Interactive videos

Digital history is not always created by historians, sometimes it is created by people who work in different areas. Recently, the filmmaker Katerina Cizek with the National Film Board and New York Times created a documentary that is different from all others, called A Short History of the Highrise. The main product is a video but you can stop the video in order to further explore the parts that interest you. During the production of this video many images from the New York Times Archives were digitized. For all the photos, you are presented first with the front but you can choose to see the back, to read the metadata about the individual photo.

Cizek used digital tools to create a very interesting interactive history of high-rise buildings.

I wonder if few or many more interactive videos similar to this one will be created?

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“Highrise.” Accessed October 5, 2014. http://highrise.nfb.ca/.

“NFB’s Highrise Project Pushes Doc-Making to New Heights | Q with Jian Ghomeshi | CBC Radio.” Accessed October 5, 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2014/04/07/the-nfbs-highrise-project-rises- to-new-heights/.

Maps, maps and more about historical maps

During the last year of my undergrad I read The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography by Graham Robb. When I first looked at this book I don’t remember why but I thought I was going to dislike it so I left it till the end but I was wrong, I actually really liked the book. Anyone interested in maps or the history of France should read this book. It has some really interesting parts for example part of it discusses when people first started trying to map the French Alps. It would be interesting to see some of the information in the book presented in a digital way.

Maps: what they can tell us about the past, present and future?

Ever since I was child I have liked maps, although growing up with a cartographer as a father also means I didn’t really have a choice. I can remember spending many evenings as a child looking at the big atlas (which is rather outdated) we keep in the living room at home. I always liked looking at maps but I never really studied them until I was doing my undergrad. One of my history professors always put historical maps on the midterms and exams. Because of all the studying I did for this I now always joke that I know historical boarders of european countries better than I know the current ones, which is probably actually the truth.

Children of today will not need to look at a regular book atlas because of all the different ways maps can be viewed on the internet. Instead people can now look at Google maps and all the interesting features that go with it on their computers, iPads and cellphones. Google street view is a feature of Google maps but the images it provides are already out dated. Google street view, just like an atlas becomes outdated. Even if it is outdated it can still be incredibly helpful and it also lets you look at interesting places without actually going there. At the moment, people are creating interesting map tools that can be used for a wide variety of possibilities in the future. If Google street view is still around 50 years into the future there will be multiple updates to the images. The images from the earlier versions could be gathered and used to the show how different cities have changed. What do you think people will do with all the data we are currently creating?

People are already creating maps that show information in really interesting ways. Just look at the article 40 maps that explain the world from The Washington Post. Another great title for this article would be 40 maps that change how you see/understand maps and world. I think number 24. called “More than half of humanity lives inside this circle” is one of the most interesting ones even if it is one of the simpler ones because it really makes you think about the differences of living in a rural vs highly populated area. The maps from this article give some great visuals for ideas discussed in Mapping the Nation by Susan Schulten. On the first page of the book Schulten writes, “The map had the odd power to reveal what was already public information.” This one simple sentence explains what people can do with mapping tools. The book focuses on American cartography but the ideas can be applied to cartography of the world. Also, there is an online companion to go along with the book, which gives a number of maps for each chapter. Part of chapter 3 is about diseases, and in the companion there are maps which show outbreaks of different diseases such as Cholera. Mapping tools can be used with historical data but also current. BBC news recently did an article where they mapped out the spread of Ebola called Ebola:Mapping the outbreak. Mapping tools show us information that we already know but in a different way that makes us realize how large and small the world is at the same time.

In the first post I wrote for this blog I mentioned how I believe historians are creating really interesting visual representations of data through technology but with help from people who already know how to use technology really well, even greater representations could be created. The blog post called How did they make that? by Miriam Posner goes into detail on a couple of different digital history projects and the technologies used to make them. For each project there is a breakdown of what the project is, what you will need to know and how to get started. From the ‘what you will need to know’ area you can see that more than basic knowledge of technology is needed for many. Are historians are going to form partnerships with people in technology fields or is learning how to use technology going to become a larger part of being a historian? Since public history programs teach digital history courses it seems as though the later is happening, but is that for the best?

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Fisher, Max. “40 Maps That Explain the World.” The Washington Post, August 12, 2013. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/08/12/40-maps-that-explain- the-world/.

“Google Maps.” Google Maps. Accessed October 4, 2014. https://www.google.com /maps/@37.0625,-95.677068,4z.

Posner, Miriam. “How Did They Make That?” Miriam Posner’s Blog. Accessed October 4, 2014. http://miriamposner.com/blog/how-did-they-make-that/

Schulten, Susan. “Mapping the Nation: History and Cartography in Nineteenth-Century America.” MyiLibrary. Accessed October 4, 2014. http://lib.myilibrary.com/Open.aspx?id=376609.

Doodles

At one point in history doodling had a purpose. Nowadays most people doodle while they are bored in class or because they like to draw…or at least those are the reasons I doodle. But at one time doodling was actually used as a way to test the ink flow of pens. There are a number of books from the medieval period in history with doodles appearing in the first or last couple of pages. A historian in the Netherlands is working to catalogue some of the doodles he has found in books. Check out the article Medieval Book Historian Erik Kwakkel Discovers and Catalogs 800-Year-Old Doodles in Some of the Wrold’s Oldest Books.

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Jobson, Christopher. “Medieval Book Historian Erik Kwakkel Discovers and Catalogs 800-Year-Old Doodles in Some of the World’s Oldest Books.” Colossal. Accessed October 3, 2014. http://www.thisiscolossal.com /2014/10/the-worlds-oldest-doodles/.

Images copyright flowchart

Sometimes it is hard to figure out if you can use an image, here is a flowchart that can help you figure it out. It’s called Can I use that picture?

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Sources

The VisualCommicationGuy.com. “Can I Use That Picture?: The Terms, Laws, and Ethics for Using Copyrighted Images.” Accessed September 25, 2014. http://thevisualcommunicationguy.com /wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Infographic_CanIUseThatPicture4.jpg.

Digitizing: a specialization?

Even when you have decided which profession you want to explore you have to keep narrowing down your interests and what you’re good at. You need to continue to show what makes you different from the other people exploring the same profession.

I have recently decided that I am going to try to make digitization be my specialization. I have always had an interest in special collections, materials which are one of a kind or rare. Now, because of databases it is possible to create websites where these one of a kind or rare materials can be seen by pretty much anyone who wants to go looking for them.

During this past summer I did a co-op placement at Cape Breton University Library and I was able to spend a lot time working on a special collection that is in the early stages of being digitized. The special collection is called the Bras d’Or Collection and it consists of materials which are either from or written about Cape Breton Island. This means there is a lot of information about coal, mining, tourism, economic development and the environment.

Also during this summer I was able to take an online course for a month through the Library Juice Academy called Getting Started with Digital Collections. Through this course I learned a lot about digital collections and some of the great resources that are out there. Such as:Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations and Generic Image Digitisation Workflow.

My third venture into digitization is currently taking place at my newest job. I am really still at the very beginning of the project where I am organizing materials. But the plan is for the collection to appear online in some form. The collection at the moment consists mostly of newspaper and magazine articles all written by Peter Desbarats, who ran the Journalism department at Western University for a number of years.

Hopefully digitizing special collections is an area that I can continue to work in. Digitization is very interesting right now because for many years there were so many kinks in the process that the majority of the projects failed or eventually stopped working. In the last number of years this has really changed and the amount of digitization projects now in the works is amazing. These projects range in terms of the types of organizations carrying them out, which databases are hosting them, and especially the content of the materials.

Through Flickr Commons you can look at the projects that a number of organizations are putting on the web for everyone to see. This may not be the best platform in terms of also presenting information about the materials and how they relate to each other but many may argue that the point is to get the photographs out there. There are other databases out there that do a much better of presenting materials and information about them but a down side is that they are all run through different organizations who have different standards.

There are still many kinks in digitizing to figure out, such as should digitizing be taking place in terms of access or preservation? but we also need to take a step back, stop looking at the problems and just admire the developments and materials now available to so many people.

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Sources

Bogus, Ian, George Blood, Robin L. Dale, Robin Leech, and Mathews, David. “Minimum Digitization Capture Recommendations.” Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.ala.org/alcts /resources/preserv/minimum-digitization-capture-recommendations.

Cape Breton University Library. “Search Bras d’Or Collection | OPEN MINE.” Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.openmine.ca/brasdor-search.

Flickr. “Flickr: The Commons.” Accessed September 25, 2014. https://www.flickr.com/commons.

JISC Digitial Media. “Generic Image Digitisation Workflow.” Accessed September 25, 2014. http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/generic-image-digitisation-workflow/.

Library Juice Academy. “Library Juice Academy: Online Professional Development for Librarians.” Accessed September 25, 2014. http://libraryjuiceacademy.com/.

Still at the beginning…

The very fact that we use the term digital history/humanities shows that we are still at the start of this change in study. When we stop referring to the process of putting historical data into computer programs and turning out interesting results as digital history and start referring to it as how one practices history, we will no longer be at the start but in the very middle of it.

Digital Tools in my Past, Present and Future Practices of History

In the past digital tools and approaches did not affected how I have practiced history very much. During my undergrad I read a lot of books and articles in print. I used the online catalogue to find these resources but that really only affects how long it took me to find them. It was not until I started my masters that I really began use a variety of online resources for my studies.

I am currently trying to use digital tools more than I have in the past because I have come to realize how important these tools are already or are going to become in the future. In 20 years from now public history institutions are going to work in different ways than they currently do because of technology. The people who work in these institutions are working as public historians first but they are also going to need to have a large amount of knowledge in the field of technology. This knowledge will be needed in order to communicate with others, to plan the collections and exhibits, and finally technology will be in places that it never was before. For example National Historic Parks that are reconstructions of place and periods in the past.

Museums and other public institutions are starting to change their approaches for sharing information about the past with the public. Many have begun to have more stations that involve technology. The museum with the dark room and an old TV playing an informational video will become a thing of the past, hopefully. One new approach involves placing QR (Quick Response) codes throughout exhibits for people to scan with their smart phones. Websites with videos and information are linked to the QR codes. This is an interesting idea but it can cause problems because not everyone knows how to use QR codes and not everyone has smart phones. There is a chance of this changing in the future but at the moment there is still a large digital divide in society. Will museums with these types of exhibits provide people with smart phones if they do not have their own? The way public history is being studied is defiantly changing but we need to keep in mind that public may not change as quickly.

The way that research is done in the field of public history is also changing, part of this is because of the amount of new resources that are out there on the world wide web. Many people have taken it upon themselves to find these new resources and learn how to use them. I believe that some great work could be done with some collaboration. Some of the new resources out there are rather technical and thus they can be hard to use if you know little about that area, which I believe some people in public history who have always had their noses stuck in books in the past may be. I may be one of those people. People who have gone through public history programs in the past couple of years or are going through them now have been taught about the new digital resources while in school but even if you are taught about the new resources in school it may be hard to figure them out. I feel that some great work could come out of people in public history and technology fields working together.

All in all I do not yet know how digital technology will affect my practices of public history in the future. I have voiced some of my ideas about where digital tools and approaches may take the study of public history but technology is still evolving and you never know what tomorrow might bring.

Welcome

This blog is going to be used for a course called Digital History which is being taught at Western University. This is a new topic for me since I am taking my Masters in Library and Information Science not Public History. With that said hopefully I will still be able to bring up some interesting ideas about Digital History and won’t end up talking too much about libraries.