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.
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 »
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.
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 »
Doing publicly engaged research isn’t easy, but it was central to Parr’s scholarship and philosophy.
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.
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.
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 »
It is as if LAC had shoveled its digitized material out into a virtual dumpster and invited researchers to dive in. There are indeed treasures to be found here, but systematic research is out of the question.
The problem I have with these claims is that they often ignore the good work of historians who have taken a different perspective.
