If you weren’t able to attend the 2015 annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Washington, D.C. last week, we’ve got you covered. In fact, the collective #envhist community on Twitter documented the whole thing minute-to-minute. I’ve created archives for a couple of ASEH meetings and this […]
Digital History
71 posts
On Tuesday, February 10, 2015, we held another “History and Computing” workshop in the Department of History at York University. This is a series of practical workshops on the use of digital technologies in historical scholarship and teaching. Alongside my colleague, Carolyn Podruchny, we led presentations on our respective experiences […]
Episode 46: Historical GIS Research in Canada, 26 January 2015 [38:27] Download Audio In recent years, environmental historians and other historians have been working with maps in new ways. Specifically, they have been using HGIS software, that is, historical geographic information systems. You may have heard a bit about this […]
As more of our reading moves from print to screens, learning how to write on the Web will become an increasingly important part of history writing skills. Just as we teach fundamental research and writing skills for print essays, we will likely begin to teach digital writing skills for the […]
In recent years, several scholars have expressed a desire to ban laptop computers and smartphones from the classroom. This urge to prohibit the use of computing devices, however, may be a reflection of our own shortcomings as educators. It may also be a future liability for higher education. What are the implications […]
Next week, I will be participating on a roundtable at the Second World Congress of Environmental History in Guimarães, Portugal. Our roundtable is titled, “Beyond Texts and Archives: Experiments with New Sources and Methods in Environmental History” and it is scheduled for Tuesday, July 8, 2014 from 14:00-15:30 in CO-04 (CFPG). All the […]
Nearly three years ago, I wrote a post called “Canada’s Historical Newspaper Digitization Problem” in which I agreed with the findings of a Higher Education Academy study that found that Canada lagged behind the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand in the digitization of historical newspapers. I found that Canada’s […]
This fall, I am excited to start teaching HIST 4530 The Development of Toronto. This is a six-credit upper-level research seminar course on the history of Toronto with a maximum enrollment of eighteen students. The course aims to cover a number of different aspects of Toronto’s history, including environmental, political, […]
Hot on the heels of last week’s annual meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, this week marks the start of the National Council for Public History conference. This year the NCPH meets in Ottawa from April 17-20 and I will be there to present on a roundtable panel […]
Have you ever wondered why you have to “return” e-books from the library? Typically, libraries permit users to download and read e-books for a limited period of time. Moreover, libraries often limit the number of users who can simultaneously read e-books from their collections. When it comes to physical or […]
If you missed the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Environmental History in Toronto, you can relive the experience on Twitter. I have archived all of the #ASEH2013 Tweets from March 31 to April 7. You will find notes, comments, links, and photos from this superb conference. Enjoy! […]
In the second History and Computing Workshop held in the Department of History at York University, I took faculty and graduate students through an overview of the use of tablet computers for history teaching and research. The most common tablet computer is, of course, Apple’s iPad so I focused my […]