Category Archives: Academic Culture

The Future of Knowledge Mobilization and Public History Online: Supplementary Reading

In August 2024 representatives from multiple online history projects, universities, and public history institutions met in London to discuss key topics in online knowledge mobilization. Over the next several months attendees will publish essays reflecting on the topics we discussed. In the meantime, here are some open-access resources that intersect with workshop content.

Drawn to History! Why I Teach Graphic History & Why You Should Too!

By Alan MacEachern I drew, when I was a kid. I drew goalies and traded them for hockey cards with guys in my class. I drew horses and gave them to girls, no exchange required. But as chapter books replaced pictures books, school drilled into me the hegemony of text. As I got older, because my drawing didn’t improve –… Read more »

Flattened History

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To the extent that we as historians accept as settled the first order questions about AI and instead opt to talk about nuanced details of implementation, I think we risk a very serious mistake. Here, then, I want to publicly state my view of AI and its use in history, and to do so without any qualification. I hate AI.

Fortress McGill

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Signs on McGill's front gates declare "Private Property. No trespassing."

By Edward Dunsworth Order has been restored to the campus of McGill University. Gone is the tent village, its perimeter fence adorned with a multilingual cacophony of banners decrying genocide and crying out for peace and freedom. Gone is the “Free Store,” the “Profs 4 Palestine” tent, and the video monitor screening documentaries. Gone too is the mud, everywhere and… Read more »

Contextualizing a Scandal: A Brief History of Library and Archives Canada

Greer positions the absence of context, connections between collections, and supports that reflect the nuance of archival research as LAC being “determined to hide the results of their past efforts from the eyes of researchers”. In actuality, what is unfolding is a predictable outcome of an impossible situation and the absence of an adequate number of trained professionals to provide anything better.

LAC’s Vision: What Future for the Past

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In fairness to LAC, I recognize that their problems are rooted in chronic underfunding.  That and a succession of governments measuring their success with inappropriate metrics.  While wishing that management had made different choices under the pressure of inadequate financing, I also wish they were not forced to choose between outreach and basic archival services.

Feminism and its Malcontents in Canadian Universities

Black-and-white photograph of several women in a library, looking for books on the shelves and working at tables.

Sara Wilmshurst First off, I’d like to bless the Internet Archive for preserving human folly. The paper under review today has been scrubbed from its original home but lives on in infamy through the Wayback Machine. I am speaking of “On the Challenges of Dating and Marriage in the New Generations,” published under the name of Benyamin Gohjogh. It made… Read more »