To assist those affected by the disasters in Japan, Google is undertaking a really interesting project. Part of this project is the creation of a collaborative website called Mirai e no Kioku, which gives Japanese people and survivors the opportunity to post and share photographs, videos, and memories related to places as they were prior to the disasters of March 2011 (media and website only available in Japanese). Another interesting aspect that non-Japanese speaking people can participate in is a re-visualization project initiated by Google, which offers users a chance to re-experience places through archived street view footage of affected areas. The site uses Streetview data to populate an archived digital landscape for the user. The interactive map of Japan allows users to choose either a before or after street view of several locations across the country (note some areas are archived more thoroughly than others). In the About section of the website, places such as Ishinomaki, Onagawa, and and Soma are identified as areas that were significantly affected. Users can explore these regions while navigating virtually along roads and highways, slipping back and forth through time with before and after views.

Memories for the Future Streetview Map

The Memories for the Future project along with the interactive map, are two great examples of how collaborative technologies can serve local communities in archiving and recalling private and collective memory(ies) following traumatic events. In an effort to promote healing, users participating in Mirai e no Kioku website can archive and share private memories of places, people, and experiences through cultural media – literally chronicling their ‘memories for the future.’ Google maintains that “seeing the street-level imagery of the affected areas puts the plight of these communities into perspective” and that this project “ensures that the memories of the disaster remain relevant and tangible for future generations.” Despite users being physically separated from the ‘real’ places they seek to revisit in the Streetview maps through their computer screens, there is something to be said about re-visualizing past places. Some people, such as myself, doubt the ability and ‘authenticity’ of revisiting and recreating past places through augmented reality. While I won’t get into this debate here, I wonder if we can truly revisit the recent past through digital projects such as the Streetview archive? What if you are not a stranger to the past, and what if the virtual places you seek to revisit are familiar?

The Memories for the Future project is similar to the Arcade Fire website The Wilderness Downtown created for their music video “We Used to Wait.” The user enters the street address of his or her childhood home and the site will use Streetview and Google maps data to populate an interactive music video. While listening to “We Used to Wait” you can re-visualize your childhood neighbourhood as it exists today. Drawing on notions of nostalgia, both the song and the video are re-narrated through the experience of the user. Similarly, users of the Memories for the Future website are given a chance to revisit (albeit visually) familiar places before they were destroyed, and through this process, users can create their own narratives of place. I can also get a sense of the damage by using the before and after views. Although I am not personally affected, the sense of destruction becomes very real and I am saddened while viewing homes missing from the spaces they once occupied. Buildings and homes disappear with the click of my mouse, and the sites they used to occupy transform into disorienting and chaotic digital landscapes.

Before March 2011 Earthquake: Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, ©Google Image Data, July 2011.

After March 2011 Earthquake: Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, ©Google Image Data, July 2011.

In terms of living memory, digital landscapes can offer individuals the opportunity to recall memory of places that no longer exist. Lost places and childhood homes cannot be re-experienced entirely; taking into account sensory experiences involving sounds, smells, and touch remind us that there are limits to revisiting past places. Memories cannot be re-experienced. But through sight there is the ability to recall, something that is significant when taking into account that for the Japanese who lost their homes, their personal items and ‘sense of place’ were altered or destroyed. Memories for the Future demonstrates how collaborative new media and digital landscape projects have something to offer individuals, communities, and heritage groups when it comes to archiving visual components of past places. These digital initiatives also raise some interesting questions about memory, archiving Google data, and placemaking through public collaboration.

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The Programming Historian

Depending on your vantage point, we have a looming opportunity – or a looming problem. Historical digital sources have reached a scale where they defy conventional analysis and now call out for computational analysis. The Internet Archive alone has 2.9 million texts, there are 2.6 million pages of historical newspapers archived at the Chronicling America site of the US Library of Congress, the McCord Museum at McGill University has over 80,000 historical photographs, and Google Books has now digitized fifteen million books out of their total goal of 130 million. Archives are increasingly committed to preserving cultural heritage materials in digital, rather than more traditional analog, forms. This is perhaps best exemplified in Canada by digitization priorities at Library and Archives Canada. The amount of accessible digital information continues to grow daily, making digital humanities projects increasingly feasible, and for that matter, necessary.

In this post, I will do two things. Firstly, I will give a sense of how much information is out there, and make the case for why Canadian historians need to start thinking about it. Secondly, I will introduce readers to the Programming Historian, a wonderful resources that at least puts you on the right track to a programming frame of mind.

TMI?

Too much information? (Photo of FEMA Publications Warehouse, WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/zjmlYc

Information overload is not new. People have long worried about the impact of too much information. In the 16th century, the German priest Martin Luther decried that the “multitude of books [were] a great evil,” in the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe bemoaned that “[t]he enormous multiplication of books in every branch of knowledge is one of the greatest evils of this age,” and as recently as 1970, American historian Lewis Mumford lamented that “the overproduction of books will bring about a state of intellectual enervation and depletion hardly to be distinguished from massive ignorance.” The rise of born-digital sources must thus be seen in this continuous context of hand wringing around the expansion and rise of information.

Despite the frustrations of microfilm for today’s historians, as well as the pitfalls of separating the wheat from the chaff amongst rising numbers of modern sources, historians have undoubtedly benefitted from these technical developments. This is perhaps disproportionately for those engaged in social and cultural pursuits. Historians will profit meaningfully from born-digital sources. These, however, do present added – albeit surmountable – challenges due to their scope and production processes. Sources do not always have attributable or reliable authorship, are often undated, but in aggregate can give a sense of the zeitgeist of a time.

Library of Congress (Photo from WikiMedia Commons - http://bit.ly/ArU8YZ)

Storage price is falling. For example, James Gleick [in his book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood] estimates that the Library of Congress collection is around 10TB (although the LOC itself claims around 200TB). These would previously have been unimaginable figures; I can now pick up 10TB of data storage for under a thousand dollars. Born-digital collections are larger, of course: the LOC’s digital collection is 254TB, larger than their print holdings, and the Internet Archive now has 3 Petabytes (PB) of information, growing at 12TB/month! In Canada, LAC has about 4TB of federal government web information and 7TB in its own internet archive. Information is also being preserved through programs such as the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media’s September 11th Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (focusing on Hurricanes Katrina and Rita), and, as of writing, the #Occupy archive. Online content is curated and preserved en masse: photographs, news reports, blog posts, and now tweets. These complement more traditional efforts at collecting and preserving oral histories and personal recollections, which are then geo-tagged, transcribed, and placed online.

What can we do about this conventional and especially born-digital deluge? There are no simple answers, but historians must begin to conceptualize new additions to their traditional research and pedagogical toolkits.

Where to Start: Programming

By the end of the Programming Historian, you'll have a basic know-how of Python and will be able to tackle projects requiring textual analysis.

One important thing we can do with this deluge of information is learn how to interact with digital information on a mass scale. Luckily, we have a tremendous resource available to us: The Programming Historian, by William Turkel and Alan MacEachern, hosted on the Network in Canadian History & Environment (NiCHE) site. Why might you want to open up this free, open-access website book?

• If you were to try to deal with born-digital sources in a traditional manner, you would spend A LOT of time flicking through websites. Much of it hasn’t been curated, and realistically, you could not read every blog comment published on a given day in Canada, navigate the tweets, or so forth. For this, you will need computational analysis.
• The same holds true for the conventional array of information discussed above: if you want to use 2.6 million newspaper pages to their full potential, there must be a way to “distant read” it.
• Digital history is ‘hot.’ The American Historical Association, meeting right now, is full of panels and twitter has been afire with the field. Even if you do not necessarily see yourself using programming languages, it behooves you to be able to understand it.
• And, most importantly, it isn’t that hard, and it doesn’t take that much time. You could move through the whole guide in a weekend, or – better yet – break it into small chunks, spending 20-30 minutes here and there.
• Finally, I believe we’ll also have to equip the next generation of historians, as I’ve written about elsewhere on ActiveHistory.ca.

The Programming Historian is very straight forward, but by the end of it, you’ll be able to do the following:

• In an automated, systematic fashion, you will be able to take a website and extract all of the words from it for further analysis.
• Establish word frequency, similar to what a Wordle word cloud displays (the possibile utility of this is discussed elsewhere on this site). Indeed, you will be able to make your very own tag clouds!
• Move beyond word frequency to see the keyword-in-context – i.e. you see that the word ‘aboriginal’ appears a hundred times in a given site, so why not see where it has appeared. This enables you to move very quickly to the relevant information.
• Download and harvest information automatically. Say you find a large collection of a hundred websites. Rather than clicking repeatedly through each to download the information, a simple script can do it for you!

Conclusion (and a proviso about why we don’t all have to be programmers!)

Don’t be afraid. It’s New Years, so why not make it your resolution as a historian to figure out some of these very basic steps. It could make you a better historian, or in any case, will equip you to figure out what’s going on. In any case, it’s an additional tool in one’s toolkit. Unlike earlier social science histories of counting with computers in the 1970s (which did revolutionize areas of historical inquiry), it is important to remember that we can use broad analysis to find issues, but then move dynamically down into context.

That all said, historians will not all have to become programmers. Just as not all historians need a firm grasp of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), or a developed understanding of the methodological implications of community-based oral history, or in-depth engagement with cutting edge demographic models, not all historians have to approach their trade from a computational perspective. Nor should they. Computational history – to use only a few examples – does not replace close reading, traditional archival inquiry, or going into communities to uncover notions of collective memory or trauma. Indeed, computational historians will play a facilitative role and provide a broader reading context; yet there will still be historians, collecting relevant primary and secondary sources, analyzing and contextualizing them, situating them in convincing narratives or explanatory frameworks, and disseminating their findings to wider audiences.

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Banting House, London, Ontario

Over the past year, I have become very passionate about social media in cultural and heritage institutions, this passion grew after attending the Museum Next 2011 Conference in Edinburgh. It still baffles me that many museums/arts organizations still do not have a social media presence. If you are one of these establishments – stop what you’re doing, put everything down and carry on reading.

I have realized that we are in a bit of a rut in the not-for-profit heritage industry. Those entering the field tend to embrace social media and encourage change. Those close to retiring from the profession, and in positions of power, often tend to be reluctant to try something new and challenge the validity of social media. I am lucky that in my experiences I have not faced this challenge when trying to push the benefits of social media, but unfortunately many of us do.

It is important to note that establishing a good social media policy is crucial before indulging in this exciting world of conversation and knowledge sharing. Most of the following points appear in the social media policy for Banting House. If you’re looking for a foundation, there are plenty social media policy templates online.

I manage the social media for Banting House National Historic Site of Canada (@BantingHouse) and based on my experience these are ten tips about managing an institutional social media presence.

1. Yes, you do have time for social media. The most common excuse I hear for not embracing social media is that there is no time for it. It takes less than 5 minutes to write a tweet or Facebook post. Schedule a time (every day) for doing your social media. If you do it at the same time every day, it will become a force of habit. You can also (if you really have to) schedule tweets ahead of time by using a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite. However, just posting and not creating conversation is bad social media etiquette. Organizations should be prepared to answer and respond to tweets.

2. Yes you have time, but don’t get caught up in reading every post or tweet. Sometimes your feed will be filled with amazing content and won’t want to go back to what you were doing. But, unless you are the social media manager or social media is your only job – you might want to limit the time you spend on it. Try favouriting or bookmarking interesting posts so that you can read them later.

3. Create epic content. Try to avoid posting content that only you will find interesting. Keep in mind that your audience is broad and has many different interests, so keep them keen!

4. Keep it timely. Make sure your content is relevant and timely. Simple.

5. Don’t flood. Sometimes, when you’re managing a social media presence and have had a gap in posts – the need to post everything at once becomes overwhelming. Space it out – you don’t want to tick your readers/followers off by flooding their feed.

6. Try to limit how many people are posting to your organizational account. Sometimes it can become confusing if you have several people posting from one account. If you choose to have more than one person posting, perhaps use the initials after each post so that you know who has responded.

7. Each post does not need to go through 2392384092384902830 people to be approved. Trust your employees. If approval is necessary pre-approve a large amount of content at once so that posts can be frequent and not only once every few weeks.

8. Reply to those who tweet and comment on your content. It’s common courtesy. They will become your biggest fans if you do this!

9. Don’t cheat. One of the biggest pet peeves I have is when I see tweets posted to Facebook. Yes, you can post the same content to each medium, but don’t cheat. Take the time to format it appropriately for each forum.

10. Have fun! Social media is fun, engaging and is a free way to promote not-for-profit organizations on a low budget. Take advantage!

Jenn Nelson is a recent graduate of the MA Public History Program at the University of Western Ontario. She has experience working at several museum and heritage institutions such as the National Museum of Scotland, Banting House National Historic Site of Canada and the Ontario Heritage Trust. Her specialties include social media and digital media, event planning and research.

UA archives, Upper Arlington History, Flickr Commons

Earlier this month there was considerable discussion on the ARCAN and the Archives & Archivists listserves about which photo sharing/hosting sites can best serve the needs of archival institutions.  Despite all the chatter there was little consensus on what hosting site was ideal for archival organizations.

Many cultural heritage groups are looking for affordable solutions to making their collections more accessible to the general public.  There are numerous options available but no clear winner has come across as an ideal image hosting site.

The current forerunners of the free or low cost image sharing options include:

Flickr
There are three different account options available to organizations using Flickr; the free account, a professional account, and a Flickr commons account.  All three accounts have the ability to include metadata in photograph tags and include photo descriptions.  Users also have the option of limiting access to photographs or making them available to everyone. Organizations can organize photographs into collections, overlay photographs on maps, and include copyright statements.

Flickr Free Account
-Upload limit of two videos and 300MB worth of photos each calendar month.
-Only small compressed images are available to you and to the public
-Does not store high-resolution originals for you.
-Only the 200 most recent photographs will be displayed.

Flickr Professional Account
-Annual fee of $24.95 US dollars.
-Unlimited photo and video uploads, unlimited storage and bandwith
-The ability to show high definition video
-Flickr stores all high-resolution originals you upload, which you can later download at anytime while you have your Pro account.
-Compiles basic user statistics

Flickr Commons
-An initiative started in 2008 by Flickr and the Library of Congress that was designed specifically to increase accessibility to publicly held collections.
-Registration process is required as you must be a cultural heritage or public organization. Currently the registration process includes a waiting period for approval.
-There is a wide range of community for support for tech problems and description.
-All material uploaded MUST have no known copyright restrictions
-Additional details on institutions results from posting material on Flickr Commons can be seen here.

Picasa Web Albums
-Includes 1 GB of free storage for photos and videos. Photos up to 800 x 800 pixels in size and videos up to 15 minutes won’t count towards your free storage.  Once you’ve reached your limit photographs will automatically be re-sized to not count toward your limit.
-Additional storage can be purchased for an annual fee (20GB for $5, 80GB for $20, 200GB for $50, etc).
-Account is automatically linked to other Google applications such as Google+ and analytics.
-Metadata and description details can easily be attached, including person and geographical tags.
-Access to photos can be restricted and you can attach copyright descriptions.
-Photographs can be sorted into collections using the photo album feature.
-Includes an easy to use export feature that will export your data and photographs.

Wikimedia Commons
-Focuses on public domain and freely licensed material that can be used for educational purposes.  This means that material bust be  free reuse or the creation of derivative works for any purpose (including commercial).
-Integrated with Wikipedia
-Files are uploaded using a template information form which includes fields for description, date, source, author, and permission information.
-Uses open file formats only.  File size limits is 100MB
-You can set up galleries and contribute to other relevant galleries and categories.
-Includes geocoding functionality
-There is a bit of a learning curve for formatting descriptions if you have never used wiki’ before, but there is a tremendous amount of documentation and community support in the Wikimedia community if you have problems.

So, what does all this mean? I don’t think there is a clear winner.  It boils down to the quantity and type of information you want to put online.  For example, Flickr Commons has a great reputation as it hosts only cultural heritage institutions but only information that has no copyright restrictions can be posted, which might not be ideal for an institution with a lot of more recent photographs.

Organizations should consider their intended audiences, the copyright status of their material, the file size and quality of their material, the cost, the need for cloud backups, and how much time a staff person can dedicate to updating an account.

What experience have you had using an image hosting site? What digital platforms have you found successful in disseminating content to a broad audience?

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Surveying all of cosmic history using ChronoZoom: you can't even see human history up there in the upper right corner.

Historians aren’t always the best at crossing the hall to the sociologists across the way, let alone the astronomers, physicians, or geologists across campus. Scientists who study the Big Bang, however, are engaged in history – just a (very) different kind. Similarly, those who study the very long-term geographical forces that have shaped Earth, those who study evolutionary processes across flora and fauna, even those who study broader, galactic or universal phenomena, are often seen as very distinct from historians.

Big History, a new and emerging field, seeks to bridge these very real but also occasionally artificial disciplinary boundaries. It can be hard, however, to really establish how we can go forward and what a Big History approach might look like in real, deliverable terms (Bill Gates and David Christian have a great project also looking at how to teach these concepts to classrooms). Look no further: ChronoZoom, from the University of California-Berkeley’s Department of Earth and Planetary Science, has a working model that gives us a sense of what this might look like.

What is ChronoZoom? Just as historians cannot reasonably access millions of books without heavy computational aids, humans have difficulty even conceiving of the scope of ‘big’ human history that covers billions of years. ChronoZoom, “a tool to aid the comprehension of time relationships between events, trends, and themes,” aids in this. The most developed big history project yet in existence, ChronoZoom ties together extant online resources (scholarly articles, photographs, audio-visual media, etc.) by placing them along a constant timeline, stretching along a 13.7 billion year continuum from the Big Bang until the present day. While this would be initially overwhelming, its use of Microsoft’s Seadragon Deep Zoom technology – a smooth means of transitioning around an extremely large and high-resolution file without overwhelming the computer (similar to how one navigates Google Maps) – will allow a user to swap between an overview of natural history, a snapshot of human history, to a more focused overview of major events in the 19th century. Historians use time as a primary frame of analysis, and ChronoZoom represents the first major search engine project to recognize it as a constant base. Imagine using this in a classroom, to give students a sense of how long ago events truly were. Or, just sitting at home, using it almost as a “total perspective vertex” as Douglas Adams humorously foresaw in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

ChronoZoom after literally zooming into all of human history (3500BC onwards)

ChronoZoom isn’t fully fleshed out yet, but a very good working demo let’s us see some of the potential. Please fire it up yourself here (you’ll need to download Microsoft Silverlight for it to fully work). At first, it looks like a static poster (pictured above): sophisticated, to be sure, but nothing too exceptional. In the lower left hand of the poster we have the Big Bang, and, in the upper right, we have human history. However, you can’t see any human history at this point – it’s too small. But if you click on the ‘human history’ bar at the top, we begin to rapidly and fluidly zoom into the upper right hand of the corner. Cosmic history recedes into the foreground, Earth & Life history as well, pre-history appears and disappears.. and then we see human history. This process really needs to be played out for yourself: watching billions of years fly by, receding, our ‘human history’ a mere dot in this billions of years.

December 2000: on the very same chart that contained all of Cosmic History!

And from here, we can zoom in even more: to the 2nd Millenium A.D. for example, to the 20th Century alone, to its 10th Decade, to the year 2000, until finally, in the very upper-right corner of the map, we see New Year’s Eve of the year 2000 (and the beginning of our 3rd Millenium). This is a fantastic way to describe, deliver, and allow people to dynamically manipulate an otherwise inconceivable amount of historical information covering an absurd amount of time.

It seems weird to be describing, in text, such a dynamic website. What are you waiting for? Get out there and check it out! What do you think about it? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

If Big History fascinates you, please watch this TED video by David Christian on Big History. I guarantee you’ll find it entertaining and provocative.

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The vastness and variety of the collections of the British Museum speaks to more than just the objects themselves. These artifacts speak to how we as humans have evolved, survived, worshipped, expressed love and made war. A simple mortar and pestle tells of how we shaped the agricultural revolution and used food as a means of communion, while ancient but beautiful sculptures of people, gods, and animals show the very human impulse to create art not only for the sake of beauty, but in an earnest attempt to try to understand our environment and experiences.

For me, among the highlights of the British Museum is the Enlightenment Room which is an eclectic mix of books and objects that speaks to the obsession with collecting that characterized the life of Hans Sloane, the British physician whose library and cabinet of curiosities formed the basis for the British Museum. The obsession with collecting, coupled with the power balance of colonialism, helped in part to create the extensive collections of the British Museum. As you inspect the mummies you can almost picture a late 19th century expedition to excavate these objects and bring them to Britain. It wasn’t until later in the 20th century that laws were passed that prevented many of these types of practices.

Of course, what this has resulted in now are issues of ownership over many of these antiquities. There are questions of who exactly these objects belong to, and where it is that they should be housed. The debate is a common one in the museum world and in many ways the British museum has handled it deftly, discussing the debate in great detail in a number of its exhibits where it is most relevant, for example, in its presentation of The Elgin Marbles.

Issues of repatriation are complicated, and by no means can generalizations be made. The types of objects and their sources are all factors to consider, as are the circumstances under which they were came to be where they now reside. There are also questions regarding the potential benefits or pitfalls if these objects were to be returned.

In an episode entitled, “Mummy of Hornedjitef” from the BBC podcast, A History of the World in 100 Objects, which explores one hundred key artifacts from the collections of the British Museum, Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif was asked about how she felt about seeing Egyptian mummies on display in a museum so far from their original home. Soueif replies that, “Ultimately, it’s probably no bad thing to have Egyptians obelisks, stones and statues sprinkled all over the world, it reminds us of ages of colonialism , yes, but it also reminds the world of our common heritage.” As Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, describes it, the objects are a means to tell the history of the world as “one shared story,” or as Soueif says, “an ongoing joint project, where one lot of people picked up where another had left off.” Undoubtedly, this theme of a common humanity speaks to the visitor of the British Museum as they are able to experience (for free) a concentrated collection of objects from different places and eras in one setting. In addition, the museum provides a center for scholarly research in the fields of history, anthropology and archeology, among others.

For those wishing to explore the artifacts of the British Museum, or issues of repatriation in more detail, I would highly recommend the BBC podcast series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, or its accompanying book, just recently published. Historians, writers, and other persons of note provide insight into the artifacts and their potential meanings in understanding the evolution of humans and their culture, while several episodes also deal with issues of repatriation that affect museums today. The podcast can be accessed for free online or through iTunes, and the book is widely available.

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One such example is Stacey Zembrycki’s website, “Sharing Authority With Baba: A Collaborative History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community, 1901-1939.” Produced through Concordia University’s Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), this site serves as an exemplary model of the innovative ways that scholarly work can be shared in a digital format.

The site opens with a brief description of its contents, along with an invitation to download a historical walking tour of the Donovan, including a guide and audio files of Sudbury’s Ukrainian community. From here, web surfers can navigate a range of options in a highly interactive learning process.

A project tab leads to a more detailed description of the work, outlining her guiding theory and methodology. Exploring the ongoing process of community, Zembrycki uses this space to engage readers with some of philosophical pillars of oral history, concisely blending her personal research experience with the broader politics of oral history. More information about the interviews is located under a social network tab, which offers both visual and written descriptions of people and place in Sudbury. Central here is Baba, who played a pivotal role in facilitating the research project.

Following this is a web of stories where written historical sketches are enhanced by an intricate web of oral interviews, allowing for the voices of interview participants to be heard. This is further supplemented by an interactive memoryscape that locates photographs on a map of Sudbury. A photo gallery serving as a community photo album brings the past much more vividly to life in the wide array of historical photographs on display. A list of credits and a site index top off this inventive work, providing further information about those involved in the production of the research and site, and links to further publications.

This format does not easily fit into traditional modes of scholarship, but herein is also its greatest strength. In written form, an author has a great deal of control in determining the path of the narrative and the flow of information. Digital history does not easily lend itself to long explanatory arguments or in-depth discussions of complex phenomena. Images, maps and audio files can easily lure attention away from the text, and visitors have greater freedom to pick and choose their flow of information.

Yet it is precisely this multi-sensory stimulation that can greatly enhance the learning experience. It becomes possible to not only read about, but to see, hear and locate a diversity of historical experiences. Digital history can bring the past to life in new, exciting and vivid ways.

Digital history offers an added benefit for oral historians who grapple with difficult questions around “sharing authority”, power relations in the research and writing process, and the complexities of transferring the spoken word to written form. Including audio files provides space for people to speak for themselves, capturing cadence, tone and inflection, which in turn can greatly affect the meaning and intention of what is being said. Sound editing, selecting clips and design can still impede a perfect balance of power, but it certainly is a big step towards allowing people to speak for themselves.

Zembrycki’s work, like much digital history, is also a project of public history. Its accessibility leaves her accountable to a much wider audience than peer reviewers, including the people from the community she has undertaken to study. But its value certainly doesn’t end in the realm of public history – it also has much to contribute to professional historical studies.

Zembrycki contributes to a growing body of historical work which engages studies of the past with new technology, adding to an increasingly impressive body of scholarly work that is available online. It serves as another striking reminder of the many benefits of remaining open to new technologies both in the classroom and within academic research. As Zembrycki illustrates, the end results can be the beginning of boundless possibilities for a future that more deeply connects with its past.

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Faced with humanitarian crises, outbreaks of civil war, and working in some of the world’s most unstable places, United Nations peacekeeping missions are taxed to their limit. This month, historian Donald Hempson traces the evolution of United Nations peacekeeping over more than six decades to highlight the challenges associated with an ever more robust approach to international peacekeeping and conflict resolution. The limitations of the current model force supporters of UN peacekeeping operations to confront the hard questions of whether or not the United Nations is equipped for missions that now entail more peace implementation and enforcement than peacekeeping, especially in an environment of evermore diminishing resources and international will for prolonged and complex peacekeeping initiatives.

• This article includes a podcast, images, and maps  •

Avoiding the Scourge of War: The Challenges of United Nations Peacekeeping

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The network of links stemming from ianmilligan.ca (activehistory.ca alone was too big!). This gives you a visual sense of the power behind hyperlinked information!

We will need to make dramatic changes to history undergraduate curriculums by aggressively implementing digital literacy programmes. This will benefit both our students and the historical profession.

Why? Let’s imagine how a future historian will tackle the question of what everyday life was in September 2011 – today. She will have a tremendous array of sources at her fingertips: the standard newspaper and media reports and oral interviews that we use today, but also a ton of added sources that would help give a sense of the flavour of daily life. Two hundred million tweets are sent every day. Hundreds of thousands of blog posts. Incredible arrays of commentary, YouTube videos, online comments, viewership and readership numbers will all hopefully be available to this historian.

But how will she read it all? Realistically, nobody is ever going to be able to get through all the tweets for even just one day: let alone categorize, analyze, and meaningfully interact with it. She’ll need to use digital tools. We are at a crossroads. This sort of history won’t be the be all and end all of future historical research, but I believe that somebody is going to do this sort of social history. Let’s make sure our future students are ready for it!

Using Mathematica, I have been able to track the rise and fall of the terms "war" (red) and "peace" (blue) across a comprehensive Top-40 Lyrics Database.

We need to begin thinking about how we are going to train historians of the future, today. Somebody is going to do this work. They are probably sitting in high school or elementary school classrooms today. When they show up at the university, let’s make sure that we’re ready to train them to write the history of today.. tomorrow. This is not simply for historians who fashion themselves as social scientists, as opposed to those who see themselves as pure humanists. It’s about deploying a tool which can provide information through which we can drape our stories, our interviews, our human anecdotes, etc.

Historians need to begin thinking about digital literacy and writing programs that will help access these sources. What’s going on right now? Tons. I have previously discussed one of the biggest current projects, the Culturomics project and their accessible Google n-gram viewer. You can see the rise and fall of a word or phrase (an ngram) and see how much it has been used across several centuries. It’s an incredible project, albeit not without some caution needed in how it is approached. There are also several digital history projects ongoing, some of which has garnered considerable attention (such as the Criminal Intent project in the New York Times).

This is just a hint of what’s to come. We need to be able to populate these future projects with even more historians. Which means thinking about how to train them today. Training these people by graduate school is simply too late, however. We need to begin training undergraduates in their first year. Indeed, as a recent study carried out at the University of Rochester indicates, students won’t adopt new technologies by the time they get to graduate work – the risks are too high. Let’s get them as undergrads.

What could a digital literacy programme look like for the next generation of historians, so that they’re ready to begin thinking and tackling these issues?

• We’ll need a firm grasp of the historiographic context of this shift – i.e. the old school quantitative historians, who crunched the census of Hamilton for example, or poured considerable time and effort into understanding demographic shift.
• Basic digital tools: What is cloud computing? How can we secure and backup our data?
• How can we digitally organize conventional sources? I’ve discussed this before in my post on Zotero.
• Grasping the SHEER SCOPE of large digital depositories. It’s one thing to say that Google Books has fifteen million books. It’s another to really grasp this. And to further realize what a drop in the bucket that is compared to other repositories of automated data being collected every day.
• Basic programming? The ‘Programming Historian‘ is a great start. What most of us will have to do won’t be so complicated and we need to be able to do it ourselves. While well-funded projects may be able to raise the funds to recruit teams of programmers to join them, or others may form collaborative and interdisciplinary work-teams, many historians will not be able to do so. They should be self-sufficient in this regard, at least for more simple and routine data mining exercises.

Our students should be able to come out of undergraduate history programs and be truly equipped for our knowledge economy and for the future demands of the profession. This will help teaching, research, and labour market outcomes. Information is increasingly being generated by the internet, written on the internet, and being consumed by internet users. People need to be able to create it, interact with it, in a fluent, comfortable manner.

What do you think? Should historians make this shift? Or are there disadvantages that I’m overlooking in my enthusiasm for this field of research? I’d love to hear from you all, especially as I begin my next project (a digital history of postwar English-Canadian youth).

“Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens, and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer, they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self- righteously. Don’t forget.” – Susan Sontag

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. What struck me during the past few days leading up to the anniversary, was the overwhelming amount of historical images of 9/11 that are recirculating around social media websites, print media, news articles, and blogs.[1] With cultural media we are constantly re-imaging and re-imagining the past.

These images are for the most part used to commemorate the events and the tragic loss of life endured that day. Are photographs of 9/11 vestiges that force us to come to terms with the violence and trauma endured as a society? Although photographs are more than just ‘evidence’ of past events, they often speak to us despite their captions and accompanying text. Photographs are also a language on their own that we are versed in as consumers of media. For me, images of 9/11 prompt memory of that day and invoke feelings of fear and loss.

The photographs I speak of clutter our collective memory and are depictions of the scarred landscapes and cityscapes of 9/11. They display smoking, crumbling buildings and damaged emergency response vehicles. We see the troubled faces of witnesses, victims, firefighters, police, families and countless others standing near crash sites, helplessly. We contemplate the Falling Man and the impossible decision he (and hundreds of others) made to jump. Thousands upon thousands of tattered papers and documents appear littering the streets of New York, possibly reminding us that we are not safe no matter where we work or play. For me, some of most horrific photographs capture the act as it was about to occur, the airliner about to make contact with the tower. But how do traumatic images like these impact collective memory of 9/11, and what are the politics surrounding their recirculation, particularly as images of a traumatic event? What does this mean for us as a society? Do they still shock us? Should they? Critics who are against the circulation of photographs depicting violence, war, and tragedy, cite our fascination as a society with morbid images, and rightfully so.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), scholar and cultural critic Susan Sontag remarked on the audience’s experience of gazing at images of trauma and violence:

Something becomes real—to those who are elsewhere, following it as “news”—by being photographed. But a catastrophe that is experienced will often seem eerily like its representation. The attack on the World Trade Center on September 11 2001, was described as “unreal,” “surreal,” “like a movie,” in many of the first accounts of those who escaped from the towers or watched from nearby. (After four decades of big-budget Hollywood disaster films, “It felt like a movie” seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through: “It felt like a dream.”)

Perhaps then, for witnesses it was surreal and for consumers of media, 9/11 became a horrifying truth. Photographs of  9/11 serve as painful reminders of that day, almost storing our memories for us. The infamous image of the Falling Man is a telling example of the politics of visual representation. When it was initially printed, critics described the image as disturbing, commenting on the act of taking the photograph: “if it’s disturbing to look at these pictures over your morning cornflakes, it’s traumatic to take them, and witness the terrible events of September 11th.” Richard Drew, who photographed the Falling Man maintains that it was just part of his job as a journalist.

It’s part of the history that I have been able to photograph in my lifetime for the AP [Associated Press], whether it be a car wreck, or a fashion show, or this thing. I just have to place in that file drawer where you say “I have covered major stuff”, and this will go in that major file drawer.”

Others like Mark D. Thompson viewed the Falling Man as a powerful and necessary testament to the existential crisis following 9/11. According to Sontag, epic photographs such as that of the Falling Man, become “the ultra familiar, ultra-celebrated image[s] – of agony, of ruin” and they are “an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of war.” As a society that consumes media at a fast rate, have wee seen too much? Have these images lost their impact? Are we too distant from 9/11 as an audience? Ten years have gone by, and for most of us who didn’t experience 9/11 firs hard, we can only know it, feel it, and see it through the media and representation.

The Falling Man was reproduced on page seven of The New Tork Times on September 12, 2001, and was not reprinted in the Times until six years later due to controversy and outcry from readership. Speculations as to the identity of the Falling Man began almost immediately after the photo was printed and controversy arose after many claimed his identity. There is even a documentary about the history of the photograph called 9/11: The Falling Man (2006). It seems that there is a struggle between the intent of the photograph as an object of art and visual representation and the context of how it will be viewed and understood by the public.

Fast forward ten years later, do they hold the same meaning in 2011? Do they horrify us? Or are they part of a much larger collection of images of war and trauma that we’ve been inundated with since 2001? While flipping through Life 100s Photographs that Changed the World a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon the image of the Falling Man alongside other photographs of tragedy and war. It haunts me no matter what context I am viewing it from.

The September 11 Memorial Museum has created a free smart phone application called Explore 9/11, which allows users to view historical photographs of 9/11 in place while listening to witness testimonies. Remarkably, Explore 9/11 also allows users to submit and share their own media through the Museum’s Make History website. This kind of participatory practice transforms private and corporate photography into sites of memory for the viewing public. I think people will ignore their cornflakes for a few moments to take the time to view these images, I know I did.

In a recent article about Explore 9/11, one reader commented: “After reading this article, I got up from the sofa, went to another room to fetch my iPhone 4, and downloaded Explore 9/11. This is the kind of intelligent interest in the tragedy we need to see more of.” Another reader remarked: ” I think that something could have been done all those inocent people who died and dont have anything to do with politics or other stuff like countries fighting eachother like little kids…. Remember 9/11.”

On the other hand, someone else wrote: “The year 2001 should not be repeated.” I think to myself after reading this comment “you are entirely right,” but does looking at photographs repeat the event? Can we chose to not look? Deciding not to look does not mean we decide to forget. At the same time, viewing does not equate memorializing 9/11.  We need to have a little more faith in the viewing public while maintaining the utmost respect for witnesses, victims and families. Let the photographs haunt us, as they should.

How have these images impacted you as an audience? Please leave a comment as I would love to hear your interpretations.

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