This Public Historian

A history nerd, yes. A science nerd, not so much.

2010-08-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

I decided that instead of having yet another lazy Sunday, I would venture out to the Canada Science and Technology Museum and see what it was all about. Unlike a lot of the other museums in Ottawa, this one isn't centrally located, so I had to take a bus I'd never taken before to get to the Museum, which ended up working out quite well. The ride to the museum wasn’t too long at all and it probably took me under 40 minutes to get there; from the minute I left my house to when I set foot on the grounds of the museum.

My only issue was that I had to walk to the museum from the bus stop and there was really no sidewalk that went to the museum. There was also no signage that indicated I was going in the right direction. I could see “Technology Park” from across the street; it had a windmill, train, and giant rocket, among other things. I didn’t really feel like running through the park to find the museum, which I correctly assumed was at the opposite end of the park. I finally crossed the street and decided I’d walk on the grass on the side of the road that I was pretty sure led to the museum. I knew I was going the right direction because the grass had a little path that was trampled, from other people walking on it to get to the museum.

It was only a 5 minute walk and once I got past the trees I could see the museum. It was in a very low one story building and looked very industrial to me. How appropriate for a museum devoted to science and technology. I went in to the front desk, showed my museum employee pass and got in for free. The girl at the desk gave me a map that I could not make sense of, so I decided I’d just go in and make my own way around.

The museum was basically a free-for-all, which seemingly no direction to go in and no noticeable “flow” of exhibits. I usually like to read the every panel of text, but in this museum, I knew I would be reading very little text due to sheer boredom. The first little section was about Canadian innovations which was interesting. Again, it seemed like the exhibits were haphazardly scattered around and I had no idea where to go next, so I just circled through the areas, seeing what I could. I should also mention that not only was the museum one story, it was also only one huge room, which I think was why I was so confused as to where one exhibit ended and the next one began; there weren’t many walls that clearly divided different areas.

They had a little display on the Titanic, a section on canoes, a section on ships, and a really cool interactive exhibit on Braille, which was probably my favorite part of the museum. It explained who Braille was, explained the Braille alphabet, and the exhibit even allowed people to write words in Braille using wooden pegs that could be inserted into a special board. It also showed vintage and modern typewriters that people used to write Braille, which was something I’d never encountered before and thought was cool. There was a section on space and a section on cars, and there was no shortage of children running around screaming. I overhead one father saying to his toddler daughter, “Can’t I just read about cars from the future?!” who then pressed a button which caused a French voice to begin speaking about cars, at which point she covered her ears and cried, “Too loud!”

The coolest part of the museum was the Crazy Kitchen. It’s a slanted kitchen where everything seems to be on an angle and your mind gets really confused about it and tries to correct the body’s balance. Then you get super dizzy and have to stumble out of the room, like I did. That was a really cool interactive space and I know that lots of people enjoy it as much as I did. I walked quickly through the rest of museum, feeling that I'd learned enough about science and technology to last me at least another year.

All in all I would say that the Canada Science and Technology Museum was not for me, but would certainly appeal to people interested in the subject matter. It offered a lot of neat hands-on exhibits that science-minded people would probably enjoy and think were cool. I found that the gift shop had tons of science related toys and games that tied in with their exhibits, but was disappointed when I couldn’t find any postcards of the museum itself to add to my scrapbook.

"Good Business is the Best Art" - Some Thoughts on Pop Life

2010-06-20T09:34:00.000-07:00

On 11 June 2010, Ottawa’s National Gallery opened their new special exhibit called Pop Life. The exhibit originally comes from the Tate Modern and before it opened at the National Gallery, a lot of people said that parts of the exhibit were quite controversial. I had heard before going that certain galleries would be for guests “18 and over” because of some sexual themes, but really just assumed that the so-called controversial aspects of the exhibit were exaggerated, as many things these days tend to be. In the weeks leading up to the opening of Pop Life, the Ottawa Citizen published a series of articles on the exhibit, including one about whether the exhibit was appropriate for children. Well, this just made me even more curious about the exhibit, as I’m certain it did many other potential museum-goers. So this past Thursday I decided I’d check out the exhibit and see what it was really all about.

On the whole, I really enjoyed the entire exhibit. It began with Andy Warhol’s later work, a lot of which was perceived by the art community as him selling out. I also realized how creepy some of his works are, especially his self-portraits with his wild hair sticking up and relentless stare. Another notable area of the exhibit was the stunning recreation of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop. The actual Pop Shop was opened in 1986 in New York City, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in black and white graffiti, with catchy music blasting through the room. In the Pop Shop, Haring sold t-shirts, buttons, and other pieces with his art on it, and what was really cool about Pop Life was that inside the recreated Pop Shop was a counter where the public could buy recreations of Haring’s original t-shirts and other things he sold in it. I think my favorite exhibit was by Damien Hirst, called Beautiful Inside My Head Forever which featured a lot of flashy pieces, like crystals strung together in a golden display case. There were also a lot of polka dots in his exhibit, and I do enjoy polka dots.

That was all fine and good, and then I got to the juicier parts of the exhibit. Most of it was thoroughly enjoyable, especially Takashi Murakami’s gallery. His was Japanese pop art and included a small “18 and over” area that had some gigantic statues in it (they looked like oversized children’s figurines) that were really fun. The one that made me laugh out loud is called My Lonesome Cowboy; racy, and hilariously so. On the whole, galleries like this (of which there are a couple), I could really appreciate and enjoy, but there was one gallery that seemed sorely out of place to me.

Before I begin my main criticism, I have to start off by saying I’m obviously untrained in art appreciation, and I only make my own assumptions when I see it. However, it was the Jeff Koons Made in Heaven gallery that really made me think about what art is and what should be in a museum. It was cordoned off by a “18 and over” sign and guarded by a security guard, so I knew it would be explicit, to say the least. I walked into the gallery and was confronted by full-on pornography. Graphic pornography that I’m still confused as to how it even falls into the pop art category. Although there were a couple of non-pornographic pieces in the room (like a really beautiful glass flowers creation) that I could see the value of, the graphic pictures on the walls were very extreme. The story is this: the artist, Koons, saw porn star Ilone Staller (a.k.a. La Cicciolina) in a porn magazine, she became his muse, they ended up getting married, and he shot all sorts of pictures of them engaging in certain activities. Which is fine and dandy, but it seemed to have no relation to pop art other than association with the artist, and these works are certainly not your typical pop art.

Here is where my real problem with this area of the exhibit is: to me, this so-called art looks like something anyone could pick up and find in a dirty magazine. I saw no artistic merit to it and there was really nothing special about it. So if this type of porn finds itself in the National Gallery, what makes it so different from other porn? Why not just put all porn on display in the museum? I’m not trying to say that porn is not art, because maybe it is, to some people. But if this porn is art, then all porn is art, and all porn should also be in this museum’s exhibit. This section of the exhibit did not belong and seemed very out of place. Maybe if the exhibit was all about pornography or the history of pornography it would be better suited, but this was just awkward and seemed very random. Also, I think with the other “18 and over” galleries, I wouldn’t have a problem allowing children in (with over-18 supervision, of course!), but this gallery was just a little much in terms of intensity.

Final thoughts on Pop Life: awesome exhibit and loved nearly all of it. Not trying to rain on anyone’s parade by complaining about this porn debacle, but really, pay attention to the exhibit’s goals and determine if it really fits within that definition.

A Foray into Board Games of the Past

2010-06-03T05:58:00.000-07:00

A large part of my summer internship project involves me researching artefacts from the museum’s collection and putting them online, making them accessible to museum-goers. I’m trying to choose items that are relevant to every generation and meaningful to the average Canadian, a task that’s proved to be very interesting. Today was my first solo foray into the museum’s collections storage, a gigantic room located in the basement of the building. I headed down and was sure to bring my building pass so I could swipe into the collection room, and to also avoid being trapped in a stairwell, as the card is needed to open all doors to exit the stairwell (I keep my pass clipped to my pocket to prevent such debacles from occurring).

The collection is pretty big, so I flipped on most of the light switches (to prevent a high level of creepiness from occurring) and started to browse through the aisles. I had decided early on that one of the artefacts I’d look at would be a board game, which is always fun, plus the museum has many, many shelves of them. I dragged over the massive step ladder, climbed to the top, and started looking on the top shelf for any games that stuck out. Here’s what I found: a game from the 1880s called World Educator, a type of trivia game house in a wooden box that reminded me of the game Jumangi. The front of the box advertised that there was “over $50 worth of information!” Hmm, interesting claim for a board game to make. Upon opening the box, I discovered that the game consisted of several large cards with each divided into a grid with some sort of cryptic statement inside each grid square. As there were no instructions, I really couldn’t even comprehend how to play the game, but thought it seemed cool nonetheless.

The two other games that really got me excited were Sorry! and Monopoly. I learned today that Sorry! is based on the game Parchisi, and I also discovered that the edition I was holding in my cotton-gloved hands was from 1938! I had no idea that Sorry! had been around for so long (since 1934), as it was one of my favorites growing up, and let’s be honest, I still love it. The board looked almost identical to the one I have at home which belonged to my mum when she was a child in the 1970s. The only significant difference I saw was that the older version used cards to draw numbers instead of rolling dice. I noticed the same thing with Monopoly; all the cards and little houses looked nearly the same as my version. Notable differences: there was no board (unless it had been lost at some point); the game was in a small square box, each side about 6 or 7 inches long (how many times had I struggled to fit my awkwardly-long game of Monopoly into the blanket box devoted to storing games?); and the game tokens were colored, wooden, and the same size (preventing arguments about who gets to be the shoe).

I think that seeing these two classic games made me realize how much I love them, and how much other generations of people also loved them, which definitely provides a unique historical connection. Knowing how little these games have changed since their respective creations in the 1930s really says something to the lasting quality and popularity of the two games. I think it goes to show that once you find something that works, don’t change it!

An easy-to-use, step-by-step guide to researching Canadians who served in World War One

2010-02-23T09:56:00.000-08:00

For a recent activity in an archives class, we were asked to compile a pathfinder to assist those researching Canadian family members who served in World War One (1914-1918). It was a very useful and informative exercise, and I hope that anyone interested in researching former Canadian servicemen/women will find this pathfinder helpful in their research!

Database #1: Soldiers of the First World War – Canadian Expeditionary Force

This database contains the personnel files of the 600,000 Canadians who enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War One. The database can be found on the Canadian Library and Archives (LAC) website at: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/cef/index-e.html

To begin your search:
• Click on the “Search” button on the toolbar that is located on the left-hand side of the page.
• Enter as much information as you know about the person you are looking for in the required fields.
• E.g. for a soldier named Joseph Robert Doyle, “Doyle” would be entered under the “Surname” category, and “Joseph Robert” would be entered under the “Given Names” category.
• As demonstrated in the case of Joseph Robert Doyle, I do not know his regiment number, but by merely entering his naming and clicking “Submit,” the database will generate a return.
• On the Results page, the record of a Joseph Robert Doyle is offered; to access this record, simply click on the soldier’s underlined name.
• As you will see, this generates his regiment number, date of birth, as well as where in LAC his records can be found.
• For more information, click on the “Front of Form” icon, which will provide you with detailed information regarding the soldier.
• You are now able to view and print this page for free.

Database #2: Canadian Virtual War Memorial

This database is particularly useful in finding grave and memorial information about soldiers who died in any conflict that Canada was involved in. This database can be found on the Veterans Affairs Canada website, at:
http://vac-acc.gc.ca/remembers/sub.cfm?source=collections/virtualmem

To begin your search:
• Enter as much information you know about the soldier in the fields requested. As noted above, the more information you enter, the more accurate your results will be.
• Using the example of Joseph Robert Doyle, “Doyle” would be entered under the “Surname” category, and “Joseph Robert” would be entered under the “Given Name” category.
• When you have entered all available information, click on the “Search” button.
• On the “Results” page, clicking on the surname, which is highlighted in the color blue, will give you information about Joseph Robert Doyle, including his service number, birthday, parents’ names, and finally, his burial information.
• At the top of the page, his memorial information is centred and in bold font, allowing viewers to easily see the name of a soldier and the date of their death.
• If you choose, you will be able to view the soldier’s name in the First World War Book of Remembrance, which has been digitized and put online. This is free, and if you wish to order a copy of the page, you are able to do so for a small fee.
• This database also includes a “digital photo collection of the soldier”, if applicable. In the case of Joseph Robert Doyle, there is both a newspaper clipping and picture of him.
• The database also includes information about the cemetery where the deceased soldiers are buried. In the instance of Joseph Robert Doyle, he was buried in the “Ontario Cemetery, Sains-les-Marquion,” in Nord-France. The cemetery plan is offered on the website, as is a brief description of the village it is located in, Sains-les-Marquion.

Database #3: Commonwealth War Graves Commission

This database compiles the death and commemorative information of the 1,700,000 men and women of the Commonwealth forces (Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, etc.) who died in the two World Wars. The database can be found on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at http://www.cwgc.org/default.asp

To begin your search:
• Click on the “Search our Records” button on the toolbar on the left-hand side of the page.
• You are given the option of searching for a casualty or a cemetery. For example’s sake, we will search for the casualty of Joseph Robert Doyle and attempt to find information about what cemetery he is buried at.
• After selecting “Casualty” from the drop down menu, enter as much information as you know.
• Enter “Doyle” into the “Surname” category and enter “J R” in the “Initials” category (be certain to include a space between initials).
• Tip: be certain to ONLY enter the initials; in the case of our example, entering “Joseph Robert” yields zero results, yet entering “J R” yields four results.
• Joseph Robert Doyle is the second result given. By clicking on his orange name, you will be able to see his casualty details.
• You are able to click on the name of the cemetery for more information about it, and by clicking on the “Certificate” button located at the bottom of the records page, you will see his tombstone information, as well as a photograph of the cemetery.

Additional Resources:
Feel free to browse the Library and Archives Canada website, as well as Cyndi’s List, a website that lists free and searchable databases relating to genealogy. The most useful information relating to Canadian military history can be found here: http://www.cyndislist.com/milcan.htm

I now know how the Internet works! Some reflections on digital history...

2009-12-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

I’ll be honest. When I began the digital history course, I was a little intimidated. Here I was, reading about things I’d never even heard of in my life, learning how to write html, and starting to write a blog. As someone who is a little wary of technology, this course has opened my mind to so many things I didn’t even know existed. It has raised questions that I couldn’t have dreamed of asking, and has really given me a new outlook on the role of technology in society.

Perhaps the part of this course that has been most significant to me is the changing role of the internet and the implications it will have in the field of history. With the internet becoming increasingly available to people all over the world, access to online books, newspapers, and journal articles is almost limitless. It makes me wonder what the role of the historian will be in the future. Especially with websites like Wikipedia, where everyone can collectively edit articles, making them fairly accurate, it’s hard to imagine what bigger innovations could arise in the future. With all of this information available online that could formerly only be found in university libraries and offices of academics, people now have a chance to learn history on their own, without the help of a university or professor. This makes me wonder what the role of the historian will be in fifteen years. Will we be relevant? Will we even be needed anymore? These questions make anyone pursuing an education in history nervous; are we doing all this work for nothing? Will people need us to interpret the sources anymore, or are we just wasting our time?

And though my immediate response was yes, we should restrict public access, it’s now obvious to me that all the historical sources, data, periodicals, etc. should be openly available to the public. For someone who cannot afford to get an education, of course they should be able to educate themselves using online sources, whether they be for history or computer science. Why should those of us lucky enough to be at universities have the monopoly on information distribution? People in North America are free to go to libraries to educate themselves (and we all know how old some of those books are), so why shouldn’t they be provided with the most up-to-date publications via the internet? I think that this is an issue that historians will continue to struggle with. Especially for older generations who aren’t used to using computers or the internet, it’s hard for them to see the importance of it to younger generations. It’s easy for me to champion the cause of open-source and availability for all because of the generation I grew up in. Computers are a part of my everyday life, which is something that can’t be said for many people older than I am.

That said, I was reluctant to start a blog and create a Twitter account. I used to role my eyes when I heard people talk about Twitter and “tweeting,” and a few of my friends even gave me a hard time about having my own Twitter account. I was nervous that I would become one of those people who couldn’t tear themselves away from their social networking sites. We all know these people; they’re the ones whose online lives greatly overshadow their actual lives, and what fun is it to live only online? This didn’t happen. Once I started to use Twitter, I saw how useful it can be. It doesn’t just have to be a place where you tell the world what you ate for breakfast, it can be used to post news articles, job offers, and send out a query and wait for responses. I think of how many times my classmates and I used Twitter to coordinate rides, meeting times, and ask/answer general questions about assignments that definitely saved us the time we would have lost if we all had to call one another on the phone.

Another surprisingly useful thing that I learned in this course was html. At first glance it looked to me like gibberish and ugly text written in Notepad, but then I learned that the gibberish actually meant something, and that you could use this gibberish to make really cool-looking webpages. As frustrating as it was in the beginning, being able to see the end result of a webpage that looks the way you imagined it in your mind is completely satisfying. It even became, dare I say it, fun to play around with, seeing which tags could be changed to make certain effects on the page. Although it became easier to do, I started to wonder when, exactly, I would ever use it in real life. I assumed I wouldn’t ever actually use it, that is, until I made a Google website. There was something I wanted to change, but just couldn’t figure it out using the options given, so I ended up going into the html and changing it on my own. I was so excited that I could actually fix minor problems that arose, and especially because if I’d never learned html, I would never even have dreamed of being able to fix it on my own.

Concluding thoughts about digital history: I ended up liking it a lot and learning tons of things that were mind-boggling but gave me many new perspectives. I really didn’t consider the implications that the internet would have on history until now. And as soon as I started this course, it seemed like so many things relating to digital history just starting popping up all over the place. I’m hearing tons about digitization and open-source, two things I previously knew very little about, and that I now have opinions on. I learned that I can read books online if I want to (though I’m still not there yet), and that hackers often aren’t the stereotypical bad people we’ve come to think of them as. I think one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that the opportunities the internet has afforded us are limitless and that we have the potential to do so much more with it, should we choose to.

So finally, I’d like to say thank you to Bill Turkel for providing me with a very positive experience in learning about digital history. Your patience for what were probably very silly questions is greatly appreciated.

The Awakening

2009-11-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

I first read Kate Chopin's The Awakening in my first year English forms of fiction class and loved it. I was told by my professor that it’s interesting to read the book at different stages in life, so I’ve been hoping to read it again soon (I just need to find the time!). That said, I figured this would be the perfect book to use for this week’s assignment; it’s surprisingly old enough to be fully available online at Project Gutenberg.

Using TAPoR, I popped the url into the box designed to find concordances and typed in the word love to see what would come up. I found that it came up 40 times, and that it mostly appeared in the second half of the book, less than I had expected, considering the book is only 128 pages. The protagonist (Edna) in the novel has an affair with a younger man, so I typed in affair next. To my surprise, it only came up four times. And in all cases, it referred to a different kind of affair, as in, “dinner was a very grand affair.” Interesting. Having read the book so long ago, maybe they referred to the affair as something else entirely. It’s nice that the generator at TAPoR gives you the context in which the word was written, allowing users to make distinctions like this. Even the word marriage only appears in the book nine times. This was surprising to me since Edna greatly struggles with her marriage to her husband.

All in all, the generator is very cool. It allows you to identify the frequency and patterns of when certain words appear in books. This could be useful for anyone, but I could really see this being useful to someone in an English literature class. It could help people analyze books more thoroughly when knowing when and where certain words appear, thus helping them identify key themes at certain points in the book. I could personally see this tool as being very helpful in researching a paper, whether it be for a history class or an English class. The reason why I say this is because I have a very bad habit of going through my sources, seeing a quote I like, then forgetting where I saw it, and then manically thumbing through every page of the book until I find it. If the book I was looking through was digitized and online at a place like Project Gutenberg, I could easily type in a unique word from the quote I was searching for and easily find the passage! Plus, I could even use it to find other related significant quotes. Yes, this tool could be very useful to us, though perhaps not until more of our recent sources have been digitized.

My Official Website

2009-11-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

I figured that it would be a good idea to post the link to my website on here in an actual post, instead of just on my profile. I have to say, making this website was pretty simple compared to have to write my own html or css file. That said, while I was putting together the site a few weeks ago, I found myself actually going into the html version of the website to adjust certain things. Plus, I'm pretty sure that if I didn't know how to "work" html, it would have taken me weeks to figure out how to link to different websites! So here is the link to my official website. Any comments are appreciated!

If Eaton's was still around, we'd be picking our Christmas gifts from their catalogue right now.

2009-11-15T19:25:00.000-08:00

For this week’s blogging assignment, we’ve been told to peruse the Eaton’s catalogue from 1913-1914 and try to find some books online that were for sale in that year. A very cool assignment, but one that makes it easy for me to distract myself looking at other non-book related things! So here are some of the books I’ve chosen to find and where you can find them online, if you wish to do so.

The first book I decided to hunt down was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, one that was surprisingly easy to find. I Googled it, not expecting to find anything, but it was on a website called Literature.org. It’s fairly convenient, and the only problem I can find is that the writing isn’t broken up very well on the webpage. What I mean is that there are no page breaks and no feel of what actual page number you are reading. This is something which would bother me, but I guess if I were to read a book online, I wouldn’t be worried about this type of thing!

The next book I decided to look for was Little Women, by Louisa M. Alcott, a personal favorite of mine when I was young. I decided to check out Google Books for this one and was successful. What I like about Google Books is that the pages online are broken up like the pages in a book would be, something that would make reading a book online easier for someone like me.

This time I tried to pick a book I’d never heard of. I selected The Foreigner by Ralph Connor and tried to look for it on Literature.org. I couldn’t find it on this website, so I headed over to Google Books, and I was surprised to discover that it was there. What I thought was cool about this book was that its table of contents was all hyperlinked so that the reader could easily go from chapter to chapter, unlike with Little Women.

I then tried looking for a book called the Mystic Dream Book, but was unable to find any results. It didn’t have an author, so that might be one reason that it was so difficult to find. Other books by the same name were listed, but they were published in the 1960s and on, so I know it is not the same book. I’ll go back to looking for a book that has an author, so this time I’ll choose Little Lame Prince, by Miss Mulock. Upon searching for this at Literature.org, I couldn’t find it, but then easily found it at Google Books. It was the second listing, and I discovered the author’s full name, which is actually Dinah Maria Mulock Craik. When I opened the link, I thought it was the full text, but at second glance, I realized it was just a preview of the book. I was curious if this was just Google not letting the reader see the entire book due to copyright reasons, so I decided to check out the Gutenburg Project just to see if it was there. It was. All of it. Hmmm.

The next book I’m going to look for is Discarded Daughter by Mrs. Southworth. I looked first at the Gutenburg Project because it was already opened in my browser, but it wasn’t there. I found it on the Internet Archive and was surprised to see that it had been downloaded 274 times. Considering I’d never heard of it, it seems to be somewhat popular. Under the copyright status it says that it’s not in copyright. This online book actually looks like a book; it’s even formatted to flip through the pages as if you were reading a physical book!

The last book I’m going to try to find is one out of the Peter Rabbit series by Beatrix Potter. I owned the entire collection as a child, and now I think I’ll see if I can find The Tale of Benjamin Bunny. Only a “snippet view” is available on Google Books, but the Gutenburg Project offers the entire book (and series). The only problem that I find with this is that there are no pictures, like in the original books, and that it’s literally just text on a website, which is very hard on the eyes. There is also a jumble of various words at the beginning of the webpage, above the actual Benjamin Bunny book, trying to elicit donations and looks like a very large and unattractive disclaimer.

If I’ve noticed one thing from trying to find these books from the early 20th century, it’s that they are shockingly easy to find. I certainly didn’t expect to find a book like Discarded Daughter so easily, and I thought that for sure Little Women would be copyrighted and hard to find a readable copy. I think it’s good to make these classic books available online, this way everyone with access to a computer is able to read them, instead of having to spend money and buy them. Yet, this also makes me worry about the future of books. With inventions like the Amazon Kindle and other readers similar to it, I wonder if the paperback book will ever become obsolete. I believe that the book is safe for at least another few generations, but after that I really don’t know what will happen. I know that I will probably never be inclined to read a book online just because I like the way it feels to hold a book in my hands and turn the pages, getting closer and closer to the end. And nothing beats the smell of a brand new book, something I’d love to see Amazon try to reproduce!

Let them eat cake? The process of re-discovering Marie Antoinette

2009-11-08T18:21:00.000-08:00

Marie Antoinette was the controversial and tragic French queen who was one of many victims of the French Revolution in the late 18^th century. Her life fascinates me, and I feel that she’s often misrepresented in history, or should I say, historical depictions of her aren’t quite as accurate as they should be. Haven’t we all heard the stories of a cruel queen who shouted “Let them eat cake!” when told that French peasants were starving because they had no bread to eat? Here’s the good news: most historians will tell you that there is no evidence that suggests she said this, or anything like it. It’s because of myths like these that Marie Antoinette is a character who has interested me for awhile now. I have read a couple of interesting books about her and the general period, but I would like to learn a little more. So here is my step-by-step guide to navigating online sources regarding Marie Antoinette.

First and foremost (and I realize this is very cliché) I would check out Wikipedia to see what the famous online encyclopedia has to say about her. For someone who has no idea who Marie Antoinette was, Wikipedia is a great starting place to find some general information about who she was. Wikipedia is also the first website that comes up when I Googled her name; very convenient for our purposes! What I like to do when I use Wikipedia is to skim the article, then check the sources. The sources that Wikipedia authors cite are often a very useful next step. In this case, the author who is most frequently cited is Antonia Fraser’s work Marie Antoinette: The Journey. (Coincidentally, I have personally read this book and can wholly recommend it to anyone with any interest in this topic.) However, this is a book, and if we look down at the other sources, we will see that they are all books as well. Looking a little further in the “External Links” section of the page, I see some sites that could be useful. Here we go.

The first site I would visit, based on Wikipedia’s recommendations, is the Story of Marie Antoinette with Primary Sources. This looks promising, and at the very least it should offer some online primary sources to use. Upon entering the site, we see that it provides a nice overview of her life, with many excellent pictures to illustrate many aspects of her life. There are direct quotes, and many are cited to be from the Fraser book that was frequently cited in the Wikipedia article. One problem with this site that I immediately see is that although many quotes from the queen are used to support ideas, the site doesn’t say exactly where they were found. However, in the last page, entitled Used and Recommended Sources, a little more information is given about the sources used, but by no means does it give enough detail.

Next, I would head to Marie Antoinette Online, a site recommended by Wikipedia, and one that admittedly has a sympathetic bend to it. This is an immediate warning that there will be bias, but since bias exists everywhere, it’s worth having a look at. This is a pretty good source. It appears to be a blog written by numerous authors that touches on some common myths about Marie Antoinette, such as her overly extravagant lifestyle, that aren’t entirely true. A Reputation in Shreds touches upon the idea that Sofia Coppola’s Film Marie Antoinette has further damaged the reputation of the queen in the eyes of the public. (Sidenote: Coppola’s film isn’t great by any means, but it does show an amazing visual display of what Versailles would have looked like at the time, often shooting scenes in the actual palace.)

I followed one of the links on this webpage to one of the authors’ webpage whose name is Elena Maria Vidal. I see that she is the author of two historical-fiction books based on Marie Antoinette and that she has completed lots of research on the queen, making her appear to be a reliable source. Furthermore, she offers more blurbs about the queen on her website, and even hosts a YouTube video showing an interview with her discussing Marie Antoinette. She talks about some of the common myths surrounding the queen and shows that she has done some considerable research in the area. In further researching the author, I found that she has some other websites, most notably an interesting blog called Tea at Trianon, which features lots of information about M arie Antoinette’s children, an obviously important aspect of the queen’s life, and other related topics in her life.

One of the links recommended by Wikipedia was on LibraryThing, which shows that Marie Antoinette’s personal library is available online. When looking through the site, I can see that it offers many titles and letters, but unfortunately, they are all in French. Theoretically, this shouldn’t be an issue for those who have a reading understanding of French, but it is a little off-putting when there is probably a place where these resources have been translated for us! So in general, yes this is a great website, but could pose some language barriers.

Heading back to Google, I found another good article at About.com that gives a lot of suggested books to learn more about her life, if that is the direction you wish to take. By narrowing down my search to more specific words, such as “Marie Antoinette education resources”, I was able to find a webpage called Famous People: Marie Antoinette that has links to dozens of great related sites, including maps, speeches, and other different forms of media.

In another search, I found a website that is called The World of Royalty that hosts what looks to be an online book about Marie Antoinette. While the book seems to be okay, the unprofessional layout of the website alarms me a little and makes me question its validity. Aesthetically, it’s tacky, but more importantly, the book that readers can look at has no author anywhere to be found on the page. It also advertises places where people can buy their very own Marie Antoinette fashion wigs and other paraphernalia that makes the website seem questionable and less than scholarly.

One thing that I personally find striking about Marie Antoinette is her fashion and style. A lot of this is could be myth, but it’s interesting nonetheless. I’m going to go back to Google and see what I can find if I add the word “fashion” to a search with her name in it. After looking at many useless titles advertising Marie Antoinette Halloween costumes (the scantily clad versions, of course), I see a great article from Slate magazine called What Marie Antoinette Really Wore, written by Anne Hollander. It’s largely about what she wore and reasons for doing so, pointing out that she was indeed rather fashion-forward for her time.

My recommended final step that I would take in researching Marie Antoinette would be to start looking through the online scholarly journals, like JSTOR. I love JSTOR, mostly because I always seem to find a lot of helpful articles that are interesting and definitely reputable. One thing I must say about searching on JSTOR: use the advanced search option! It will save you many frustrated searches from using just the basic search; trust me, I’ve been there. Many times. One negative thing about JSTOR that could be problematic is that someone who doesn’t have a subscription wouldn't be able to access it, but for those of us at UWO, this isn’t an issue. I would also look to Google Books to see if there are any titles that might be helpful and fully available online. Finally, I would check out Amazon. You could use it to find other books related to the topic of Marie Antoinette and input those titles into a search engine to see if any of them are online.

I really hope I’ve given any newcomers to the subject a good starting point on researching Marie Antoinette online. I believe that the best thing to do is to give yourself a general overview of the subject, then pick things to focus on about her life that personally interest you. In my case, it’s the fashion and social aspect of Marie Antoinette’s life that I really enjoy. Best of luck!

Lies, Lies, Lies!

2009-11-03T18:28:00.000-08:00

After reading a chapter of James Loewen’s Lies Across America this week for my Intro to Public History class, I remembered how much I enjoyed Loewen and his writing. In my American history seminar class last year, we read his book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which was awesome. Yes, Loewen is very biased, but I really enjoyed this book. It was an interesting book that read like a novel, and here follows a quick synopsis for anyone interested in checking it out.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen assesses the American history textbooks that most American high school students use to study history. He comes to the conclusion that most of the books are missing several important parts of American history, and that some include downright lies. As a sociologist and history professor who concentrates on race relations in the United States of America, Loewen provides readers with some really interesting historical truths that are not commonly known and even gives suggestions on how textbooks can be improved. And although he does have a very strong sociological bias, his book exposes the many problems of teaching of history in America, which are pretty worrisome.

A memorable example that he gives is that of Helen Keller. Textbooks tell students that she was blind and deaf, yet overcame adversity to be an inspiration for people everywhere. This is heart-warming and true, but textbooks “forget” to mention that she was a radical socialist who praised the Russian Revolution. This isn’t so inspiring. But maybe it is, just not for a nation who would go on communist witch-hunts a few decades later. This is a prime example of what he calls "heroification", the tendency of textbooks to gloss over the undesirable aspects of national heroes and emphasis the good. It’s exactly what happens with historical sites too. People want to remember things that present themselves in a favorable light and forget the bad, and glorify their nation while they’re at it.

He gives this example and so many more to prove his point, which I think he does a good job of. So if you’re looking for an interesting book to read over the Christmas holiday, I would definitely recommend this one. It’s really funny and you’ll probably be surprised with a lot of the mistruths that exist in the study of American history.

"Rip! A Remix Manifesto" and Some Related Thoughts

2009-10-25T13:15:00.002-07:00

Last Thursday night, Catherine, Becca, and myself decided to check out Brett Gaylor’s Rip! A Remix Manifesto, a film that was being shown at Museum London. Although we were a part of an extremely small audience, the film turned out to be amazing and prompted me to really think about the issues of open source and copyright that we’ve been discussing lately in digital history.

Rip! A Remix Manifesto is a film that discusses copyright, explores its origins, questions the manipulations of copyright laws, and uses everyday people to illustrate the consequences that all these laws have in all our lives. Narrated in a soothing Michael Moore-like voice, Gaylor refers to the two opposing sides as the copyright and the copyleft, and states that there’s an ongoing war of ideas, with the Internet as the battleground. He explains to viewers who controls copyright laws, and provides examples of people who are working hard to fight them, such as lawyer Lawrence Lessig.

Gaylor provides viewers with the Remixer’s Manifesto, a list that he uses to make his arguments, and in my opinion, does so with success.

1. Culture always builds on the past.

2. The past always tries to control the future.

3. Our future is becoming less free.

4. To build free societies, you must limit control of the past.

Throughout the film, Gaylor uses the example of Girl Talk, a remixer named Gregg Gillis who uses the music of thousands of different artists to create mash-up songs. The controversy with Girl Talk is that although he is breaching copyright laws, the songs he creates through his mash-ups sound so different from the originals, that listeners would be hard pressed to identify all the original songs he used. Gaylor refers to this as evolution; artists merely building on the works before them, and he even gives the example of the Rolling Stones as doing so. If Gregg Gillis were to pay for every snippet of sound borrowed from other artists in making his own album, it would amount to over $4.2 million! This is a crazy amount of money that is absolutely ridiculous to even conceivably ask someone to pay for borrowing a few seconds of audio.

In his film, Gaylor found numerous people who are, or have been, prosecuted in the US for their illegal downloading of music. The person who stood out the most to me was a single mom who was sued for downloading the equivalent of two CDs. What made her stand out was the fact that she had not settled the lawsuit, unlike the countless other people who had settled instead of going through the trial process. Even settling outside of court has huge consequences for everyday people. The legal fees alone add up, but in settling, each person prosecuted had to pay a certain amount of money per song they illegally downloaded, which in some cases ended up being tens of thousands of dollars! But the real kicker was this: they weren’t being sued by the artists themselves, they were being sued by record companies who owned the rights to the music. Furthermore, Gaylor showed viewers that all record companies, production companies, movie companies, etc. are all owned by two major companies at the top of the chain.

This is so wrong! These two companies who own every other imaginable company in the US are incredibly rich, yet they try to make examples of ordinary people for illegally downloading music, all the while putting them so deep in debt just for the sake of a few songs. Can it really be considered stealing when so many people are doing it? And wouldn’t record companies rather people steal music, grow to love a band, and then rope them in with concerts and merchandise? It ends up being way more money in the long run.

I found this film to be very relatable in terms of downloading music and the copyright problems that arise from it. I hate to hear downloading music deemed to be “illegal downloading,” just because it’s an absolutely ridiculous concept to me. What I want to say is that it shouldn’t be illegal because so many people are doing it, but I know that is an extremely flawed argument. What I will say is that artists should be grateful and flattered that so many people are downloading their music. It’s unrealistic for a music lover like myself to buy the music of every band I like; that would be tens of thousands of dollars that could be better spent on other things. This film made me realize that quite often it’s not the artists themselves who are starting lawsuits, it the companies above them. I wish these executive companies could realize that the more people listen to an artist’s music, the more loyal fans they become, thus buying overpriced concert tickets and other band-related paraphernalia. If everyone paid for every song they ever listened to, why would anyone ever listen to any new music? I think I would be afraid to spend money on a CD of a band whose music I’d never heard; I would worry that I might hate it and then never listen to it again, thus wasting my $10 or $15 (or however much it is that CDs cost these days).

All in all, Rip! A Remix Manifesto was awesome. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good movie to watch that will provoke some interesting discussions. He tackles so many relevant issues to people today and makes some very compelling arguments. Here’s the link to a related website that Gaylor created, it’s pretty interesting. One more really cool thing: Gaylor encourages the use and remixes of his film, something you won’t hear many artists say!

Scarcity and Abundance in the Growing Digital World

2009-10-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

With the current trend towards the digitization of primary and secondary sources, historians and laypeople alike are left wondering how this will change their lives. For the historian, this changes everything. It’s something I hadn’t given much thought to up until now, but now that I consider the effects of the movement towards digitization, I’ve realized that there are many consequences to this growing trend.

Roy Rosenweig argued that historians are shifting from a culture of scarcity to a culture of abundance. I agree with this statement, but I do see this as being a problem in a couple of ways. It is because of the internet that we have so many more resources than ever before, and now we can preserve whatever we like. In the past decade there has been a shift in our daily lives to creating a more digital world. To illustrate this point, I would argue that almost every student at UWO owns a computer of some sort, whether it be a laptop or desktop. And for those who do not have their own computer, the school puts a large emphasis on having multiple computer labs for students to access at any time of the day. Furthermore, adolescents who go to university are given email addresses from their schools so that teachers and administrators are able to contact them quickly. All of this indicates how much we have grown to depend on our computers in our everyday lives. With such widespread access to computers, it is easy to rely so heavily on the internet. All of this leads to a build up of information on computers and on the internet, but now there are no hard copies of this correspondence. And here is where the problem lies.

Gone are the days when we would write letters to each other and send them in the mail. We even call it “snail mail”, indicating how slow and inconveniencing our generation thinks it is to send a written letter, especially compared to how fast we can send an email version of the same thing. When historians look to the past to learn about its inhabitants, one thing they do is read people’s daily letters to discover valuable information. With the growing dependency on email, historians won’t be able to read people’s correspondence with each other. This will be because of privacy laws, and the nasty habit that people have of deleting their old emails.

I think that this will become an increasingly bigger problem as the years pass. In the past, people would be mailed newsletters that someone would inevitably keep and pass down through the generations, and historians would analyze it years later to learn about the past. Today, people are emailed newsletters. No one keeps them. They are deleted right away or sent to the junk box so no one has to be bothered by them. As historians, this will create a gap in our knowledge about certain groups, or people, who have sent out an email, unless someone decides to print it out and save it.

It’s the same thing with pictures and home videos. I remember the days when I worried about running out of film, or having to take the film to a store to be developed. Now it’s me standing at a kiosk and editing the pictures I want to print. It used to be that I’d have to wait for days before I could get my pictures, and now it only takes an hour, or even seconds if I’m willing to pay a little extra. This is the world today. I think that in the future even the kiosk will become obsolete. It will be up to people to print their own pictures by using special photo printers in their homes. This is a great idea, but how many people upload the pictures to their computers and quickly forget about them? Instead of printing off pictures to show our friends and family, we will make photo compilation discs that we pop into DVD players and watch on a TV. As historians, we will have fewer family photo albums to examine, and thus fewer hard copies of pictures, which will be problematic when people get rid of their computers without thinking to extract the pictures that may be on them.

These are some dangerous consequences that could arise from the increase in digitalization. While some things may become scarcer than ever before, there will be an amazing abundance in other areas. The best example of this is seen with newspapers. Newspapers today archive all of their articles, which makes them easy to find years later when we want to dive into the past. Thanks to the digitization of old newspapers we are able to go online and search a term and see what comes up, instead of having to spend hours hunting through microfilm with sore eyes to find a news story from decades past. This will definitely help historians and make their jobs a lot easier. If everyone on the internet archived websites, newspapers, and even scholarly journals, they could be easily accessed in years to come.

This is a positive thing, but because it means that resources will be widely available to every person who owns a computer, and historians won’t have a monopoly on the interpretation of information. While this is great for amateur historians, this makes the jobs of professionally educated historians a little harder to do. If everybody is able to access everything without the help of professionals, what will be the role of the historian? Could we become obsolete?

As hard as it will be for historians to share the growing pool of information with regular people, I think that the role of a historian will ultimately always be valued. Historians will still continue to publish in reputable academic journals; something that would be hard for non-historians to do. Historians will also possess the academic training that amateurs lack, and most importantly, let’s not forget about all the things civilization has amassed over the centuries. We still need people to take care of old artifacts, and interpret old documents and letters. Museums certainly can’t run themselves; institutes like these will be here for years to come, and working in a place like this isn’t something that anyone off the street can do. It’s the same for archives; there will always be the need for professionally trained people to safeguard the past. It seems like museums, archives, and other means of preserving the past will be around for many years to come, and for most historians, public or otherwise, this is very good news. We as historians will not become obsolete, our roles will just continue to change and evolve, much like history itself continues to do.

How much is too much? Information overload in the growing digital world

2009-09-25T21:06:00.001-07:00

Being new to blogging, I found it very difficult to pick a topic to write my first blog about, at least until I read an article from the New Yorker in Professor Turkel’s Digital History class. I found that this article that made me really think, and in turn, moved me to share some thoughts about. So here’s where the blog begins.

Gordon Bell. The man who digitized his entire life. When a friend of his began scanning books into a computer, Bell decided that he would scan everything he had ever accumulated during the course of his life into a computer of his own. Upon first reading the article, I have to admit that I didn't have a problem with Bell scanning the contents of his filing cabinets and boxes that were stored in his house, and putting it onto a computer. I can even see the practical value of this: get it on the computer, save it, back it up, throw out the originals, and voilà, more space! But I continued reading and saw that he scanned scrapbooks, photographs, and even labels of wine that he’d enjoyed at some point in his life. This is where it stopped being practical and became unsentimental. As someone who has personally made scrapbooks, compiled photo albums, and written journals, it’s difficult to imagine throwing out the real copies and being satisfied with images of it on a computer screen. Flipping through the pages of these books and reminiscing about all things that have happened in my life cannot be substituted for scrolling down a computer screen with a mouse! How unsatisfying!

I can truly understand why Bell saved his emails (well, maybe not all of them), scanned his pictures (there were no hard drives in the 1960s), and put all of his books onto the computer (easier to access?). Don’t all of us want to be remembered in some way after we die? I think that most people want to leave some sort of a legacy once they’re gone, and saving things like journals, mementos, and pictures to pass on to the next generation is a great way of doing it. But is it really necessary for one person to keep recordings of every phone call ever made, every website ever visited, or even information about the battery life in their pacemaker? I don’t think so. This is pointless and borderline unhealthy! If someone were to write the biography of Bell’s life, I highly doubt that details regarding the mechanics of his pacemaker would make the final cut. But even more so, does he want to be remembered by the battery life of his pacemaker? Why not leave things that shed light on who the true Gordon Bell is for after his death? Things like what his interests and hobbies were; you know, the things that make him a real human being. Mundane and extensive records take away the intricacies and emotions of an individual person and it makes it harder for future generations to identify with those who have lived in the past. And as for Bell, what will happen in thirty years when technology completely changes and he is no longer around to ensure the safety of his records? Will someone be kind enough to transfer all of his life information onto an updated computer? Will anyone even care enough to do this? What if someone decides that the phone call recordings are taking up too much room, and that they can be discarded? All of Bell’s scanning could be for nothing! Wouldn't he have been better off to keep and pass down his old photo albums so that his descendants could keep them in the family line and keep his memory alive?

The reality of it is that digitizing one’s entire life scares me. If I had the choice, would I want to put all of the things that were meaningful to me onto a computer? Probably not. I’d rather enjoy my trinkets, souvenirs, and photographs in real life, where I can hold them in my hands, not from a computer screen.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528fa_fact_wilkinson