By Jim Clifford

Three  years ago, in the lead up to the Canadian Historical Association meeting, Christine McLaughlin, Ian Milligan, Thomas Peace, Jay Young and I founded ActiveHistory.ca.  At the time we were all graduate students in the history department at York University. The website emerged out of the Active History symposium held in September 2008. Having budgeted to disseminate the conference proceedings, we considered publishing an academic book or a special issue of a journal. But these options, we thought, seemed counter to the public outreach goals of the symposium. Instead we decided to launch a website that embodied the Active History mission, instead of simply publishing some of the essays presented at the workshop (though, Ian Milligan also worked with Left History to publish a special issue).

We launched a website with a certain amount of trepidation, as the conference attendees did not show much enthusiasm for submitting blog posts either before or after the workshop and there were not too many examples in Canada of successful history websites (Christopher Moore and Andrew Smith being the major exceptions to that rule). While cleaning up some papers one day I stumbled on a flyer for a British website called HistoryandPolicy.org. I thought I had found a model for a successful academic website.

The early months in the ActiveHistory.ca archive reflect our orientation towards Papers similar to those published by History & Policy. We issued a call for papers and published three submissions through to the end of 2009. This approach attracted some web traffic, but as Chrisopher Moore quipped in September 2009, ActiveHistory.ca needed to be a little more active. In November the Canadian Government published a new Citizens Guide and spurred Thomas Peace to write a short reaction piece. During the days that followed we watched our visitor stats jump significantly and realized people were linking back to our website. This quickly ended our reluctance to embrace the “blog” format and in the months that followed we started posting weekly Monday contributions from the editorial collective. During this same time period we started to embrace social media and started Facebook and Twitter accounts for the website. These two steps contributed to the significant growth of the website in the months that followed.

In the two and a half years since the blog started in earnest the visitor stats have grown from a few hundred visits a month, to a couple of thousand and now more than ten thousand during our best months. Our authors include a large number of regular contributors, dozens of one-off authors and six members of the editorial collective. One of our ongoing challenges has been to spread beyond our base at York University in Toronto. While none of the founding editors are originally from Toronto,  it is the city where most of us still live and this leads to a lot of focus on Southern Ontario. Thankfully we continue to add contributors from across Canada and even a few posts from people living further afield. Moreover, the editorial collective now includes three historians at universities outside of Toronto, with Krista McCracken at Algoma University, Ian Milligan at Western University, and Thomas Peace at Dartmouth College. The paper section continues to fluctuate in terms of submissions, but some of the essays, including Gérard-François Dumont’s The Berlin Wall: Life, Death and the Spatial Heritage of Berlin, remain some of our most visited webpages.

In addition to the blog and papers section we have also developed a number of additional features on our site. There is a book review section managed with the help of David Weber and George Buri.  We have cultivated a series of partnerships with the Canadian Historical Association, the Mississauga Library System, The History and Education Network, and various departments of the City of Toronto. In the fall, we look forward to an expanded Podcast section and directing more attention to the papers section of the site.

After three years it came time to renew our hosting service and we are very grateful that the history department at York University and the Avie Bennett Historica-Dominion Institute Chair in Canadian History, also at York University, both made sustaining contributions.

By Jay Young

I recently spent an extended weekend in New York City.  Along with the well-known sights, sounds and tastes of the Big Apple, I was excited to visit the Tenement Museum, a restored five-storey building at 97 Orchard Street that educates visitors about life in the Lower East Side during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The non-profit museum, which also features an exhibit space, connects people to the history of the building through the vibrant stories of immigrants who made the tenement home.

German immigrant Lucas Glockner built 97 Orchard Street in 1863.  At the time, this area of the Lower East Side was still known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany.  Multi-story brick buildings – they became known as tenements – replaced small wooden structures that lined the neighbourhood’s narrow streets, and soon after, the area’s ethnic composition changed from a population of mostly German and Irish inhabitants to include newcomers of Italian and East-European Jewish heritage.  Unlike most tenement owners, Glockner lived with his family in the building during its early years.  Over the next seven decades, almost 7,000 people resided in the five-storey building until its owners evicted its last tenants in 1935.  During the 1950s, the city condemned the building because it failed to conform to new regulations requiring metal staircases.

97 Orchard Street

Then, historian and social activist Ruth Abram discovered 97 Orchard.  Abram and her co-founder Anita Jacobsen aspired to use an old tenement as a venue to understand the immigrant experience in the United States.  In 1988, they found 97 Orchard, a “time capsule” that had remained (officially) unused for decades.  Researchers uncovered the history of the building and the lives of those who resided there, while preservation experts restored the rooms inside.  Four years later, the first restored apartment was complete, a number that now stands at six apartments.

According to its mission statement, the museum “forges emotional connections between visitors and immigrants past and present; and enhances appreciation for the profound role immigration has played and continues to play in shaping America’s evolving national identity.”  To fulfill these aims, a number of activities take place.  Over 40,000 students have come to the museum to experience the history of immigration and city life.  ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) students also arrive at the museum to learn English through a program that maintains a connection between lives of past immigrants and those of today.  The museum features a stimulating website, where educators can download lesson plans to teach their students (elementary to high school level) about material history, archival documents, and oral history.  Lectures, discussions, and other community events that explore the history of New York also take place at the museum.

The best way for the first-time visitor to get to know the museum is to participate in one of the guide-led tours.  These tours explore the restored apartments through the lives of the building’s families.  Each tour focuses on a small number of real families of various ethnic backgrounds who lived at 97 Orchard in order to learn about wider historical themes of specific decades.  If you can’t make it to Manhattan any time soon – you can get a sense via online tours found on the website.  I opted for the “Hard Times” tour, which looked at two families struggling to get by during the economic depressions of 1870s and 1930s.

Participation and conversation are key parts of the tours.  At the outset, as we stood outside the stoop at 97 Orchard, our informative and energetic tour guide explained to us that she was going to ask us questions throughout the tour.  This interactive dimension created a lively atmosphere between tour participants.  She also asked us to turn off our cell phones – for the sake of historical accuracy, of course!

The first apartment we visited was the home of the Gumpertzs, a German-Jewish family that migrated from Prussia in 1858.  We were all immediately struck by the size of the apartment, which consisted of a small bedroom, an even smaller kitchen (featuring a coal stove), and a larger living room – the only room to feature natural light.  Our tour guide revealed the most dramatic part of the Gumpertz story: Julius, husband to Natalie and father to four children, abandoned his family a year after the Panic of 1873.  Natalie had to make ends meet by sewing.  This led to a discussion about what strategies we might pursue if we needed help.  Who would we turn to?  With the state providing a minimal social safety net during the 1870s, people of the Lower East Side turned to family, friends, and local mutual aid societies for assistance.

Next, we walked across the hall to our second apartment, inhabited by the Baldizzi family.  The Baldizzis left Sicily in 1923.  Greater restriction on immigration following passage of the Johnson-Reed Act a year later meant that the family probably arrived in the United States by “creative means,” as the tour guide put it.  Entering the Baldizzi’s former home, our tour guide asked us to think about continuity and change.  What was different about this apartment, restored to emulate the space during the 1930s, compared to the previous apartment?  New technology stood out, as running water was installed in 1895, followed soon after by indoor plumbing.  The building was wired for electricity in the early 1920s.  An electric iron in the corner of the room signaled such change.  Tour participants also noted more windows, as the building was retrofitted to increase air flow and natural light.  After we heard about daily life for the Baldizzis and their struggles during the Great Depression, our tour guide asked us to share memories about how our own families had dealt with the economic trials of the 1930s.

The tour ended with a discussion of life in the neighbourhood since the 1950s.  The Lower East Side has seen an influx of immigrants from other areas of the world, especially Latin America and Asia.  Our tour guide also mentioned the ways in which gentrification is having an impact on the area.  Middle-class New Yorkers with disposable income are moving in.  Old tenement apartments sell for astronomical prices and new luxury condominiums pop up.

I suspect the museum is at the crossroads of this process.  On the one hand, it seeks to preserve the legacy of past immigrants who struggled to make it in New York.  It also provides useful services to more recent newcomers.  On the other hand, the museum is a sign of the changing local economy.  Orchard Street is now lined with chic clothing stores and hip restaurants.  By attracting tourists and other visitors willing pay $22 (adult price) to see the tenements, the museum serves as a significant economic motor for the area.  A nearby restaurant, for example, advertises a ten percent discount with purchase of a museum ticket.  Local shop owners seem to realize that heritage can be good business.

My time at the museum was short, but I left in agreement with one aspect of its mission: “In recognizing the importance of this seemingly ordinary building, the Tenement Museum has re-imagined the role that museums can play in our lives.”

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.

UA archives, Upper Arlington History, Flickr Commons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very recently I had the opportunity to visit the British Museum in London, England. It was a place that had long been on my “to do” list. From the scope of the building itself, to the individual objects and their imaginative presentations – the experience did not disappoint. The visit was awe inspiring and enlightening and fed my love of history and material culture. I don’t think I was alone – the faces of many of the school children there spoke volumes.

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

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

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

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

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

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