This is amazing. This afternoon, I read a 1854 petition written by William Lyon Mackenzie to the Legislative Assembly of Canada demanding £500 compensation for travel expenses incurred during his tenure as a government director for the Welland Canal Company. I read this bizarre and fascinating 157 year old historical […]
Digital History
This week Lauren Wheeler and I launched a new video series for the Network in Canadian History and Environment called EHTV: Live from the Field. NiCHE director, Alan MacEachern, kick-started the idea a couple of months ago with a proposal to get video cameras into the hands of environmental history […]
Andrew Smith published a terrific blog post yesterday about the Higher Education Academy guide to digital history newspaper research. The guide argued that Canada lags behind the UK, United States, Australia, and New Zealand in the digitization of historical newspapers because “[u]nfortunately so far Canada has not funded a national […]
The NiCHE New Scholars Reading Group, a monthly online environmental history graduate workshop, will be holding a live conference call to discuss a chapter from Cheryl Williams’s M.A. thesis titled “The Banff Winter Olympics: Sport, Tourism, and the National Parks.” This chapter looks at the efforts of Calgary business interests […]
Last December, NiCHE announced the results of its fourth annual call for projects and we were awarded funding to develop an environmental history mobile application for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). The EH App Project will develop a mobile application to help connect the environmental history research community to […]
I recently led a session at the City of Calgary Teachers’ Convention Association meeting here at Mount Royal University titled “Teaching Digital History Skills”. The purpose of this session was to explore some of the key digital tools and technologies used for history research, analysis, communication, and teaching at the […]
Last December, Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange claimed that his organization had coined a new type of journalism called “scientific journalism”. According to Assange, “[s]cientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge […]
Historians should be control freaks when it comes to data storage. We are data gatherers who scrape archives for any content relevant to our particular research projects. For instance, when I was last at the city archives in Montreal, I asked the archivist for access to the Montreal public market […]
It is the start of a New Year and it is the start of a new round of the NiCHE New Scholars Reading Group. For the January Round we’ll be taking a look at the introduction to Dan Macfarlane’s recently completed dissertation “To the Heart of the Continent: Canada and […]
As many already know, the transparency activist website Wikileaks is in the process of publishing the text of about 250,000 US diplomatic cables this week. The revelations from the leaked cables range from the scandalous (and even criminal) to the mundane. But, like the previously released Afghanistan and Iraq war […]
Digital and online-based technologies have changed the historian’s craft. Within the past two decades, these technologies have enhanced our abilities to research, analyze, communicate, and teach history. While the current generation of students is commonly referred to as “digital natives” or the “net generation” the assumption that young people are […]
Episode 17 Virtual Field Trips, Automobiles, and Global Commodity Chains: October 29, 2010 [audio: http://niche-canada.org/files/sound/naturespast/natures-past17.mp3][24:35] Over the summer, the NiCHE New Scholars group organized a virtual environmental history workshop that invited graduate students from around the world to participate in two days of discussion and review of working papers on […]