By Jim Clifford Today in Canada you can legally distribute, download and create new editions of George Orwell’s 1984, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran, Georges Lefebvre’s work on the French revolution, Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, Ernest Hemingway’s many short stories and novels, and for all the fans of the staples thesis, the works of Canadian political… Read more »
By Ian Milligan When we started up ActiveHistory.ca way back in 2009 (!), we did it with a pretty simple vision in mind: historians were producing good scholarship, but it was inaccessible. It was inaccessible for a few reasons: sometimes we don’t exactly write for a general audience (we’ve been guilty of dropping jargon around this site too, I know,… Read more »
By Ian Milligan This post is a bit technical. My goal is to explain technical concepts related to digital history so people can save time and not have to rely on experts. The worst thing that could happen to digital history is for knowledge to consolidate among a handful of experts. From the holdings of Library and Archives Canada, to… Read more »
By Ian Milligan Yesterday afternoon, in the atrium of the University of Waterloo’s Stratford Campus, a packed room forewent what was likely the last nice weekend of summer to join Peter Mansbridge and guests for a discussion around “What’s the future of the library in the age of Google?” It was aired on CBC’s Cross Country Checkup on CBC Radio… Read more »
By Thomas Peace This post is a little late in coming, but hopefully it will be useful for those of us working in pre-twentieth century North American history or with online resources. About a year ago, I discovered that one of the most useful reference resources I use, Statistics Canada’s E-Stat tables of the Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871 had been… Read more »
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 »
