History on the Internet

A Journey Through Inuit Oral Traditions: Website Review of Listening to Our Past

June 9, 2011

Listening to Our Past explores the rich cultural heritage of the people of Nunavut.  The website was created by Nunavut Arctic College and l’Association des francophones du Nunavut.  The site aims to present history recorded though oral traditions and oral histories told by Nunavut elders.  The site is tri-lingual and material is available in English, [...]

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The Rise and Fall of Ideas: Having fun with Google N-Grams

May 23, 2011

We need to make sense of large quantities of information in order to do ‘big history’ and provide a context into which we can write our smaller studies. In this post, I’ll tell you what an ngram is, show some cool pictures, and hopefully drive you to have some fun with this.

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The Webby Nominees Are In

May 2, 2011

A feature of some notable Webby nominees.

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New Paper: Matthew Hayday on “The History of the Recent”

April 12, 2011

Professor Matthew Hayday of the University of Guelph has written an evocative piece on some of the joys and potential pitfalls of engaging living activists in historical research. His piece, “The History of the Recent: Reflections on Social Movement History, Research Methods and the Rapid Passage of Time,” is a useful read for anybody interested in the connections between oral history, professional historians, social movements, and activists.

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Using Word Clouds to Quickly See the Political Past

April 11, 2011

This is a demonstration by Ian Milligan of how word clouds can be used to visually display textual documents, with possible applications in the educational field, media field, and elsewhere. It also has lots of pretty pictures.

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Call for Website reviewers

March 11, 2011

ActiveHistory.ca is expanding its review section to include scholarly analyses of websites. It is imperiative in this “digital age” to develop the tools necessary to critically engage with this expanding resource base.

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Open Source Tools For Heritage Organizations

March 10, 2011

Heritage organizations are continuously working to establish a digital presence and integrate digital tools into their collection management practices. Open source software can be a huge benefit for an organization with a limited technology budget.

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Twitter in the Classroom

March 3, 2011

This post discusses the potential uses of Twitter in the classroom, from the position of somebody who was once a skeptic.

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Step by Step: Zotero

February 22, 2011

In this post, I’ll explain to students how to install Zotero on their home computers. As a teaching assistant, I’ve found this to be the most useful technological skill that I’ve taught undergraduates – many have confirmed this by noting how they now use it.

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