Digital Literacy: What Every Graduate Student needs to Know. (Summer 2009)
What should the well-trained graduate student know about digital history when they convocate? The “digital turn” has affected all aspects of history including how we research, write, teach, communicate and publish and its impact is only going to grow…. Recognizing that today’s technologies are only going to be the foundation for tomorrow’s, anyone who does not have the fundamentals today will find themselves cut off from a growing, dynamic and increasingly important part of the profession and it will be increasingly difficult to catch up.
Clio’s New Tools Managing Bibliographies, Zotero, and Intellectual Transparency (Winter 2008)
Citing books, websites, photos, articles, blogs or podcasts and keeping track of your annotations just got easier. Free and designed for historians (and others) by historians (and others). Zotero is a simple-to-use tool that even those who have only Recently given up their typewriters for word processors can use with ease….It is a rare and excellent example of what historians can do when we create tools for our own use insteadof borrowing those designed for others.
Putting the Revolutionary into the Internet Revolution: Historians on the Holodeck (March 2008)
What was the past like? We all want to know since our identity depends so much on our imagination of the past. Was it dirty, colourful, smelly, colder, nasty, and brutish but with loving extended families? Historians are taking the first steps into a world of three dimensional (3D) re-creations of historical places and landscapes. Is this a colossal waste of resources or a revolutionary opportunity to do things we have always dreamed of?
The Web Gives and It Takes Away (Fall 2007)
The Internet has been with us for over a decade so we are starting to have the critical distance to see what elements of historical work it has enabled and what parts it has begun to undermine. The reflection is useful, I think, to give two types of direction. The question: “what are the affinities between what we want to do as historians and the new technology?”suggests how we may take advantage of it. We also need to understand how the technology is taking advantage of us.
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Bed Jumping and Compelling Convergences in Historical Computing (2007)
Rivers are a common metaphor for knowledge; both are always in motion -- undercutting the edge of the bank here, depositing material there, following beds carved out eons or centuries ago. Over the past half century important intellectual currents in three distinct fields: historiography, teaching, and computing have largely flowed in distinct watersheds with only occasional attempts to link them, and with not much more success than Baillie Grohman. In the last decade, however, some have started to flow along parallel valleys and it is possible from certain vantages to see the similarities and where these rivers of thought and intellectual effort have begun to converge.
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Preserving Our Past Essential to Our Future (2005)
What is a people or a province, without a story, without a history? A shared story is what makes us a people: British Columbians. Alongside are our separate stories which make us different peoples within the larger whole: the First Nations and the mosaic of other peoples who comprise the province. Together, these stories of our history -- tell us who we are. Without a sense of a shared past we have no common future and condemn ourselves to competing for the spoils.
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A Heritage Policy for British Columbia (2005)
A provincial heritage policy would acknowledge the role of historic resources as central to the culture, education system and economy in British Columbia and to the ongoing process of settling title issues with First Nations.
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Humanities and Technology (1999)
I am going to offer a series of propositions which I believe to be true. Six of these propositions relate to the connections between the humanities and technology, and two to the links between technology and teaching the humanities. These propositions were initially crafted to fit into a ten minute presentation, and so leave lots of room for development and evidence, but brevity has its own power.
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