By Ian Milligan

The splash page for the Globe and Mail's "Canada's Heritage Since 1844" website.

Online digitized newspapers are great. If you have access (either through a free database or via a personal or library subscription), you can quickly find the information you need: a specific search for a last name might help you find ancestors, a search for a specific event can find historical context for it (i.e. the Christie Pits Riots, or a certain strike), and generally the results are beautiful, render relatively well, and are – crucially – immediate.

In some ways, however, poor and misunderstood use of online newspapers can skew historical research. In a conference presentation or a lecture, it’s not uknown to see the familiar yellow highlighting of found searchwords on projected images: indicative of how the original primary material was obtained. But this historical approach generally usually remains unspoken, without a critical methodological reflection. As I hope I’ll show here, using Pages of the Past uncritically for historical research is akin to using a volume of the Canadian Historical Review with 10% or so of the pages ripped out. Historians, journalists, policy researchers, genealogists, and amateur researchers need to at least have a basic understanding of what goes on behind the black box.

An example of a "results list" from the Globe and Mail's newspaper database. It all seems so orderly and systematic.

And the ensuing results, a newspaper article focused on the Artistic Woodwork Strike of 1973

An amazing array of information at your fingertips (but…)

In Canada, when one thinks of online digitized newspapers, the Toronto Star’s Pages of the Past and the Globe and Mail’s “Canada’s Heritage from 1844″ often come to mind. There are other wonderful collections, of course, notably the incredible historical newspapers of British Columbia collection, but the Star and the Globe are most commonly used.

The Star and Globe can be accessed through an institutional or personal subscription (you can also access these two databases through libraries like the Toronto Public Library – with a valid library card). You can search by a specific word, or a specific phrase, and narrow it down by a date range. A keyword search (such as for “Artistic Woodwork” at right) and a date range can quickly take you to a seemingly systematic, quantified, and perhaps even complete listing of relevant articles. History laid before you, neatly ordered, from the comfort of your home, library, or office. Another click, and you’re brought to a PDF version of the scanned document: complete with placement, accompanying advertisements, etc.

An example of a feature, front-page, above-the-fold article on the Artistic Woodwork strike that does not appear in a keyword search.

But we need to use these databases with greater caution. In the example at right, for example, the Globe and Mail‘s database has correctly found a large feature article on the Artistic Woodwork strike of 1973. Yet it is a continuance of an article from Page One. That headline, the first page of the newspaper, does not appear in the search list. If one just uses the search engine, you miss this vivid headline, picture, and entire story.

Why?

Primarily, the issue lies in faulty optical character recognition (OCR). This issue is not just limited to these newspapers, and is an inherent flaw in large projects. Tim Hitchcock has described the uncritical use of digitized sources as “roulette dressed up as scholarship,” as historians are “not even bothering to apply the kind of critical approach that historians built their professional authority upon.”

What about the specific case of the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail online? These databases were assembled at the turn of the present century, and indeed, the Toronto Star is heralded on Paper of Record’s (the company responsible for the database creation) as the “first newspaper in the world to have its entire history … digitized.” It was created quickly, as Bruce Gillespie reported in 2003 in his “All the News That’s Fit to Scan”:

 Using technology developed in-house, Cold North Wind [Paper of Record's parent company] converts documents stored on rolled microfilm into digital computer files. It is an automated process that works quickly-Mr. Huggins says two million pages from The Toronto Star’s 110-year history were archived in less than four months.

This incredible speed and the use of microfilm originals comes at a cost, however. The former means that basic OCR is used: hyphenations are not covered (problematic in smaller columns, where Woodwork might be hyphenated as Wood-work across two lines), if microfilm streaks obscure a letter, if it was slightly tilted, or if the OCR just plain misses a character. This is currently unavoidable with large-scale digitization projects: I am currently OCRing a large collection of word processed documents from 1997 onwards – about as perfect a sample as you can get, and while the OCR under these ideal circumstances is well above 99%, it can never be perfect. Quite frankly, without human proof-reading and additional layers, you can never be completely convinced of your accuracy. Furthermore, comprehensive database use requires some limited understanding of Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a complicated field of research, and a proper search query would also need to be formulated to pick up alternates such as ‘Woodworking,’ etc. without unnecessarily duplication of results.

Another issue lies in the proprietary nature of the Star and Globe databases: I have been trying to track down their technical support team to discuss a research project, to no avail. E-mails often bounce back from the addresses provided on their search portals, and they can be a bit impenetrable. This is understandable, in a way: unlike other national newspaper projects, they are run by private companies.

So what can we do?

Now, with a strike (as in my example above), one could pop the date ranges in, go through each newspaper throughout the period, and explore specific events. This would avoid the above problem. But studies that purport to trace social or cultural trends over a long period of time can fall into the habit of relying on these databases without critical reflection. That’s not to say that they should not use them – we can find most articles, especially by the postwar period and its attending better image quality. Indexes are hardly perfect alternatives. History has always had an element of serendipity.

Indeed, we cannot and should not abandon our use of digitized online databases. Despite their faults, they allow us to cover large swaths of time and space on a realistic timeline, and are much quicker than using microfilm. They also open up new frontiers of large-scale data and textual processing, although the current user interface and databases are not terribly amenable to this form of work.

But we do need to be cognizant. Dissertations and articles that extensively rely on these databases need to be up-front about the issue and at least mention how they have dealt with or recognized the very real and concrete limitations inherent in this form. In my on-going survey of English-language dissertations and other historical work, I have found that while these databases appear to be having some impact on citation counts, few scholars note their database use. Doctoral supervisors, journal editors, bloggers, public historians, etc. need to realize how these databases are potentially shaping professional and amateur historical inquiry in Canada.

So next time you’re using the databases, think about what’s going on. Are you getting everything? Are you missing something? Should you do some digging around a hotspot of hits on a given date? In all cases, we should be more up-front about the tools we’re using and how they might be shaping our research.

The interactive map above, produced by Leo Bonanni, the CEO of Sourcemap.com, demonstrates the impressive power of geographical analysis in the early 21st century. The map shows the supply chains for a typical laptop computer and provides a fascinating insight into the complicated mix of natural resources and manufacturing labour needed. It raises questions about the environmental and social consequences of the computers that many of us interact with daily.

To what extent has geography emerged as a more powerful tool than history to shed light on the social and environmental consequences of today’s global economic and political systems? I don’t make it a habit to quote from the French philosopher Michel Foucault in my posts for ActiveHistory.ca, or for that matter in most of my academic writing. However, there is an idea from a lecture first given in 1967 that has stuck with me since I first came across it in during my early years in graduate school. The quote, taken from the 1986 English translation, argues that geography (space) increasingly surpassed history in the twentieth century: “The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed”. (Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 1986) The literary critic,  John Berger, provides another often quoted passage building the same idea and argues that it is now “space not time that hides consequences from us”:

It is scarcely any longer possible to tell a straight story sequentially unfolding in time.  And this is because we are too aware of what is continually traversing the storyline laterally…  Such awareness is the result of our constantly having to take into account the simultaneity and extension of events and possibilities.  There are so many reasons why this should be so: the range of modern means of communication: … the degree of personal political responsibility that must be accepted for events all over the world: the fact that the world has become indivisible: the unevenness of economic development within that world… Prophecy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences from us. (Soja, Postmodern Geographies, 22)

The popularity of posts by Karlee Sapoznik and the Alliance Against Modern Slavery on this website (which have been read by thousands of visitors) suggest an awareness among our readership of the political significance the geographical divisions in our world. When considering the common chocolate bar, it is hard to not agree with Berger that space, not history, hides the consequences of moderns slavery from consumers. Though it is equally true that history remains a powerful tool for explaining how and why the world developed in this way and our ability to contrast modern slavery with historical slavery remains very important. So I do not believe geography has surpassed historians, but with the ongoing process of globalization, there are many examples of geography’s growing importance. Moreover, a lot of historians, myself included, have become increasingly interested in the geographical aspects of the past.

My current research project attempts to look at the growth of the global commodity trade in the 19th century and to write a history of space and distance hiding consequences. I’ve been looking for a way to visualize this history. A week ago I learned about Sourcemap.com. I’ve begun working on a map to trace the raw materials that flowed into factories in East London during the nineteenth century and I plan to develop a series of maps that better show the vast expansion of global trade during between 1800 and 1914. I hope that blending geography and history with a powerful digital tool like Sourcemap.com will provide new insights into the development of the global economy and present the material in a uniquely dynamic and accessible format on the internet.

An inspiring historical visualization of Napoleon's 1812 campaign (please click to see it).

I have recently been trying to figure out good ways of representing large amounts of historical information in a way that makes sense to everybody who might stumble across my work! I think that a good graphic has the ability to draw readers into what we do, letting us convey the scope, joy, or horror of history without needing to read through often dense prose. In this post, I want to give a sense of what I think works, what doesn’t, and why we should start thinking about cool maps, graphs, and charts!

What is arguably the finest historical visualization ever is at right. Charles Joseph Minard, a French engineer, produced this 1869 chart visualizing Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign. In this image, which I encourage you to click on to zoom in, you see how BIG the army is going into Russia, the path it took, where it had to begin retreating, just how few soldiers returned from the campaign, and the plummeting and wretched winter conditions along the path. Take a second, look at this chart. From this, you learn a great deal, and the human scale of suffering and tragedy can be captured in a way that a paragraph of text might not (at least to us visual learners).

Why should we pay so much attention to how we make our graphics? Firstly, I think people learn in a variety of ways. Some can sit through a three-hour lecture with rapt attention, while others snooze. Some can read a 400-page book, devouring every nook and cranny, while others get bogged down. Still more draw inspiration from graphics, visual ways to see the past. But, perhaps we should leave it to Mark Howard Moss and his book Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image, who argues that “individuals access images more readily than words. Seeing is a central feature of modern soceity and as Mitchell Stevens cogently puts it, ‘Moving Images use our senses more effectively than do black lines of type stacked on white pages.’” Heck, think of chemical elements: chances are, your mind immediately flashes to a visualization, the Periodic Table of the Elements.

From Canada: A National History, a top notch-history textbook! Thumbnail used for the purposes of critical analysis.

Visualizations, as Minard’s map shows, have tremendous power (another famous one that had power at its time is of course John Snow’s map of contaminated wells and cholera outbreaks). For more, see “12 Great Visualizations that Made History.” But we can also do them very poorly. Flipping open a random Canadian history textbook, I am confronted with the visualization at left. Do we get the sense of the turmoil of the late Second World War? The flow of modern warfare, or the human suffering? One can read the prose, certainly, but the picture contributes little.

To be fair, I’ve made my share of very poor visualizations (you can click here to see the worst one that I suspect a Canadian historian has ever made, as compared to a much clearer one here that really shows what I want it to), but I think that historians – if we want to be active, engage with the public, need to begin thinking about how to visualize information.

How?

• We can take it seriously! This goes for professionals and amateurs. We can read and absorb it all. Maybe that’s reading Edward Tufte’s beautifully bound and comprehensive books, thinking about how to produce really cool and engaging visualizations. Or maybe it is simply seeing what else works, as in the beautiful and inspiring “50 Great Examples of Data Visualization.”
• Popularize fun, easy ways to visualize information. Anybody with a computer can use ‘Wordle.’ They’re not perfect visualizations, BUT they are a lot of fun. When I’ve used them in presentations, people are really engaged. During my doctoral defence, handouts with a word cloud gave people a quick sense to see some of the themes, and encouraged deeper questions. As instructors, amateur historians, etc., why not start out simple with these ways forward?
• Teach it. If a great visualization is around, use it in a lecture or seminar. Of course, the problem is, there aren’t too many visualizations out there that we can immediately grab!
• Practice it. Let’s start creating this massive database of visualizations so our teachers and researchers can draw on them. Much of this will probably come from programmers, tinkerers, and amateurs – let’s embrace it. There are tons of online resources, such as “How to create a visualization.”

But most importantly, just think about it. The power of images, the ability to draw people in, to make connections that you might otherwise miss.

What could we use to make these, in terms of off-the-shelf solutions? I’ll provide a few, and if you can think of any please let us know in the comments!

• Wordle: Creates word clouds that can quickly give you a sense of word frequency in a document. While they lack contextualization (you can’t see if people love Elvis at a glance or hate him, just that they’re talking about him, for example), they’re beautiful and very easy to use. I’ve discussed these elsewhere here at ActiveHistory.ca.
• Timelines: If you have technical skills, there are free open-source options like SIMILE Timeline. That said, it does require a basic understanding of HTML and Javascript (there is a very good ‘getting started tutorial‘). An easier alternative, at minimal cost, is BEEDOCS Easy Timeline, which presents interactive timelines in 3D!
• Maps: From a simple annotated Google Map to more advanced solutions, digital maps can provide an interactive sense of space and time. Tom Peace, who uses maps extensively, draws on “Magic Maps” (providing free Canadian topographic maps) and DIVA-GIS.

In the comments below, please feel free to discuss other options, their various pros and cons, and other ideas to make history come alive…

Next month will mark one year since the people of Japan experienced a devastating series of natural disasters. The earthquake and tsunami that hit parts of Japan on March 11, 2011, resulted in tremendous loss for the Japanese people. Many Japanese lost their lives while survivors lost homes, a sense of stability, and sense of place. Personal items and familiar places tied to memories of home and loved ones were destroyed during the earthquake and tsunami. Places were erased and the ability to recall – to feel at home – disappeared under rubble and waves.

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.

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.

by Jenn Nelson (@unmuseum)

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.

My Conservative MP sent the following question to his constituents this week:

“Debate has now begun on [Conservative] MP Blake Richards’ Private Members’ Bill C-309.  The Bill proposes creating a new criminal offence for those that wear ‘a mask or other disguise to conceal their identity without lawful excuse’ during a riot or unlawful assembly.  This Bill was crafted in response to disturbances in large Canadian cities in which masked rioters assaulted civilians, destroyed public and private property and looted businesses.  So this week I ask, ‘Should it be a criminal offense to mask or conceal one’s identity without lawful excuse during a riot or unlawful assembly?’”

Bill C-309 poses a severe threat to Canadians’ right to freedom of assembly, and  threatens future protest movements. Anonymity, crowd action and protest have a long and storied history, a tradition which extends well into the present day. Crowd action is deeply rooted in anonymity, allowing an individual to blend into a larger group of people, reducing the risk of state reprisal and repression. In this post, I provide some historical context to this, arguing that we should not allow Bill C-309 to pass.

The use of fictional or historical characters to mask a protesters’ identity has many precedents. Historians Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé have explored the symbolic and practical importance of figures like General Ludd to the Luddite movement or Captain Swing to the Swing Riots during nineteenth century British protests. With the latter, farm workers facing unemployment, underemployment, low levels of relief, and the replacement of their labour with threshing machines, used letters from “Captain Swing” to object to these conditions and protect their identity from the long arm of the state. Of course, the use of masks during crowd actions also have a much more sordid history – the white hood, as one example, continues to be a powerful symbol of racist oppression and violence against African Americans.

In more recent years, “Anonymous” has become a potent symbol among protestors. Popularized by the comic book (inspired by Thatcher’s Britain) and film V is for Vendetta, the Guy Fawkes masks provide a means for activists to escape state repression, rallying behind a symbol that evokes considerable meaning.

Technological developments have been a powerful force in building protest movements and activist links. So too have they made it easier for the state to crack down on dissent. Many repressive states across the world have used the Internet to trace its critics, jailing or otherwise eliminating opposition to dictatorial rule. In the Canadian context, face recognition technology has most recently enabled authorities to identify and arrest individuals caught in crowd shots.

There are many reasons why someone participating in a peaceful assembly may want to cover their face or hide their identity. Some people shield their faces in public for religious reasons. While religion may be read as a “lawful excuse”, this Bill could still limit the right of some religious groups to join in peaceful assembly.

There are many other reasons people may choose to cover their faces during a peaceful assembly. Photos are often shot continuously during protests, as participants, observers and the media attempt to document these events. Pictures can be instantly uploaded to the Internet, available to be viewed by millions. This could cause professional or personal duress for those who may live or work in an environment hostile to activist causes. Furthermore, facial concealment is also an important method for peaceful protestors to physically protect themselves from police violence. A kerchief is often the only tool a protestor may have to shield against the burning effect of tear gas or other forms of crowd control.

Supporters of Bill C-309 might point out that these prohibitions would exist only in cases where a riot or unlawful assembly was unfolding. Yet who gets to define what constitutes an unlawful assembly? Many governments have seemed all too willing to define a broad range of protest as unlawful, particularly when these protests target state authority or power, such as was witnessed during the largely peaceful G20 protests in Toronto.

Bill C-309 could pose a serious threat to Canadian rights to participate in peaceful assembly. It would also enhance the power of the state to crack down on dissenters. This is not a positive development for democracy. The Conservatives in Canada like to position themselves as the champions of smaller government, freedom and democracy. However, a state that dictates what we can and cannot wear is Big Government in all the wrong ways. Bill C-309 would place serious limitations on our democratic rights.

What does your MP think of Bill C-309? Contact information for your MP is available here if you’d like to find out.

Historian Lisa Rumiel recently presented a talk entitled “Three Mile Island to Bhopal: the Life and Work of Environmental Activist Rosalie Bertell” in front of an engaged audience at Toronto’s Parkdale library.  Bertell, who has a PhD in biometrics, has long spoken out about the environmental consequences of nuclear power.

Rumiel’s talk is available here for audio download.

The presentation is the second talk of the 2011 History Matters lecture series.  Now in its second year, the series gives the public an opportunity to connect with working historians and discover some of the many and surprising ways in which the past shapes the present.  This year’s talks focus on two themes: labour and environmental history.

The next History Matters lecture takes place tonight.  Jennifer Bonnell will discuss a timely topic: “Imagined Futures for the Lower Don: A History of Big Ideas for a Small River.” Click here for more details.

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.