The oil slick as seen from space, June 22 2010 (wikipedia.com)

Public outrage mounts with every successive failure to mend the gaping wound in the Gulf of Mexico seabed. Struggling to affirm his leadership in the spill’s wake, President Obama recently described the disaster as “an environmental 9/11,” underscoring the need for a bold new energy-environment policy.

Through reference to the still-poignant memory of 9/11, the president seems to be cultivating an atmosphere conducive to a sweeping energy security agenda. “Beyond the risks inherent in drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth,” President Obama recently asserted, “… our continued dependence on fossil fuels will jeopardise our national security. It will smother our planet. And it will continue to put our economy and our environment at risk.”

Is this simple hyperbole aimed at distancing the Oval Office from the perceived incompetence of BP executives, not to mention his predecessor’s disaster-relief experiences on the Gulf Coast? Will the Gulf oil spill be as defining a moment for the Obama presidency as 9/11 was for Bush the Younger? Perhaps not. But the environmental-policy landscape has clearly been changed irrevocably.

Of course, much of Canadian security and foreign policy post-9/11 was forced to respond, if not always mimic,  the American experience: military engagement in Afghanistan but not Iraq, security certificates, public debates about the place of people with names like Arar and Khadr in Canada, and now Afghan detainees running into fundamental constitutional matters.

What will the environmental 9/11 mean for Canada? Offshore drilling in Newfoundland and the Arctic? The Tar Sands? How will Stephen Harper’s plans to make Canada an energy superpower be affected?

Such questions are just as pertinent here on the west coast, with controversial plans for a pipeline across Northern British Columbia to provide the Tar Sands access to the Pacific Rim market. Anxiety over the well-being of the BC Coast was already at high enough levels before the BP spill. Now, no doubt responding to the changing political climate, the federal Liberal party has officially endorsed a campaign to ban oil-tanker traffic on the BC Coast.

The Conservatives have already made clear the importance of aligning Canadian and American policies regarding energy and the environment, but will this attitude continue if the Obama administration successfully passes decidedly anti-fossil fuel legislation? With the NDP already on-board, the tanker ban and Canadian energy-environment policy in general will likely become a major political battleground in the coming months.

Of course, many now look back at 9/11 as a double tragedy: A massive loss of life followed by an even greater missed opportunity, the Bush administration’s polarizing and militaristic response amidst a global outpouring of goodwill. In years to come will people on both sides of the border and around the world look back at the Gulf Oil spill as a similarly senseless tragedy?

Jeff Slack is a 2^nd-year master’s student in the history department, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George. His thesis examines the “rediscovery” of the Coast Mountains, 1858-1939. As an outlet for his sometimes excessive interest in all things “mountain,” he recently began blogging at mountainnerd.wordpress.com/

For another post on ActiveHistory.ca related to the BP oil spill see Dana Johnson‘s Historical Perspectives on Oil Gushers, posted May 2010.

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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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Sean Kheraj

Last week the federal government tabled its long anticipated copyright reform legislation for first reading in the House of Commons. The Copyright Modernization Act or Bill C-32 attempts to overhaul many of the out-dated provisions of Canada’s copyright law that have fallen far behind major technological changes of the last thirty years. For instance, under the proposed legislation, it would now be legal for Canadians to rip a CD to an iPod. Unfortunately, as we give a sarcastic slow-clap for this long overdue “reform” to legalize what has been common (and soon to be obsolete) consumer behaviour for nearly a generation, the canonization of digital locks overrides all of the new fair dealing rights in the bill. And this may be a huge problem for history researchers and educators.

Read the full story here on the Knowledge Mobilization blog.

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A recent BBC news report highlights some of the key issues in a decades-long debate over heli-skiing in the European Alps. First experimented with in British Columbia’s interior mountain ranges in the 1960s, heli-skiing entails using helicopters in lieu of chairlifts to shuttle small, guided groups of skiers to the top of otherwise difficult-to-access, and thus untracked mountain slopes.

Although this lucrative industry flourished in western North America’s wide open spaces, it also faces growing opposition, primarily over environmental concerns such as air pollution and other threats to fragile alpine ecosystems. In one recent controversy, however, opponents of a contentious heli-ski proposal voiced their concerns over potential conflicts between mechanized recreation and cultural heritage values in the region surrounding British Columbia’s highest mountain, Mount Waddington. As human demands on Canada’s natural spaces increase, such convergences of ecological and heritage concerns are likely to become a more common, and perhaps more effective, environmental strategy.

1926 Vancouver Province article about a mountaineering expedition to Mount Waddington

Soon after mountaineers began visiting Mount Waddington in the 1920s, the first calls were made to have this superlative landscape protected within a national park.   While mountaineers had successfully led similar campaigns such as at Garibaldi Park north of Vancouver, the remote and desolate Mount Waddington landscape was largely ignored by government officials. Over the next eight decades mountaineering parties from around the world continued to visit the region’s massive icefields and near-vertical spires, often likened to the “aiguilles” surrounding France’s celebrated Chamonix valley.

Never ceasing completely, park advocacy was renewed in  2007 in response to a proposed 350,000 hectare heli-ski tenure by Knight Inlet Heli Sports. For perspective, this is more than one hundred times larger than Whistler-Blackcomb, North America’s largest ski resort.

The proposal seemed consistent with the province’s ambitious tourism policies, but opponents argued that the constant presence of helicopters would compromise the wilderness experience of backcountry skiers and mountaineers, who themselves represented a substantial sector of the region’s economy. Don Serl, perhaps the region’s foremost alpinist of the past thirty years, raised concerns that “the new proposal is a massive breach of the standards of behaviour that have evolved to their present state over 80 years since the Mundays first set off to find and explore the Range.”

Opposition continued to mount even as the tenure was awarded, eventually succeeding in having the decision partially reversed. The area surrounding Mount Waddington was removed from the tenure and certain provisions were included to minimize helicopter-mountaineer contact. In so doing, long-standing (and environmentally sensitive) human interests surrounding a remote, geological wonder were acknowledged, and a non-mechanized zone was established around this globally significant mountaineering destination.

The Knight Inlet Heli-ski controversy is symptomatic of the development free-for-all that has been going on for years in the British Columbia backcountry. The initial tenure proposal’s massive area was far larger than necessary, in fact too large to service without fuel caches. Elsewhere, ever-growing heli-ski tenures dwarf older operations, and there has been a fire-sale for hydro rights to the province’s rivers. Such policies betray an alarming zeal to develop our seemingly empty and inexhaustible wilderness.

Insightful as it was at the time, W.L. Mackenzie King’s oft-repeated aphorism that “if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography” is no longer an apt description of our country.

As our natural landscapes become increasingly contested spaces, human interests need not trump environmental concerns. The Mount Waddington controversy reminds us that even in Canada’s most remote corners there is often an under-appreciated depth to past relationships with the land. Creating awareness of cultural heritage in “wilderness” areas, rather than compromising their environmental integrity, can add new layers of meaning and value.

Taking seriously the common viewpoint that our backcountry is our backyard can make us more appreciative of our wide-open spaces, and more willing to pursue and protect land-use practices that enrich our lives without compromising our natural environment.

Jeff Slack is a 2^nd-year master’s student in the history department, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George. His thesis examines the “rediscovery” of the Coast Mountains, 1858-1939. As an outlet for his sometimes excessive interest in all things “mountain,” he recently began blogging at mountainnerd.wordpress.com/

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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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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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Using google maps, lookbackmaps allows users to not only click on a location and see a current photograph juxtaposed against a historical one, but also to upload their own entries into the system. Right now there is a marked focus on San Francisco, where founder Jon Voss is situated, but it is spreading across the United States and hopefully soon even into Canada!  It also has an iPhone application that allows you to phase the historical imagery into your screencapture – augmented reality for historians! Check out a video demo here. What a remarkable way to engage in a historical manner with your surroundings!

Historical photographs are aggregated from a variety of places: personal collections, university archives, municipal archives, railroad enthusiasts, the list goes on. An important message that comes out of this is the importance of moving beyond silos of knowledge. It’s wonderful that the City of Toronto has a great collection of photographs, as does the Clara Thomas Archives & Special Collections at York University – but a site like this can bring them together and make them accessible to the general public in an engaging manner.

Another project is SepiaTown, which also seeks to aggregate historical photographs in a variety of places – currently featured is New York, London, San Francisco, Paris, Boston, Moscow, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. When you click on an image, you’re brought to a better quality version of it (which might be drawn from a personal collection of the New York Public Library), along with a representation of where you’re standing. You can even see the google streetview juxtaposed with the past image.

In Toronto, a similar project has been running over on Torontoist.com. A great example of this can be seen here. A historical image is combined with a current-day photograph to vividly show how it has changed over time – for example, at Yonge and Queen we see the historic Yonge St. streetcar line below, rambling beneath the skyscrapers that now exist. What a way to show how vividly things have changed, without having to dig through the archival search engines yourself.

If I sound excited, that’s because I am. Are there any projects that come to mind that have done this sort of work with space and image? If so, I’d love to hear about them.

People naturally forget things over time.  Details become vague, memories cloudy, and events are never recalled exactly as they occurred.  The act of recording history assists in preserving an authentic version of the past.  The way in which the past is remembered and recorded has drastically changed as technology and digital memory have improved.

Technology has created an abundance of new mediums.  Digital information is now cheaper and easier to store than ever before.  The cheapness of digital storage is a huge benefit for those interested in documenting the past.  Digital storage allows heritage institutions to preserve fragile and valuable information at a lower cost, while simultaneously saving space.

However, it has been suggested (here, here, and here) that there are some problems with digital memory.  You probably don’t remember every internet search you have made in the past three months, but Google does.  Digital memory remembers things which humans may have naturally forgotten and is far more comprehensive than human memory. For better or for worse, an offhand comment online has the potential to be remembered indefinitely. The ability of technology to collect information you would never personally remember does have the potential to be historically valuable.  But, digital memory also has the potential to be a reminder of something you would rather forget.

The way in which digital memory is stored is drastically different than the way in which human memory is kept.  Digital memory is often saved in snapshot format.  Photographs, emails, search histories, tweets, etc are often archived separately and are usually saved amongst thousands of similar records. Properly cared for archival records are stored in an organized and methodical way.  Digital memory is often stored by date of creation, broad theme, or in the worst case scenario in no real order.  This difference in organization has the potential to remove digital memory from its proper context.  Born digital items need to be properly organized and sorted in a way which links them to events, people, and other digital records.  Properly created metadata can greatly improve the context of born digital items.  However, a lot of digital information is saved without metadata and without thought toward later use.  This lack of context begs the question, how valuable is information if you cannot piece it together to create a larger picture?  Information is only as valuable as the insight it provides and insight is a lot easier to come by with context.

As Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger argues, technology can “capture the words that have been said, but not the thoughts that were thought.” Technology is a great tool for accessing previously untapped information. However, more traditional forms of collecting history should not be forgotten. Historians and the interpretation of history are still crucial in a world ruled by digital memory.  Recording every action, a la Gordon Bell, can provide a look into the past, but without context this information is not living up to its full potential.

Krista McCracken is a public history consultant and is currently working with Knowledge Ontario as a Digitization Facilitator.

Storytelling has long been an important aspect of the historian’s craft.  The move beyond exploring traditional archival material, which privileges the voices of the literate and often the powerful, towards the collection of oral history, has been an exciting development in historical scholarship.

On the other hand, the use of oral history has been ripe with paradoxes.  Historians conduct oral interviews, which they then transcribe to written word.  From here, they pick a few, hopefully representative, quotes from multiple interviews to integrate into their work.  The completed academic project may or may not be accessible to the interviewees.

Furthermore, a significant power imbalance exists between researcher and interviewee; the historian holds ultimate authority over the story that eventually emerges from their research.  Traditionally, then, the historian, as mediator between interview material and the information that reaches the public, has been the predominant storyteller in narratives of history.

An innovative project at Concordia University seeks to revolutionize the way that oral history is collected, archived and accessed.  The Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, co-directed by two history professors, Steven High and Elana Razlogova, has been built around the idea that the stories people tell matter.  The Centre not only facilitates the collection of oral histories for researchers, but privileges storytelling in the words and voices of those who lived through historical events by digitising video and audio recordings, and by seeking alternate ways of presenting research findings that move beyond the written word.

One example of an important project the Centre is engaged in is the Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations.  University and community-based researchers are in the process of recording “the experiences and memories of mass violence and displacement” of over 500 migrants to Montreal.  This material is posted on the web, so that anyone with access to an internet connection can hear stories of the experiences of refugees from Cambodia, Haiti, and Europe, to name but a few, in their own voices.

Committed to the idea of “sharing authority,” the site also contains resources for oral history researchers, including ethical guidelines and training material for the interview process.  Such materials include a list of sample interview questions.  While questions posed by an interviewer can signficantly impact the content of the life stories recorded, the transparency of this process as it is featured on the site is admirable.   Affiliates are also welcome to use the Centre’s state of the art facilities, which provide access to technologies and equipment that aid in the collection and digitisation of life stories.

The Centre has also developed Stories Matter, free software that allows for “the archiving of digital video and audio materials, enabling users to annotate, analyze, evaluate and export materials, as well as tag, index, search, and browse within interviews, sessions, and clips or across entire collections.”  Currently in its second phase, they are developing “an online platform for the software, which will allow multiple users to collaborate on the creation of a single database through an online server.”

The site also includes blog updates, access to articles and databases of oral histories, among many other features.

The Centre has done an incredible amount of work since the doors were first opened by Steven High on 10 September 2007.  Those interested in oral history would do well to monitor its future developments as it continues to probe how digital technologies can highlight the power of the spoken word.  It is also an excellent resource for educators and interested community members.  In “breaching the divide between the ivory tower and the street,” as Steven High aptly puts it, this massive project serves as an excellent example of how technology can be harnessed to make history more accessible and relevant to a public audience.

Over the past week, a recent spurt of articles in Toronto newspapers reported numerous cases of leaking watermains across the city.  Corrosion is one source of the broken pipes; another is changing temperature, which impacts soil movement and creates pressure on the fragile, rusty conduits.  A recent cold spell burst an eight-inch main and cut power to 19,000 residents.

Notable in these articles is how the (often temporary) failure of the infrastructure of everyday life – in this case water pipes but we can think of roads and electricity wires to name a few others – connects people to the past.

A Toronto Star article on these broken city watermains explains that “many of the pipes are far older than the residents who sip and wash and flush from their waters”.  The piece also includes a map of Toronto watermains laid between 1859-1900.   The pipes of greatest concern to the city’s water department were laid during Toronto’s massive geographical expansion in the 1950s and 1960s, when kilometers of thin iron-cast pipe played an essential part in the transformation of farmland to postwar suburbia.  In 2007, Toronto City Council allocated $87.7 million to replace aging pipes, which have a projected lifespan of 80 years.

The Globe and Mail posted a more extensive map, which traces the installation date of the city’s 5,953 kilometers of watermain with a colour coded, decade-by-decade visual survey covering pre-1879 to the present.

Infrastructure history is in many ways an interesting example of active history.  When infrastructure fails, it forces us to ask questions about its place in our lives, its place in space, its place in time.  Not only are the networks of utilities upon which we rely for the functioning of everyday life often hidden from view, but their histories are as well.

Theorists of technology argue that we gain consciousness of such networks and their importance in our daily activities when their function fails to live up to our expectations.  Could the same be said of our interest in the many connections between infrastructure and the past?  The attention these newspaper articles place on the specific history of watermains in Toronto suggests that we seek an understanding of infrastructures’ past when they fail or threaten to fail again, even if this failure is a temporary disruption.