by Krista McCracken Discussion around the value of contributing to Wikipedia and its use as a resource has been occurring since the establishment of the collaboratively written encyclopedia in 2001. You don’t have to look very far to find someone decrying the crowdsourced material as rubbish or others proclaiming it as the best thing since sliced bread. In between these… Read more »
By Stacey Devlin During the second half of my MA, my colleagues and I were tasked with preparing an exhibit about early-twentieth-century medicine. Not having a background in medical history, I began by downloading archived medical periodicals from Early Canadiana Online. I reasoned that if I could identify important conversations of the profession during the period of interest, I would… Read more »
By Sean Kheraj Digital history is coming to York University in Fall 2016. That is to say, I finally got around to organizing and preparing to teach digital history. As I get ready to teach this course, I am surveying the landscape of digital history teaching in Canada, looking for ideas. Readers of this article, I hope, will help by… Read more »
by Sean Carleton, Crystal Fraser, and John Milloy Earlier this month, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) opened its physical and digital doors to the public. The Centre is located in Chancellor’s Hall at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg and its online archive contains “Terabytes of Testimony,” including 35,000 photos, five million government, church, and school documents,… Read more »
By Mark Abraham Accepting her Video of the Year award at the 2015 VMAs, pop singer Taylor Swift, surrounded by the women who appear as weapon-toting warriors in her victorious video “Bad Blood,” said she was grateful that “we live in a world where boys can play princesses and girls can play soldiers.” That same night, writer Adam Fleischer posted… Read more »
ActiveHistory.ca is on a three-week hiatus, but we’ll be back with new content in mid-August. During the hiatus, we’re featuring some of our most popular and favourite posts from the past year. We will also be highlighting some of the special series and papers we’ve run this year. Thanks as always to our writers and readers. The following post was… Read more »
By Tina Loo “The bigger-is-better approach to art is best left to Stalinist tyrants, theme-park entrepreneurs and insecure municipalities hoping to waylay bored drive-by tourists…. A brutal megalith doesn’t prompt individual introspection – it mocks it. And by defiling a quiet beauty spot with its grandiose bulk, Mother Canada will only diminish the heritage it claims to honour.” – Globe… Read more »
By Daniel Ross On June 19th, City of Toronto officials on their way to work had to step over the bodies of hundreds of cyclists lying in front of the entrance to City Hall. A week later, the busy intersection in front of the Bank of England in central London was shut down by a similar spectacle. And in January,… Read more »
By David Webster The internet deleted its first virtual country this month. It wasn’t that bad: Timor-Leste is now a real country, and doesn’t need its original internet domain name any longer. But the .tp top-level country domain name (ccTLD, in the lingo) has a story to tell as it ends its 18-year history. In 1997, the former Portuguese colony… Read more »
Active History is pleased to present our first Film Friday. If you have created a film about history and are interested in screening it on our site, drop us a line. By Matthew Hayes In the middle of winter in 1965, women workers at a plastics factory in Peterborough, Ontario went on strike. The Tilco strikers were fighting against unacceptable… Read more »
