I have come to realize over the decade and a half since I first discovered the Wailers that popular music can serve as a useful entry point for understanding the past.  This should not come as a surprise.  Approaches to teaching and learning, such as John Bigg’s SOLO taxonomy, emphasize the importance of understanding foundational concepts before higher order thinking can take place.  Popular culture serves as an easy way to establish these concepts by capitalizing on students’ everyday experience.

Music can be used to teach about the past in at least seven overlapping ways (feel free to add other categories and examples in the comments section):

1) Trivia and basic facts:  Although I am not a hockey fan, thanks to the Tragically Hip, I don’t think that I will ever forget that Bill Barilko went missing after he scored the goal that won the Toronto Maple Leafs the Stanley Cup.  The Leaf’s didn’t win another, until 1962, the year he discovered.  Boney M’s Rasputin is another song full of biographical detail about Grigori Rasputin, adviser to Czar Nicolas II.

2) Commemoration of Events:  U2’s or John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Sunday Bloody Sunday can be used to teach about the 1972 killing of civil rights protestors by British soldiers in Derry, Ireland.

3) As a Primary Source: Songs like Pete Seeger’s Bring ‘Em Home, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier, and Edwin Starr’s War (originally recorded by the Temptations) serve as useful primary sources to introduce people to the anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

4) Commemoration of Historical Processes: Neil Young’s Pocahontas is useful for beginning discussions about the European colonization of North America and dispossession of the continent’s Aboriginal people.

5) Change over time: Although it’s a rather simple song, Istanbul (not Constantinople), (first recorded in 1953 but perhaps now better known by its cover by They Might Be Giants) can be used to illustrate how the meaning of places change over time.

6) Teaching Oral Traditions: Organizations like Mariposa in the Schools emphasize the importance of oral cultural traditions in the school system.  Their music program emphasizes themes such as migration and cultural interaction as well as the development of specific types of music such as folk and the blues.

7) Telling Alternative Narratives: On the eve of the bicentennial of the War of 1812 it is worth noting Stan Rogers’s efforts to tell some of the lesser known stories of the war.  One of Rogers’s better known songs about 1812, MacDonnell on the Heights, tells the story of a valiant major who met his death during the battle of Queenston Heights but whose legacy languished because of General Isaac Brock’s legacy (Brock, incidentally, died at the beginning of the battle with which he is most frequently associated).  For more on Stan Rogers and the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘popular’ history see Nick Baxter-Moore’s article “Recording the War of 1812: Stan Rogers’ (Un)sung Heros.”

We have to be careful not to over-emphasize what music can teach us.  Music – particularly folk music – often instills romantic notions of the past and tempts us to create simple and somewhat singular narratives about the past.  Like all primary and secondary sources, music needs to be critically evaluated.  But as a tool through which historical events and concepts can be introduced, it serves as a bridge between students’ everyday experiences and the past.

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.

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Figure 1: Constance Margaret Austin, c. 1920

Who was Constance Margaret Austin (1894 – 1966)?  Her obituary doesn’t say: reporters emphasized her filial connection to James Austin (1813 – 1897), President of Dominion Bank.  Nor did she: Margaret left no diaries and the letters that she penned were lost.

But, Spadina Museum has charged visiting students with the task of finding out.  Their educational program on World War I teaches students how to utilize primary sources – photographs, report cards, newspaper articles and the like – and provides them with the skill-set to answer an “unanswered” question.

On 5 October 2011, a group of educators participated in Spadina Museum’s program as part of the quarterly Approaching the Past workshops, discovering both Margaret and an innovative teaching tool.

We began our learning journey upstairs in the children’s quarters.  Doug, our guide, informed us that Margaret (Margie) moved into the grand house, the children’s quarters, at 5 years old.  She had come from Winnipeg, MB, an industrializing city to Canada’s cultural epicenter.  Her father even built a golf and country club on their estate!  Margie’s parents promised her that when she became a lady, she herself could move into the adult quarters, visit the club, and become an active participant in city life.

But, Doug didn’t describe Margie’s pre-war life in detail.   He provided us with a base of information.  Then, Doug asked us to imagine, “What would life be like for Margie before 1914?  What sort of world did she live in?”

To help answer the question, Doug led us into the “Blue Room,” a space designed to inspire Margie and her sisters.  He pulled out a collection of primary documents, asking us to interpret their meaning.  My team was handed a postcard from 1907.  It depicted Avenue des Champs-Élysées. Margie’s 13-year old cursive informed us that she was staying close to “here.”

Figure 2: The Blue Room, a lounge designed to inspire young ladies

The postcard led us to the following conclusions:

• Margie was well-educated for a woman in 1907, having been offered opportunities for growth through travel – a privilege denied many women whose primary occupation was domestic service (to their families or their employers).
• Margie must have privately tutored – her postcard was dated September 1907, meaning that Margie would have missed at least one month of school returning to Canada by steamship.

We were right about her educational opportunities, but wrong to assume that Margie had a governess.  By cross-referencing our postcard conclusions with her father’s account books (Doug’s findings), we learned that Margie attended school in Eastonbury, England and took a stop-over in Paris, France.

As Doug’s students, we learned more about Margie’s journey to become a Toronto lady.  As educators, the activity reinforced the importance of hands-on learning: Spadina Museum structures activities so that students not only what happened, but how history is produced.  Doug showed us how different sources told different stories.  The importance of cross-referencing sources was highlighted by gaps in Margie’s life story that we identified and filled as a team.

Figure 3: Margie in Uniform, c. 1917

Unfortunately, Margie’s entrance into Toronto society was thwarted by war.  Her parents cancelled her debutante party out of respect for the soldiers, in support of the war effort.  Margie didn’t sulk in her party dress.  Instead, by 1917, Margie had travelled to England and volunteered as a Nurse’s Aide.  And, as part of Doug’s mission to have us learn about WWI through experience, we travelled “out of the house.”

Once settled in the screened-in veranda, Doug shared primary sources with the group, encouraging us to discuss Margie’s life during the war.  He showed us a picture of her in uniform.  “What can you say about Margie’s uniform?” he asked.

We stared at her nun-like garb.  And, we fell silent.  Doug resisted the temptation to micro-manage the group by answering the question.  He kept us in charge of our learning experience by offering encouraging prompts.  For example, Doug pointed at a cross stitched onto Margie’s headpiece.  “Are you thinking holy thoughts?” Doug asked.

His prompts kept us in charge of our learning experience.  Doug provided us with a clue, not an answer, thus sparking a lively conversation about the desexualization of female volunteers.  As Doug’s students, we concluded that WWI demanded a new set of prerequisites for our lady-in-training.  As educators, we learned that a museum tour could act as a launching pad for classroom discussions about changing women’s roles.

Margie returned home in 1919 and, after 20 – 30 minutes on the veranda, we followed Margie home, convening in the foyer.  Doug reminded us that 5 years had passed since Margie’s cancelled debutante party.  She would be forced to enter Toronto society as a “mature” woman.  Bad luck followed Margie it seems and there was an outbreak of Spanish Flu on the eve of her rescheduled soiree. Doug asked us to reconstruct Margie’s life after the war, asking us “Why is her obituary so sparse?”

Primary documents helped us to reconstruct history once again.  Reading the provincial government’s address to women workers showed us that women’s labour was devalued after the war.  Women were believed to be taking jobs away from veterans.  Her obituary was sparse (in part) because Margie’s service had no place in post-war society.

As educators, this conclusion was powerful because it reinforced that history is a vital experience.  History is not just a collection of facts that comes from textbooks.  Indeed, we could not learn about Margie in Bumstead’s Canadian Peoples. Instead, Spadina Museum’s activities reinforced that history develops with us as we live and work in “historic” environments.  We learned that our students could take charge of their own learning experience through a local fieldtrip.

Learning about Margie at Spadina House allowed us to imagine how WWI changed family life in Canada, how it modified women’s roles.  More importantly, it taught us that we could use museum tours to empower our students to build histories using primary sources.

A tour of Spadina House is an essential addition to any teacher’s toolbox.  It teaches both content and process (methodology) by allowing students to act like historians.  And, by acting like historians, students identify the power and value of their own analytical skills – skills that are not necessarily activated through reading assignments.

To arrange a tour for your classroom, please e-mail spadina@toronto.ca or telephone 416-392-6910.

“The monster they’ve engendered in me will return to torment its maker, from the grave, the pit, the profoundest pit. Hurl me into the next existence, the descent into hell won’t turn me. I’ll crawl back to dog his trail forever.” (George Jackson—Soledad Brother, Black Panther, movement martyr)

The importance of educating students about past radicalisms is undeniable. In presenting prior contexts of rebellion, historians on the left seek to provide new generations with a vocabulary of revolt, to impart a sense of the vital necessity of taking up the challenge of the traditions of resistance that have shaped our social and economic world. Another undeniability is that this is no easy task: as Stuart Henderson has amply demonstrated, patterns of disappointment and ironic detachment are woven tightly into the fabric of mass culture under capitalism. And yet, I am perturbed by the tone and conclusion of Professor Henderson’s recent article, “Disappointment, Nihilism, and Engagement.”

Henderson presents his musings as an attempt to expand on what, by his own avowal, was “knee-jerk professoring”; in a response to a concerned participant in his class he condemned the seeming apathy of his other students as a kind of moral failure to face up to the mounting challenges of global environmental decay, war, corporatization, etc. His longer piece, though, seems to me to be only a slightly more charitable articulation of this line of thought. In setting himself (and by extension other self-identified “active historians”) up as the impassioned and ethically enlightened authority figure, crusading against the passivity of a generation that would rather spend the reading week playing video games than at a protest, I want to submit that Henderson in fact bypasses what seem to me to be more interesting and fundamental questions. What constitutes engagement? Can conventional historical work (lecturing on the Sixties, for example) continue to be understood as a fulfillment of our responsibilities as left historians? Where should we be looking to find active history? READ MORE

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Grow, Canada, Grow!

Wolfram Alpha likes to help you out. By simple typing ‘history’ into the answer engine, you’ll get a page demonstrating all the cool things you can do for historical topics. This is a reliable source of simple information for anybody wanting to quickly access basic facts. As noted by Léon Robichaud in the comments, however, however, the data on Canadian Prime Ministers is faulty – Meighen was the 9th Prime Minister but had the 3rd shortest term; similarly, 1st Prime Minister returns Harper! For example, if you type ’3rd Prime Minister of Canada’ into the engine, you’ll see it parsed as ‘Canada’ ‘Prime Minister’ ’3rd.’ And then you would [erroneously] learn that the third Prime Minister of Canada was Arthur Meighen, he governed for 2 months and 27 days, he was born in Toronto 137 years ago and died 51 years ago at the age of 86.

What’s going on with the Prime Minister section? Turns out that Wolfram is parsing the information in a peculiar way! It’s interpreting the list of prime ministers by term-length. You can see this by pulling up the list (press ‘more‘ on sequence to see Alpha’s take on it). There you have the correct sequence, but the data parses it by focusing on the LENGTH field as opposed to the sequence you have. This appears to be a unique manifestation, as opposed to the American list of presidents.

This is perhaps a more valuable lesson than the original post entailed! In any case, I’ll report this to Wolfram Alpha as it’s clearly not returning the data that we want. That way they can refine their results better. There is a ‘feedback’ button on the bottom of every page.

Say that you’ve always wondered what your ‘third cousin’ really is: a simple search demonstrates a genealogical chart! Population information abounds in the database: you can learn the population growth percentages of Canada between 1945 and 1960, or the population circa 1911 (7.21 million people, the 33rd largest country then in the World, and probably weighing approximately 504 462 metric tons). You can also access basic biographic (Harriet Tubman) or comparative biographic information (Stephen Harper and Pierre Trudeau), information on historical events (D-Day), or even defunct empires (Austro-Hungary).

The showdown everybody has been waiting for: the name Ian vs. the name Edith!

For contemporary information, you can do a search such as ‘Income Inequality of Canada vs United States‘ and quickly learn out Gini indexes, income share held by the various fifths of the population. How frequent does your own name appear? I learn that ‘Ian’ is the 72nd most popular name in the United States, and it has been steadily increasingly in popularity since 1960 or so. It’s a young name. Edith, on the other hand, is pretty unpopular these days – although it was pretty popular back in the day. Indeed, about 2% of people in their late 80s are named ‘Edith’ (as opposed to less than half a percentage under 10 these days). You can even do showdowns: “Ian vs. Edith” to see the relative ranges [my apologies to any of our readers named Edith - quite frankly, we both pale in comparison to the most popular US given names!]. Or simpler, everyday things: exchange rates, both historically and today (right now $2500 Canadian gets you $2538.38 US).

You can have a lot of fun with this information. For each result, you can see what sources were used to generate the information. If anything, it’s a snapshot into the future: refined, intelligent knowledge acquisition.

What do you think? Toy or tool? Would you encourage your undergraduates to check it out and play with it? How trustworthy is the information? Are you just thrilled to have a simple way to figure out how you’re related to your grandmother’s aunt?

[Text in red was modified and added from the original post]

A few months ago I took part in the “Expert participation survey” and in doing so learned about the Wikimedia Research Committee‘s concern about the lack of involvement from scientists, academics and professional experts. The survey asked me to rank the importance of a number of reasons I did not edit Wikipedia more often. The major themes in these questions included lack of time, lack of professional credit/career advancement, and inability to include “original research”. I think the first two are interconnected. Should graduate students or early career historians spent time writing Wikipedia articles when they should be finishing their dissertations or working on their books/articles for peer-review?

I don’t expect job search committees put too much weight on editing Wikipedia when they consider a candidates academic CV. As a friend suggested in my question about editing Wikipedia on Twitter, she already spends enough time doing things that will not help get her a paying job. While none of us want to think purely about advancing our careers (if we all took a CV building mentality to its extreme we’d be terrible teachers and it would be hard to find people to blog for ActiveHistory.ca), we do all hope to get paying jobs some day and finishing the dissertations, books and article require a lot of time.

The third concern, about not writing article based on original research, is equally limiting. The easiest articles that I could edit are the ones on West Ham and the River Lea. I know a lot about this history, as I’ve completed a dissertation on the topic. Wikipedia, however, does not allow any information not found in reputable published sources. It is possible to reference your own publications, but they warn not to do so excessively, as it would raise red flags about self-promotion. So the lack of time, career advancing credit, and warnings against writing about our own research, together creates some high barriers against regular participation from academic historians (not to mention the historians who distrust the whole Wikipedia crowd-sources approach to creating an encyclopedia).

With all these road blocks, why should we bother with Wikipedia? The answer is simple. Wikipedia is one of the most visited sites on the web (currently ranked # 7, behind giants like Facebook and Google, but still ahead of Twitter and Bing). Google and other search engines direct millions of readers to Wikipedia articles daily. One of the goals of ActiveHistory.ca is to connect historians with policy makers, the media and the public. They all use Wikipedia. It is the first source of information for a growing proportion of the world’s population, so it is increasingly important that the information is both correct and expansive.

Other disciplines have recognized the importance of Wikipedia and are working on promoting a more active engagement. The Association for Psychological Science, for example, issued this statement to its members encouraging them to edit Wikipedia:

APS is calling on its Members to support the Association’s mission to deploy the power of Wikipedia to represent scientific psychology as fully and as accurately as possible and thereby to promote the free teaching of psychology worldwide. (APS Webiste)

They also have a good short podcast on their site about the topic.

After having been convinced of the importance of engaging with Wikipedia a few months ago, I’ve finally set aside some time to get started. Last week I decided to look at pages related to environmental history, which is a topic that I’ve read a lot of secondary sources for, giving me the expertise to add content, without relying on my own original research. First, I updated the list of key sources in British Environmental History and then I noticed the lack of attention to Canadian Environmental History. This led me to learn how to start a draft page for a new topic and I’m currently working with a group of Canadian environmental historians to write a new article on their topic. If you would like to help, please visit this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cljim22/Canadian_environmental_history

You don’t, however, need to jump straight into writing new article for Wikipedia. Simply adding citations is one of the biggest and easiest contribution academic historians can make to improving Wikipedia articles. The process is simple. Click “Edit this Page” on any Wikipedia article and then put your cursor at the location you’d like to add a citation. Then click Citation on the top of the edit screen and choose the type of source from the templates (web, book, journal, news). This brings up a form for you to fill in the author, title, publisher, etc. Finally, add something in the “Edit Summary” box explaining you’ve added a citation and click “Save Page”. If all of us take five minutes to add a citation or two every few weeks, the quality of the history articles will increase and make them an even more useful source for students beginning research projects.

Teaching is the final reason it is important for academic historians to engage with Wikipedia. We need to stop telling our students to avoid it. After they leave university many of them will work in jobs where web searches will be the standard approach to research and information gathering. Instead of telling our students to never use Wikipedia, we need to show them how the articles are created and provide them with the critical skills to judge good articles from bad ones (the number of citations and type of citations and the number of editors are two easy tests to judge the quality of an article). Good articles are ideal for the first stage of research, as they provide lists of further resources on the topic (much like a text book) at the bottom of the page. I still warn student to not use Wikipedia article in their citations, much like my professors warned me to not use the Encyclopedia of Britannica articles in research papers during my first year of university (during the pre-Wikipedia late 1990s). A few history professors have gone beyond teaching students how to use Wikipedia for research and ask their students to write Wikipedia articles as assignments. You can read Frederick Gibbs’ blog post on the topic here. I think it is increasingly important that we teach our students digital literacy and I think a Wikipedia assignment could teach students a wide range of new skills. The site is ranked almost as highly as Facebook after all, so we should teach our students and ourselves how to use it well.

Please leave comments about your experience with Wikipedia.

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The 1933 CCF Regina Manifesto (all images produced by Wordle.net)

With politicians out on the hustings, what better time than to go through the old political speeches, manifestos, and platforms. Using Wordle, we can throw them up and look at word clouds. They’re not just pretty, but they can let us see the evolution of political thought and what words were capturing Canadians. They also let us see what things remain the same: most Throne Speeches over the last 15 years are nearly identical, stressing ‘government,’ ‘Canada,’ ‘Canadians, ‘etc. But we can see discontinuities: the 1933 Regina Manifesto, for example, contrasted with contemporary NDP promises and platforms (‘family’ and ‘home’). Reading all the documents might be preferable, but this is quick (it takes a minute to produce the picture at left) and has great possibilities for dealing with large quantities of information.

A proviso: this isn’t stunning analysis. It’s more just a demonstration of how we could take textual information, throw it up into a visual format, and then see changes over time. The examples I use might seem straightforward to some of our readers. But you could put these down in front of people who aren’t familiar with the story, and see how the CCF of 1933 is demonstrably different than the NDP of today.

What is a word cloud? Basically, it goes through a text, counts how often particular words appear, scrubs out ‘stop words’ (which are common words like ‘the’), and then throws them up on the screen. If the most common word was ‘Canada,’ it would appear both larger and bolder. If the least common word was ‘socialism,’ it either wouldn’t appear at all or in tiny, almost imperceptible text. The clouds here were created using Wordle.net, although you could make your own with a simple programming script. Wordle is more accessible, however, and much prettier.

The 1933 Cooperative Commonwealth Federation’s Regina Manifesto word cloud captures some element of the spirit. MUST is the most important word, capturing the urgency which its drafters saw the need to profoundly change Canada’s economic system. Others: PUBLIC, SYSTEM, ECONOMIC, POWER. Canada appears to a lesser degree, and also some words you wouldn’t see in a contemporary stump speech: capitalist, socialized, even ownership and workers sneaking in there.

The 1970 'Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada' (Waffle Manifesto)

If you were to then throw up the 1970 Waffle Manifesto, you’d see ‘Canadian,’ ‘Canada,’ ‘American,’ capturing the national aspects of it. But still socialist, socialism, capitalism, struggle, capturing the radical critique of the present order.

The NDP Platform (c. early April 2011 before it's been fleshed out)

It gets trickier when you want to compare it to recent NDP platforms, as manifesto has faded in favour of sound bits and short less precise promises. But if we put the 2011 NDP platform in, we see different emphases: family, families, make, home, affordable. Gone are the imperatives, the ‘musts,’ the ‘workers,’ the ‘capitalist’, other such analysis. If you’re teaching or trying to understand the shift in political discussion based on these textual materials, why not convert it into visual form for some quick and easy analysis? In about 5 minutes, you can make a point to an audience (many of whom like to actually see stuff, like me, instead of just read it).

Here are some other examples: the Students for a Democratic Society Port Huron Statement (1962 and the Liberal Red Book (1993).

NDP Platform from April 10th (post updated to add)

1962 Port Huron Statement by Students for a Democratic Society

The 1993 'Little Red Book' for the Liberal Party

Approaching the Past is a workshop series that brings together teachers working in middle and high schools, universities and museums to discuss teaching history.  Approaching the Past is organized by The History Education Network (THEN/HIER) and ActiveHistory.ca.

Please RSVP Samantha Cutrara at rsvp.approachingthepast@gmail.com by April 21 to attend.

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Many people use Twitter for personal social/professional pursuits: finding links, having communication with a broad audience, self-promoting your blog on making history relevant (“follow us,” we cry). But you can use twitter in the classroom to create a sense of community, facilitate communication out of class, and hopefully open students’ eyes to the enormity of the world and the role that digital communication plays in ongoing events. As a long-term skeptic about the utility of twitter – and somebody who continues to avoid Facebook – I hope to reach the digital skeptic here.

When I first heard of Twitter in mid-to-late 2006, it sounded inane. 140 characters seemed restrictive for text (SMS) messaging, let alone as a means to communicate over the internet. We have e-mail, I probably snidely dismissed, and then went back to predicting the eminent end of Facebook. It wasn’t really until 2009 that I realized I had been wrong.

It was at the Great Lakes THATCamp, where co-editor Jim Clifford and I went to Michigan Sate University, that I saw the power of an ad-hoc network. By adding the hashtag #THATCamp, your message went to everybody following that particular tag. You didn’t have to be friends, you didn’t have to know each other, but you could carry on conversations throughout the Conference. Have you ever sat in one panel at a large conference and wondered what was going on in the next room over? Whether there were opportunities for cross-talk that were simply gone because the programme committee decided a certain way? Wished that you knew where people were congregating for an ad-hoc debate on historical materialism, or social history, or whatever? During the G20 in Toronto, following the #g20 hashtag quickly let you realize what was going on, where protests were, where police were, and painted a disturbing picture of quickly eroding civil liberties. And, of course, the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa continue to demonstrate the organizational powers of twitter.

But enough of that. How could an instructor use Twitter? This is me thinking out loud here – something that I hope to try next year as a TA.

Firstly, you have to get students to sign on at the start of the class (day one). Put it on the syllabus. Demo how it works on the first day of class. Like everything that you do involving digital humanities, we have to assume that digital literacy levels are very low. Take them to the twitter.com homepage, show them how to make an account (maybe make your official course account at this time), and demonstrate a few trending issues. Say you’re running a class on sexuality. Why not see what the current debate on #circumcision is? Could academics play a role in informing debate?

This is probably the most crucial point. As Sean Kheraj pointed out to me via Twitter, there just aren’t enough people bought into Twitter.

Secondly, encourage your students to use it during class. In a large lecture hall format, if a student thinks something is cool or has an interesting point, it may not be feasible to interrupt the flow of a lecture for every comment. At schools like York University, I also suspect there’s a culture of passivity in the lecture hall. So get them to put comments up, attached with a hashtag, say #HIST1000 [or whatever your course code is].

Imagine how gratifying it would be to see: “Wow, just learned a neat point in my #HIST1000 class about X,” questioning an issue, or even asking for clarification from peers. The problem is, if only one or two or even ten students have bought in, this would be a boring conversation. Hence the importance of that introductory lesson on day one of the course.

Most importantly, however, it would continue the conversation outside of class. At York University, a commuter campus located on the periphery of Toronto, I’m continually shocked by the sheer level of student alienation. Many students note that they have difficulty making friends, as they rush from class to class, worry about making bus connections, and face such large classrooms that peer interaction is so limited.

So imagine: asking for lecture notes if somebody couldn’t make it? Having difficulty finding a reading? Forming ad-hoc study groups? Complaining about the reading? Even complaining about the instructor! Sure, we have Moodle and the occasional course blogs. But those quite frankly, aren’t conducive to off-the-cuff communication. They’re coldly, resistant to customization, and really only provide a venue for a course forum.

Finally, as Sean mentioned in a tweet, it might help students follow your research. Let them see what you do, get insight into the daily life of a researcher, the questions asked and considered. And even if you just reach one or two students, what a difference that might make!