf and “rhythmically challenged” as I am, you’ll be able to sympathize with me when I say how much I dreaded having to sing “Fish and Chips and Vinegar,” “There’s a Hole in my Bucket” and “La Bamba” on a weekly basis.

But I digress...

The point that I wanted to make about my 4th grade music class was not the songs that I didn’t enjoy singing, but the one I did – Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” For anyone unfamiliar with the song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a folk song about a boat that sank in bad weather on Lake Superior in the 1970s, carrying the captain and all 28 crew members to their deaths. The song was apparently inspired by an article Lightfoot read in Newsweek and (understandably) the lyrics read like an incredibly tragic story. I still remember sitting at my desk in the classroom, examining a black and white photograph of the Edmund Fitzgerald from the text and pouring over the song’s lyrics in order to learn about this piece of maritime history (an aspect of history that I’d never been particularly interested in before). In fact, for the rest of the semester, every time we opened our music books for a new lesson, I would take the time to reread the lyrics of Lightfoot’s song.

To be honest, I don’t recall what first prompted me to think about this particular memory tonight as I sat down to write my latest post; I haven’t thought about that song in years. But I think the fact that this memory is still so vivid after more than a decade just goes to show what potential music has to be a powerful tool with which to educate the public about historical events and eras. As a teacher, I can’t help but think about the ways that this cross-curricular approach to history might benefit students. Songs written about specific events in history, like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or the ones found in the Song Gallery of the Ultimate Canadian History Site, have the ability to teach history to students that might otherwise not engage in more traditional learning methods or to those that identify themselves as being uninterested in the subject as a whole but enjoy music.

That said, I think it is important to approach music about historical events with the same caution that historians would take towards other forms of popular culture such as historical fiction in books and movies. Firstly, we have to be careful not to romanticize history just because of the medium that we are using to communicate to the public with. We should also be aware that the nature of the mediums put limitations on the content. For instance, songs, just like fiction books and movies, face time and space contraints that force artists to pick and choose the details that they are able to include. Lastly, we must also strive to remember that the majority of songwriters (like screenwriters or filmmakers) are not historians and their first concern, therefore, is likely not historical accuracy. Doing some quick research on the Edmund Fitzgerald as an adult and comparing that to Lightfoot’s lyrics, I can see that he took a few artistic liberties with some terminology as well as details of the shipwreck in order to fit the format of his song. These sorts of changes have the potential to be problematic if carried out on a large scale. With this particular song, however, I was able to determine that the changes were relatively minor and therefore the core historical facts remained. As a result, I realize that I did learn about history in a lasting and meaningful way through Lightfoot's music.

In addition to music written about history, I believe that it is also important to consider the impact of listening to music written during particular eras. Listening to music from the time periods you are studying is a great way for a person to get a ‘feel’ for the time. Personally, I can barely imagine what my university course on the 1960s would have been like without the lessons on music or what my Apartheid literature course would have been like without including the protest music of those living in the townships.

It is my hope the in the future recording artists continue to be inspired by both current and past events, drawing on them to write accurate and engaging songs that educate as well as entertain.

Questions? Comments? Statements of brilliance?

Public History (As I Currently Understand It)

2009-04-25T00:05:00.000-07:00

I suppose that the natural starting point for a blog about public history would be for me to establish my current understanding of the discipline (however rudimentary that might be at this point). Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on this entry at the end of my year in the Public History program at UWO and see how much course readings, guest speakers, field trips, group projects, class discussions and self-reflection have deepened my understanding of the subject.

According to the Public History page for UWO, public history as a discipline is broadly defined as one that “explores how history is understood by and communicated to the public.” The method of communication to the public can take many forms including, but not limited to, historical fiction in books and movies (an admittedly guilty pleasure of mine), documentaries, museum exhibits or historical sites, websites, archives, video games on historic themes, etc. It is the Heritage Moments that used to run on television during commercial breaks and those blue commemorative plaques on the side of the road in Ontario. It is Doors Open Ontario events and those statues of the dude on the horse that every capital city from here to Europe seems to have in spades.

I could be wrong, but it seems to me to be the innumerable ways that historians try to engage those outside of academia (whose first priority might not be the study of history - blasphemy, I know!) to learn about the past in ways both meaningful and interesting to them as individuals. Emphasis also seems to be on the responsibility of the public historian to communicate their specialized knowledge to an audience in a manner appropriate to their level of understanding.

Well, that’s public history as I currently understand it. It isn’t pretty or detailed, but it is a starting point.

Questions? Comments? Statements of brilliance?

Third Time's the Charm...?

2009-04-24T20:50:00.000-07:00

I have been agonizing about the beginnings of this blog for weeks. Seriously. I’ve actually lost count of the number of times I loaded this webpage and eagerly clicked on “New Post” only to find myself staring at the white text box and a blinking cursor with no idea how I wanted to go about establishing myself in my own little corner of the World Wide Web.

I think my trepidation stems from the fact that this is not my first kick at the proverbial blogging can. In fact, this is not even my second attempt at a blog. I created my first blog as a procrastination technique during my first essay season of university more than six years ago. Unfortunately, what started merely as a traditional journal in digital form quickly devolved into a slam book of sorts (Baby-sitters Club reference, anyone? Anyone?). Let’s just say that the entries weren’t worth preserving. If memory serves, I deleted the blog long before my first set of exams.

My second foray into the blogosphere started in July 2008 when I decided to try to chronicle the ups and downs of living and working as an ESL teacher in South Korea. The blog, in conjunction with a trusty Flickr account, was my way to stay in touch with friends and family back home who had yet to jump on the Facebook bandwagon. Blogging went smoothly for a couple of months, but eventually it deteriorated into hastily scrawled notes on Post-Its that got “filed” in the junk drawer of my desk and never made it onto the web. After allowing my blog to languish for several months without updates, I finally gave up the ghost and took it down. (In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it up...?)

Which brings us to attempt #3...

Eventually this blog will become a course requirement for History 9808, Dr. William Turkel’s Digital History course, which focuses on representations of history on the web and interactive systems (whatever those are... Do blogs and wikis count?!?). It will act as a forum in which I, along with my peers in the Public History program at UWO, publicly engage in reflective practice. At that time, I suspect that the tone, style, format and content of this blog might change to reflect a significantly more academic bent. Until then, I’d like to use it to explore (rather informally) the concept of public history as I currently understand it.

As a recent graduate of Brock University’s Faculty of Education, I have to admit to cringing inwardly a little at the mention of reflective practice. Since its introduction in Donald Schön’s 1983 book, The Reflective Practitioner, the concept of reflective practice has become one of the cornerstones of teacher training programs in Ontario, including the one at Brock. As such, I’ve written countless reflections over the last five years on topics ranging from teaching techniques to current issues in education to my evolving philosophy of education; the list goes on and on. Although I think the process of reflective practice is generally a valuable one both personally and professionally, I had secretly hoped that I’d done enough reflecting in teacher’s college to last me a lifetime. :) In fairness to the Public History program at UWO, however, this is the first time that I’ll be applying the concept of reflective practice to the discipline of history and in a digital format, so I’m excited to see how this experiment works out.

With that said, I’ll end this entry the same way my 7th grade English teacher, Mr. Blight, ended all of his classes, “Questions? Comments? Statements of brilliance...?” If you’ve got them, feel free to leave them, but please be gentle. This is a learning process. :)