But how can the conventional printed book, which privileges the sense of sight in the form of black text printed on a white page, facilitate an argument that urges us to reconsider the importance of humans’ varied senses?

Parr, in collaboration with new media designer Jon van der Veen, has taken up this challenge with Megaprojects New Media, a series of online exhibits that “parallel” the text contained in her book.  A short introduction by van der Veen precedes each of the book’s chapters and informs the reader of the diverse media available on the website.

The use of new digital media to promote a published book’s goal of a more “sensuous history” inevitably contains some dilemmas. The most obvious issue is that digital media – similar to conventional print – also prioritizes sight (along with sound) at the expense of touch, taste, and smell.  Indeed, a majority of exhibits on the Megaprojects website still cater primarily to sight and sound through the many maps, oral interviews, songs, photographs, and other sources found on the website.

Yet one of the most unique exhibits on the site is a series of virtual walking tours that use oral evidence from local people to reconstruct the “lostscape” of Iroquois, Ontario before the St. Lawrence Seaway project flooded much of the old town in the early 1950s.  Although this technique still relies upon sight and sound, the locals’ descriptions, historic photographs, and maps allows the listener-viewer of the exhibit to imagine what the town may have been like in multi-sensorial terms.  The tastes, smells, and touches of old Iroquois as remembered by locals emerge as visitors journey through space and back in time.

The Megaprojects-Sensing Changes project illustrates the opportunities that digital media offers to conventional print publication.  In what other ways are historians using digital media to augment more traditional methods of (re)presenting the past?  What are its challenges? What are its possibilities for the future?

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On Wednesday 14 April, the United States of America’s Library of Congress (LOC) announced a deal with the popular social networking service, Twitter, to archive all public messages on the site right down to the first “tweet” from @jack (Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder) on 21 March 2006, at 3:50 PM.

Response to the news can generally be described as positive and set “Library of Congress” as a top trend for the remainder of the week. Considering that the site has evolved into one of the most efficient means of spreading information (even by Internet standards) such enthusiasm is understandable.

Still, the LOC’s initial announcement carried little description of the archive itself or the conditions of access. As hype matured into curiosity, the LOC released a short FAQ to follow-up on questions from the public two weeks later.

Let’s break it down:

Archive Description

• the archive was a gift
• it includes all public messages (but excludes “private account information” and “deleted tweets”)
• it excludes links or pictures (such as short URLs and location based services like Foursquare)
• tweets are made available to researchers approximately half a year after their publication

Archive Direction

• “…Library…[to work] with academic research communities to explore issues related to researcher access”
• “…serve as a helpful case study [in the development of] policies for research use…”
• “…Library…will not try to reproduce [Twitter's] functionality”
• “…interested in offering collections of tweets…” related to current events

Archive Access

The FAQ identifies access issues as a priority but does not elaborate on conditions. Shortly after its release Martha Anderson (director of the LOC’s National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program) told Randall Stross of the New York Times that “[t]he library plans to dole out its access…only to…qualified researchers” due to privacy concerns.

However, exactly what “qualifications” means is unclear. Hopefully the LOC will further clarify this and elaborate on their overall archive strategy as it develops over the coming months.

HOW USEFUL IS IT?

While it is perhaps too early to properly assess just how useful such an archive might be, it is difficult to dismiss its potential value to the historical community as a source of contemporary cultural commentary in future. It is thus less a question of whether or not researchers will use the archive but how.

Overall, the LOC’s interest indicates that the still infant networking service may indeed have a staying power beyond others within the same rapidly evolving medium with a notoriously fleeting attention span. This may set a powerful precedent and persuade us to reevaluate otherwise “everyday” content on the Internet as well as reflect on new roles for archives.

On the other hand, it would take very little for Twitter to incorporate a more advanced, research-ready option into their existing search. Some researchers are already using Twitter for their own purposes without a formal archive structure or support beyond the platform itself. This does not dismiss the significance of the LOC’s decision to build and maintain an archive at considerable expense and effort, but it does suggest that not all prospective researchers need it.

For now, the only safe conclusion here is that Twitter has become socially significant enough to merit an archive at a publicly funded institution — which is not only unprecedented for a four-year-old start-up but also somewhat prophetic for researchers and the historical community in general.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

What do you think about the LOC’s efforts to collect and collate messages on Twitter (now estimated at over 15 billion)?

Do you agree with the Washington Post‘s Monica Hesse that this an important example of history from the bottom up?

Are you a Twitter user?

Do you have any privacy concerns about your content? And if so, will the collection of public messages alter how you use the network?

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The ActiveHistory.ca team is looking for more contributors for our collaborative blog on how history and historians actively engage communities and contribute to current debates.  This blog has a growing readership – last month we had over 2,000 distinct visitors – and it provides potential contributors the opportunity to reach a wider audience. If you’re interested in contributing, please read more to find out what we’re looking for!

Our blog posts are normally in the realm of four to six hundred words, and we aim to have them written in an accessible, lively, and engaging style. We have posts on a variety of themes, including but not limited to:
- Does History Matter?
- Environmental Issues
- History and Everyday Life
- History in the News
- History on the Internet
- Local History
- Teaching History

Participants will be listed as “Contributing Editors” and are welcome to take a role in shaping the future direction and mandate of our web project. Our contributors range from engaged community members to faculty members to graduate students, and the more diverse the better! Participation may vary from a monthly post to a few posts a year.

We would like to find historians from a wide range of background and expertise in all periods and geographic regions of history.  We also hope to encourage participation from historians outside of academia, whether this is people with historical training who now work in another field or laypeople with a passion for history. Please feel free to forward and distribute widely.

If you are interested please contact us at info@activehistory.ca. We look forward to hearing from you!

The internet has the potential to enrich and increase our interactions with the past simply through making historical sources widely available and by making the tools to produce and disseminate history accessible to anyone. This means the historian’s role is becoming less that of a gatekeeper of the past as traditional print-based published histories increasingly co-exist with historical interpretations, narratives, memories, and source material posted by the likes of bloggers and artists.

Screen capture of Roy Arden's blog

One example is artist Roy Arden’s blog, Under the Sun, a seemingly random collection of images and YouTube videos. I discovered Arden’s blog after he linked images I used in posts on my own history blog about a 1972 riot at a Rolling Stones concert and from the Battle of Ballantyne Pier, a riot during the 1935 waterfront strike in Vancouver. For me, providing context for the images is what drives many of my blog posts, so I was struck by Arden’s use of the same images with a complete absence of context, giving the viewer a relatively unmediated view of the same history. Scrolling through the rest of his blog, I found a lot of provocative historical photographs and ephemera that make it easier to appreciate just how potent such images can be on their own terms.

newspaper advertisement for Cellar Club

Another Vancouver artist, Michael de Courcy, runs a website featuring several online exhibitions showing pieces of a past to which he feels some personal connection. One exhibit consists of newspaper clippings containing ads for the Cellar Club, a jazz club that operated in Vancouver between 1956 and 1963. In contrast to the lack of context on Roy Arden’s blog, De Courcy writes: “Suspended as these ads were within the entertainment pages of the daily papers, the images in this archive also provide an opportunity to reflect on the mid-century pop culture context in which the Cellar’s edgy musical and theatrical offerings flourished …”

Coincidentally, I had been reading Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex, and Sin in Postwar Vancouver (University of Toronto Press, 2009) by UBC prof Becki Ross when I came upon de Courcy’s website. Ads for the Cellar appear alongside ads for other clubs I had been reading about such as Kublai Khan, Isy’s, and the Cave, giving me additional context beyond what Ross provides in 300-plus pages of text and images. True, these newspaper ads don’t challenge or augment Ross’s interpretation, but they do make nightlife in mid-century Vancouver a little more real to me.

Lani Russwurm holds an MA in history from Simon Fraser University and runs Past Tense, a history blog about Vancouver, where he lives and works.

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But they have also created challenges for more conventional forms of resource sharing in a community where print arguably remains the standard.

While websites have generally made a more concerted effort to reduce the length of their root URL (uniform resource locator) in recent years, things like course materials, references, and finding aides have all become bloated with long strings of seemingly random, run-on characters.

Their presence within endnotes and footnotes is particularly disruptive, where a single note already has the potential to snowball into a self-contained realm and acquire something akin to sovereignty as it slowly envelops the page.

This is a problem we share and one that requires our attention for two reasons.

First, it will only compound as more and more sources are made available online. Referring to the physical source is best but not always possible. And while hyperlinks offer an efficient work-around for digital content, they do not translate to print.

Second, unwieldy links hinder the ability of professionals and the public to share findings and sources with themselves and one another. And despite the Internet’s best efforts to level distribution, many people already find run-on references and archival organization intimidating even without links.

Exactly how to solve this problem is unclear.

But let’s look at one possible solution: the URL shortener.

URL shorteners do exactly what they suggest: they replace a long string of seemingly random, run-on characters and crunch them into a much smaller, more memorable link.

They began circulating with the launch of tinyurl.com in 2002 and have come to fill a niche on social networking sites where character limits (i.e. the ‘Twitter effect’) have transformed them into a burgeoning micro-industry.

Among the more popular URL shorteners are stand-alone services, like bit.ly and is.gd, while larger sites like Flickr (flic.kr) and even Google (goo.gl) have already stated to integrate them into their broader platforms.

The popularity of these services is understandable but they are not without criticism. Joshua Schachter offers what is perhaps the most comprehensive critique of URL shorteners; arguing, among other things, that they undermine link integrity (causing linkrot), destabilize security, and enable spam. And he has a point: the current crop of URL shortening services are not built to last.

But here’s where it gets complicated: sites like the Globe and Mail (tgam.ca) and the New York Times (nyturl.com) have started to offer their own short URLs on dedicated databases that are presumably less susceptible to things like linkrot and spam interdiction.

That may very well elevate specific URL shorteners over others but what about shorter URLs in theory?

Perhaps we should start to experiment with a few pilot programs at select databases and universities. Consider, for example, how a shorter URL system could improve access and attract a wider audience to databases like the oldbaileyonline.org.

While the oldbaileyonline.org provides all of the original publication data, that may not be prudent or useful in all circumstances. More directly, the root URL is short and stable but searches invariably lead to complicated, run-away links. Perhaps even something as simple as the Globe and Mail‘s “tgam.ca” (i.e. olgbail.ey/a1b1c1d1) on a dedicated database would suffice.

You must admit, it is rather tempting.

In the meantime, short URLs may not be the best solution — and the increasingly popular URL shorteners services should probably be avoided — but exploring ways to rein in our run-away link problem is certainly a conversation worth having.

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Earth Day drew much of its early enthusiasm from university campuses.  Fittingly, then, NiCHE (Network in Canadian History and Environment) today published short “research snapshots” of five New Scholars who research the relationship between nature and the Canadian past.   The writings address the question of what they have learned during their research and how their research impacts current environmental concerns.  The feature contains a forward by Alan MacEachern, professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.

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Richmond Street circa 1905

Whether in an urban or a rural environment, I find built history fascinating. It’s all around us, and contains incredible stories about our past, but most people never really notice it. As part of my MA in Public History at the University of Western Ontario I had the opportunity to take a class in interactive exhibit design, taught by Professor Bill Turkel. The premise of the class was simple: create a project that teaches history in an interactive way. With this as my goal, I set about looking for a way to teach people about their local built environment, which would hopefully make them see it in a different way. I decided to accomplish this by creating a digital representation of a streetscape and showing its progression through time. Thus the interactive streetscape was born.

My first step was to find a suitable local streetscape. After wandering downtown London and completing some archival research, I chose the east side of Richmond Street between Queen and Dundas, a block which has seen substantial redevelopment while still retaining core buildings.

Using Google SketchUp I created 3D digital models of all the buildings that have existed on the street. I used SketchUp as my 3D modeling software primarily because it is free, it is geared towards non-professionals, and it has a very active community, including some very helpful online tutorials. With the models created, I began the interactive aspect. I connected a knob to a small, very inexpensive computer called an Arduino which allowed the user to scroll between images of the modeled streetscapes displayed on a laptop. This required a little bit of coding in a simple programming language called Processing, which is geared specifically towards non-programmers.

Richmond Street circa 1915

This project is an example of how history can be told through a digital medium. It was made possible by free and accessible software, active online communities, and the inexpensive but incredibly powerful and versatile Arduino. Furthermore, the technical side is within the realm of possibility for anyone with a willingness to learn. For a closer look at the specifics, including the code I used to make it all work, feel free to check out my website.

Richmond Street circa 1928

There are a number of ways I would like to expand the interactive streetscape. If I had the time I would create ways to provide information on the businesses and people that gave life to the buildings on this street. Numerous local institutions are represented here including the London Free Press, the Foresters, Huron and Erie Savings and Loan, and the very first Canada Trust. These companies and the people associated with them were important in the development of London, and what better way to tell those stories than through buildings people see every day.

Richmond Street circa 1965

Professor Turkel suggested at one point I use Google Earth as the project interface, which was a great idea. In a perfect world, Google Earth would have an app that allows the user to navigate through historical streetscapes, and contributors could insert their work into the larger framework. As more and more photographic collections are digitized and made available online this type of project becomes closer to reality. Imagine fully digitized historic environments available online for people to explore. Benefits would include a better understanding of local history and a firmer grasp on patterns of development. Furthermore, by juxtaposing historic streetscapes to the modern vehicle-dependent urban environment, responsible design and planning could be promoted.

Richmond Street circa 2010

Tim O’Grady has several years experience in heritage resource management, and is currently finishing his MA in Public History at UWO. His main interests lie in how to incorporate local knowledge to make history meaningful and approachable to the public.

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The Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud at 06:00 UTC on 17 April 2010. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Dr Jan Oosthoek has produced a podcast on the history of volcanoes in European history.  The podcast can be found here or you can subscribe on iTunes here.  This podcast and its supporting website are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we have republished his text introducing the volcanoes podcast and the further readings lists below:

On 14 April 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted for a second time in two month after having been dormant for just under 200 years. The second eruption caused an ash plume that was ejected into the stratosphere and transported by the wind to Northwest Europe and all air traffic was shut down. As a result the eruption became a major news story. A secondary reason why the eruption became a major news story is the fact that volcanic ash clouds have not affected Europe in such an immediate way in living memory. But looking at the historical record of volcanic eruptions it becomes clear that these events have affected Europe and other parts of the world in significant ways and sometimes even altered the course of history. This extra edition of the Exploring Environmental History podcast considers a small sample of such volcanic event events, including the 536 AD dust veil event, the Black Death and the Laki eruption of 1783.

Resources and further reading
Nature as Historical Protagonist by Bruce M. S. Campbell
The Tawney Memorial Lecture 2008
Watch the lecture online

Gavin Schmidt, 536 AD and all that, RealClimate

L. B. Larsen et.al., “New ice core evidence for a volcanic cause of the A.D. 536 dust veil”, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 35, L04708, 5 PP., 2008.

Stephen Self, Icelandic eruptions, open2.net

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Photo credit: "craft john 2" by Genealogy Photos on Flickr, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic

April marks the one-year anniversary of this website.  The steering committee of ActiveHistory.ca recently discussed the challenges and successes we have faced in our attempt over the past year to bridge the work of historians with a wider audience at Activism and the Academy: Struggles Against Hegemony, a two-day conference organized by the Graduate Women’s Studies Student Association at York University.

ActiveHistory.ca, originally conceived as an open space for the dissemination of short, accessible scholarly articles, has transformed to include a collective blog that focuses on topics such as history on the internet and historical perspectives on current issues, and a new book review section that features reviews of academic work by non-academics.  In line with these developments, the website has continually increased its viewership; indeed, we currently receive as many as 200 views a day.

After launching last April, we actively began soliciting papers from contributors throughout the Canadian history community.  Initially, we suggested papers that concentrated on economic issues, as we were in the midst of the recession, although we quickly broadened our view for papers on any topic that might conceivably be of interest to Canadians, our target audience.

Papers were not forthcoming.  Christopher Moore, a popular Canadian history author and blogger, in fact, suggested that by simply soliciting papers on historical topics relevant to current issues we weren’t being very “active.”  He had a good point.  We had some promising prospects, but few papers materialized. Only in the last month have we been able to post an original Canadian history submission, a fascinating paper by Larry Glassford that traces the changing nature of history education through a survey of twentieth-century Ontario textbooks.

So, we realized we had to change directions in two ways.

First, we began expanding our scope to include global issues. This stemmed from interest that we received from the European historical community, perhaps reflecting a different conception of public intellectuals. For example, we published a paper by Gérard-François Dumont on the Berlin Wall, just in time for the twentieth anniversary of the wall’s fall.  Continuing the international vein, we have also published a paper by French scholar Yves Montenay, in which he compares Vietnamese and Cuban development since their respective communist revolutions, and an essay by David Webster on the use of historical memory in the heated conflict in Papau New Guinea.   Interestingly, we can see the specific search engine terms that direct readers to our site. These papers have received a fair amount of random web traffic, which helps expand our readership.

Our second shift was to move from formalized papers to blogging.  The web is filled with thousands of history blogs.  History News Network in the United States, for example, is a great site that features commentary by leading historians on contemporary issues.  We hoped to find a niche as a blog that focused primarily on presenting a historical perspective to Canadian issues.  ActiveHistory.ca’s five-person steering committee embarked upon a formalized blogging schedule, which has slowly but steadily expanded into a circle of regular and guest contributors.

The biggest challenge that our website faces is the degree to which we have connected academic historians and their work with wider publics.  Although we don’t know exactly who visits our site, we assume that a majority of our audience are academics or fellow history bloggers.  Indeed, one downside of our shift towards blogging is that this has in some ways moved the site away from our original goal of accessible academic papers for a general audience to more of an internal conversation with other Canadian and international history blogs.

We’ve recently introduced a book review section – featuring reviews of academic works by non-academics – as a further means to increase traffic and engage with a broader public audience.  Our first review, John Horn’s rollicking review of Craig Heron’s Booze: A Distilled History, carries with it much promise for the future success of this initiative.  While Horn’s review certainly highlights the strengths and limitations of the book, its style is accessible, engaging, and perhaps most importantly, it is truly a fun read.  Perhaps, then, academics ought to be connecting with people outside the academy not only to teach and share their research, but also because of what academics themselves can learn through this process.

Alongside this, we’ve begun using social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The former has helped us reinforce our internal discussions, while the latter has helped us market in a broad yet random manner. These mediums have so far been somewhat successful in attracting a relatively diverse group of people to our site.

We hope ActiveHistory.ca will continue to expand its readership and serve as a conversation space for people of diverse backgrounds who believe the past is important to our individual and collective lives.  A full-length version of our presentation at the Activism and the Academy conference is available here.

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Photo Credit: David Dennis, creative commons licensed

By Adam Crymble

Thanks to a successful workshop held in Vancouver last month, the Popular Publishing Writer’s Guild has added a new Western Canadian chapter. The guild is a support network of new scholars who are trying to engage a wider public with their research and ideas through newspapers, magazines or online.

Every five months, the group holds an internal call for participation that encourages members to draft a submission for an editor of a popular publication. The group offers feedback and encouragement when requested – though some members have submitted content directly to editors on their own.

Originally the group consisted of a handful of members who attended the first Popular Writing workshop in London, ON in the fall of 2009. That group managed to publish six articles out of eight attempts in various Canadian publications out of the first call and many of the Active History editors are part of the team. For some participants, it was their first ever popular article.

Now they’ve got some friendly competition from the folks out West who will be holding their own first call for participation this month. Some may suggest this will once and for all settle the East vs. West dispute. We in the guild like to think everyone wins when academics engage the public.

Right now, membership is limited to people who have attended one of our Popular Publishing workshops. We don’t claim our guild is responsible for our members successes, but we’re pleased to be expanding and hope to have more content out for the world on a regular basis.

Some of that content will be coming your way in the form of new or revitalized blogs. At the Vancouver workshop, co-organizer Dr. Sean Kheraj led a popular session on “Controlling your Google” and has convinced at least one of the participants to start blogging.

Read what the participants had to say about the event (two of whom started their blogs after being converted at the workshop):

• Merle Massie, University of Saskatchewan, History
• Sean Howard Atkins, University of Alberta, History & Classics
• Lauren Wheeler, University of Alberta, History & Classics

If there are other similar groups out there working towards the same goals, I’d love to hear from you. And if you’d like to learn how to set up a similar group with your friends or classmates, drop me a line and I’m happy to help.

Thank you to the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE), The History Education Network (THEN / HiER), Canada’s History Magazine and the University of British Columbia for their support bringing the last workshop together.

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