The use of new digital media in conjunction with conventional print publication is one of the many important contributions that Joy Parr’s recent Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (2010, UBC Press) makes to our understanding of the past. The book examines how Canadians living in environments affected by megaprojects built after the [...]
Posts under ‘History on the Internet’
Want to Write With Us? We’re Looking for More Bloggers!
ActiveHistory.Ca puts out a Call for Bloggers, as we seek to expand our circle of regular contributors.
History Variations
by Lani Russwurm The internet has the potential to enrich and increase our interactions with the past simply through making historical sources widely available and by making the tools to produce and disseminate history accessible to anyone. This means the historian’s role is becoming less that of a gatekeeper of the past as traditional print-based [...]
Should We Embrace the Short URL?
The increasing number of primary and secondary sources made available by various online archives and databases continue to aid researchers and enrich the historical community as a whole. 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 [...]
Earth Day turns 40
Today, Earth Day celebrates its 40th anniversary. Earth Day originated as a call to arms by US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who hoped to draw on the grassroots movement for greater environmental consciousness in order to bring about positive policy changes in Washington. Earth Day drew much of its early enthusiasm from university campuses. [...]
Interactive Exhibit Design – The Interactive Streetscape
by Tim O’Grady 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 [...]
Volcanoes in European history: Exploring Environmental History Podcast
Dr Jan Oosthoek has produced a podcast on the history of volcanoes in European history. The podcast can be found here or you can subscribe on iTunes here. This podcast and its supporting website are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, so we have republished his text introducing the volcanoes podcast and the [...]
One year of ActiveHistory.ca
April marks the one-year anniversary of this website. The steering committee of ActiveHistory.ca recently discussed the challenges and successes we have faced in our attempt over the past year to bridge the work of historians with a wider audience at Activism and the Academy: Struggles Against Hegemony, a two-day conference organized by the Graduate Women’s [...]
Popular Publishing Writer’s Guild Expands Westward
By Adam Crymble Thanks to a successful workshop held in Vancouver last month, the Popular Publishing Writer’s Guild has added a new Western Canadian chapter. The guild is a support network of new scholars who are trying to engage a wider public with their research and ideas through newspapers, magazines or online. Every five months, [...]
How Useful is the Library of Congress’ Twitter Archive?
On Wednesday 14 April, the United States of America’s Library of Congress (LOC) announced a deal with the popular social networking service, Twitter, to archive all public messages on the site right down to the first “tweet” from @jack (Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder) on 21 March 2006, at 3:50 PM. Response to the news can [...]