By Ian Milligan “Sorry, the page you were looking for is no longer available.” In everyday web browsing, a frustration. In recreating or retracing the steps of a scholarly paper, it’s a potential nightmare. Luckily, three tools exist that users should be using to properly cite, store, and retrieve web information – before it’s too late and the material is… Read more »
By Ian Milligan “Thirty goons break into your office and confiscate your computers, your hard drives, your files.. and with them, a big chunk of your institutional memory. Who you gonna call?” These were the words Bob Garfield used in a recent episode of On the Media, to address the storming of the Crimean Center for Investigative Journalism. On Saturday, March… Read more »
Things aren’t looking very bright for the arts and humanities at the moment. In our current age of austerity, arts and humanities budgets are easy targets for spending reductions. In both the United States and Canada, politicians seem focused on cuts. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney identified the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for… Read more »
By Ian Milligan This post originally appeared on ianmilligan.ca. OK, you’re all forgiven: when you hear ‘open data,’ the first thing that springs to mind probably isn’t a historian (to some historians, it’s the first episode of the BBC show ‘Yes, Minister’). In general, you’d be right: most open data releases tend to do with scientific, technical, statistical, or other… Read more »
By Ian Milligan For many students, it’s back to school season. For me, that means it is time to think about some of the resources and tools that are out there. If you want to research a topic, it’s worth keeping in mind some great repositories online. The big one online is the Internet Archive – which is not just old websites…. Read more »
Digital History isn’t for everyone. In Canada, according to the 2010 Canadian Internet Use Survey, one-fifth of all households remain without access to the internet in the home.
By Ian Milligan In 1963, despite community opposition, New York City’s Pennsylvania Station was torn down. It was an age of modernism, old being wiped away for new. Afterwards, some of the sails went out of that movement: there was renewed interest in architectural preservation, added hesitation when it came to the wholesale destruction of our past. Last week, a… Read more »
By Paul W. Bennett The Internet is finally beginning to penetrate historical practice. At the recent North American Society for Sports History (NASSH) Conference, held May 24-26, 2013 at Saint Mary’s University, Douglas Booth and Gary Osmond provided a fascinating primer on the impact digital history is starting to exert on a field like the study of international sports history. … Read more »
By Ian Milligan (previously posted in two parts on ianmilligan.ca) Yahoo! succeeded in destroying the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time, certainly on purpose, in known memory. Millions of files, user accounts, all gone. – Archive.Org (click through for the GeoCities archive) As if it was a bad April Fools joke, April 1st 2013 saw the end… Read more »
By Kaitlin Wainwright At December’s public consultations on the new Museum of Canadian History, Sean Kheraj, an assistant professor of history at York University, made a comment that stuck with me: by commemorating moments in history we actually learn as much about our present as our past. In trying to see the past through a contemporary lens, we blur history… Read more »
