In this post, Ian Milligan introduces people to the Internet Archive, the Haithi Trust, and Google Books. Why should we have to travel to archival repositories, especially if they’re in an already convenient form like microfilm? Shouldn’t everybody have access to information, not just the select few who happen to have institutional affiliations? When it comes to access to information, we should be on an even playing field. Lay people interested in history, undergraduates, cash-strapped professional researchers, and all can benefit from several internet resources that put an incredible amount of information at your finger tips.
http://www.qaa.ac.uk/podcasts/Wikipedia.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadI started editing a few Wikipedia articles lately. While I’ve been interested in the project for years, I never seemed to have the time to become involved. Before this past week, I had created an account and fixed a few small details on pages directly related to my expertise, but I never added much… Read more »
Listening to Our Past explores the rich cultural heritage of the people of Nunavut. The website was created by Nunavut Arctic College and l’Association des francophones du Nunavut. The site aims to present history recorded though oral traditions and oral histories told by Nunavut elders. The site is tri-lingual and material is available in English, French, and Inuktitut. When first… Read more »
We need to make sense of large quantities of information in order to do ‘big history’ and provide a context into which we can write our smaller studies. In this post, I’ll tell you what an ngram is, show some cool pictures, and hopefully drive you to have some fun with this.
Professor Matthew Hayday of the University of Guelph has written an evocative piece on some of the joys and potential pitfalls of engaging living activists in historical research. His piece, “The History of the Recent: Reflections on Social Movement History, Research Methods and the Rapid Passage of Time,” is a useful read for anybody interested in the connections between oral history, professional historians, social movements, and activists.
This is a demonstration by Ian Milligan of how word clouds can be used to visually display textual documents, with possible applications in the educational field, media field, and elsewhere. It also has lots of pretty pictures.
WhatWasThere and Historypin are websites which emphasize history’s connection to geography. Last August, Teresa Iacobelli wrote a great post on Historypin, its predecessors, and location based history. WhatWasThere is a similar site that has been gaining popularity in recent weeks. Both sites are based on the idea of attaching historical photographs of buildings, landscape, and landmarks to present day maps…. Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is expanding its review section to include scholarly analyses of websites. It is imperiative in this “digital age” to develop the tools necessary to critically engage with this expanding resource base.
Heritage organizations are continuously working to establish a digital presence and integrate digital tools into their collection management practices. Open source software can be a huge benefit for an organization with a limited technology budget.
