The term “download decade” is an effective description of the first ten years of this infant century and the first rising chapter of the so-called Information Age. It accurately distills the blind conspiracy between the exponential availability of high-speed Internet, the gradual decrease in the cost of personal computers, the rise of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and websites like Napster and… Read more »
by Jeff Slack Public outrage mounts with every successive failure to mend the gaping wound in the Gulf of Mexico seabed. Struggling to affirm his leadership in the spill’s wake, President Obama recently described the disaster as “an environmental 9/11,” underscoring the need for a bold new energy-environment policy. Through reference to the still-poignant memory of 9/11, the president seems… Read more »
The use of new digital media in conjunction with conventional print publication is one of the many important contributions that Joy Parr’s recent Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953-2003 (2010, UBC Press) makes to our understanding of the past. The book examines how Canadians living in environments affected by megaprojects built after the Second World War responded to… Read more »
Sean Kheraj Last week the federal government tabled its long anticipated copyright reform legislation for first reading in the House of Commons. The Copyright Modernization Act or Bill C-32 attempts to overhaul many of the out-dated provisions of Canada’s copyright law that have fallen far behind major technological changes of the last thirty years. For instance, under the proposed legislation,… Read more »
by Jeff Slack A recent BBC news report highlights some of the key issues in a decades-long debate over heli-skiing in the European Alps. First experimented with in British Columbia’s interior mountain ranges in the 1960s, heli-skiing entails using helicopters in lieu of chairlifts to shuttle small, guided groups of skiers to the top of otherwise difficult-to-access, and thus untracked… Read more »
The increasing number of primary and secondary sources made available by various online archives and databases continue to aid researchers and enrich the historical community as a whole. But they have also created challenges for more conventional forms of resource sharing in a community where print arguably remains the standard. While websites have generally made a more concerted effort to… Read more »
by Tim O’Grady Whether in an urban or a rural environment, I find built history fascinating. It’s all around us, and contains incredible stories about our past, but most people never really notice it. As part of my MA in Public History at the University of Western Ontario I had the opportunity to take a class in interactive exhibit design,… Read more »
This post quickly looks at some neat new internet-based websites that attempt to make historical imagery accessible to the general public.
Technology has created an abundance of new mediums for storing historical documents. Challenges arise for the historian over issues of organization and accessibility. Historians and the interpretation of history are still crucial in a world ruled by digital memory.
This is a blog post looking at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, introducing readers to the resources available there.
