History of Technology

I use a getting-old laptop with a screen that is roughly square.  Looking at new models, I can't help noticing that they all now offer rectangular screens, a good deal wider than high.

This is where the 'net is going. Screens are being letter-boxed to match the picture shape of the DVDs and downloaded films that everyone is watching online. Laptops are growing wider. They are adding numerical keypads and still have acres of space either side.

But some of us write and read on computer screens. For that, it still makes sense to have text lines that are not too long for comprehension and to have screens that can show us quite a few lines of text at once. That is, our ideal screen would be something more like the shape of an 8x11 sheet of paper, taller than it is wide.

I got a feeling it ain't gonna happen, not outside of a specialty market high-price option anyway. Technology: win some, lose some.

September 2: Thad McIlroy of The Future of Publishing notes the potential of two-page display on those wide screens:

(Saw your post via Eoin Purcell).

The default resolution for early VGA monitors was 640 x 480...so manufacturers never started out thinking "let's make this like a page". That aspect ratio was maintained, give or take, for a couple of decades, while resolution improved substantially.

When I began in "desktop publishing" in the mid-1980s there was a company called Radius in Silicon Valley that made what as I recall was named the "Single Page Display" which was about 9 x 12 (and black & white only). Very popular for 15 minutes or so. That led to the "Dual Page Display" monitors from Radius, SuperMac and perhaps a few others that could properly display a 2-page spread at full size. This was ideal for designers who mostly worked on 2-page spreads with trim sizes of between 8 x 10 and 8-1/2 x 11.

I agree with you that today's monitors are designed primarily for movie display. But the really big ones, like Apple's top-of-the-line are great for 2-page display with room to spare.

In the late 1980s, Ted Nelson, often acknowledged as the true father of hypermedia, told (the now defunct) Seybold Seminars audience: “Here we are using some of the finest technology of the 20th century to recreate the experience of reading on paper.” It startled me at the time, and ever since have questioned the whole notion of trying to migrate an analog experience into the digital realm.

As hard as they tried, backlit monitors were never ideal for reading, hence the popularity of E Ink displays on dedicated e-readers.

For myself paper works just fine (although I do spend about 5-6 hours a day reading shorter text on a large well-calibrated LCD).

Today in History: Charlottetown conference, 1864

Noting the, ah, 146th anniversary of the Charlottetown conference on confederation (and maritime union, but they decided to postpone that one), The Canadian Encyclopedia Online offers James Marsh's nice little essay on the importance of the conference. Or is it just that he quotes me that makes it seem so nice?  See for yourself.  

Stay within the lines, Crayola

Brian Busby goes after Crayola for sloppy errors and omissions in its Colour Canada's Prime Ministers project. (Talk about who knew?) It does look as if they would have benefited from some consultation -- and a copy-editor!  But there's some crazy charm to the idea, no?

Book Notes: Natalie Zemon Davis interviewed

Years ago I interviewed Natalie Zemon Davis, and I've had a little historian's crush there ever since. So my eye was caught by this review-essay by David Bell in The New Republic, which draws attention to the recent English-language publication of a book based of interviews she did with a French historian some years ago. The book is  A Passion for History, and Bell's review features "hope and play" -- not keywords you would instantly associate with many historians, perhaps. Bell reminds me how prolific she has been -- and how much NZD I still have to look forward to reading.

Bell also notes the growing field the French call "egohistoire" -- autobiographies by historians. (Maybe it would stretch to our blogs, too.)

Here's publication details on A Passion for History here. (Who knew there was a Truman State University Press? Now we do.) Thanks Cliopatria.

What he said: Tom Kent against the political party subsidy

Old liberal Tom Kent and Stephen Harper agree on this: the taxpayer subsidy to the political parties ought to be ended. I'm with 'em.

A political party is a voluntary association of people sharing views about public policy. Its members and sympathizers are the natural source for its finances.

and

The money goes entirely to party headquarters, not to the constituency associations whose vigour is the root of representative democracy. Lavish tax financing has helped to make the parties more than ever centralized machines directed to manipulating opinion and power.

Why should the TTC museum be controversial?

The Toronto Transit Commission has problems -- funding, customer service, labour relations, construction overruns, inadequate subways, what have you? -- but the fact that its new headquarters will include a TTC museum is not one of them.

The TTC is an integral part of Toronto and of Toronto history. The building of the subway in the 1950s was a transformative moment for the city. The building of the Don Valley Viaduct, subway potential included, decades in advance, makes a crucial and appropriate appearance in Michael Ondaadje's novel of Toronto immigrants and labourers, In the Skin of A Lion. The fight over ownership of the "street railways" way back in the early twentieth century was one crucial battle between public ownership and private monopoly in Canadian public life. The TTC even trades on traditional "Red Rocket" imagery to persuade us that streetcars are an adequate substitute for our missing subway routes. (And as someone said in the press recently, the TTC's flimsy paper transfers and aging architecture make every subway station seem like a living museum anyway.)

The history of the TTC matters. It ought to conserve and make available its historical material as a matter of course. Museums and archives should be understood as an obligation, not a frill or a diversion, in every significant public institution.

The suburban boobosity that seems to run Toronto since the megacity amalgamation is in hysterics about this wasteful spending. A museum? What's worse is that even those who ought to be urban thinkers and politicians seem to be running scared.

Mr. Smitherman said he's not opposed to the idea of a transit museum, but given the choice, he'd scrap the project....

If you glance at Toronto city politics from afar and wonder why on earth a nasty clown named Rob Ford seems to be doing well in the current mayoral race, there's the answer in a nutshell. If the main urban candidate wants to be all downtown and progressive, but goes all Rob Ford lite whenever an issue arises, why not?

[Image: Toronto Star via Google Images.]

Drivel Watch: Simpson on Australia

Jeffrey Simpson wrote a book, The Friendly Dictator, about unaccountable leadership in Canadian politics.

From the title, you wouldn't have thought he was in favour of it.

But look at Simpson's panicky, almost hysterical column today about the Australian election that followed the removal of Kevin Rudd from the leadership of the governing Labor Party. Simpson raves about coups and knifings.

One day, a leader, even a prime minister, is running the party; the next day, he’s out..... Can you imagine how the Jean Chrétien-Paul Martin rivalry inside the Liberal Party would have played itself out under Australian political rules?

Well, yes, actually.

In reality, it's not Aussie rules at all. It's parliamentary democracy rules. When a leader loses the confidence of the majority caucus in parliament (as Australia's Kevin Rudd did, and Jean Chrétien did here), parliamentary democracy requires that he or she go. It's the fundamental principle of the constant accountability of the executive to the legislature. It happens in Britain, it happens in Ireland, it happens in Sweden and Japan and ... well, in pretty much all the parliamentary democracies of the world.

The Australian situation today -- the leadership change clearly did not help the ALP electorally, shall we say -- confirms how the system of caucus accountability has its own internal controls. Should a leadership review appear too ruthless, driven more by personal ambition than by the needs of the party or the nation, the public reacts negatively, and the new leader suffers, as Ms. Gillard has. But in most cases these removals respond to the public will by removing a failing and unpopular leader and rejuvenating the party. (Recall Mrs. Thatcher, and the re-election of the Conservative Party that removed her?) Surely having a system of leadership accountability is always better than the constipated system we suffer in Canada.

But Jeffrey Simpson -- and Canadian politics in general -- continues to find the idea of party leaders being accountable to the elected representatives of the Canadian people "almost inconceivable" (it's Simpson's phrase, though why he includes "almost" escapes me.) It's this failure of imagination that is perhaps most depressing in Canadian political analysis. Not only are we in denial about how the whole parliamentary world operates, panic seizes even our leading commentators the moment they even start to imagine parliamentary democracy working here.

"Can you imagine....?" As John Lennon says, it's easy if you try.

Two small addenda. An Ontario poll suggests Ontarians have become bored and dissatified with Premier Dalton McGuinty. Wouldn't you think it would serve the Ontario Liberal party to at least have a process available by which the party could determine whether having Premier McGuinty lead them into the next election would serve the party's (or the province's) interests? I guess not.

And where Jeffrey Simpson cannot even conceive of parliamentary accountability, an Australian commentator thinks boldly about an even greater asserting of authority by parliamentarians. The Australian electoral deadlock seems to be inspiring creative thought there. Too bad ours mostly inspires drivel.

Update: Robin Mowat comments:

You write: "When a leader loses the confidence of the majority caucus in parliament (as Australia's Kevin Rudd did, and Jean Chrétien did here), parliamentary democracy requires that he or she go." Undoubtedly true. It would be impossible for a leader to continue if he'd truly lost the confidence of his caucus.

But to my knowledge there really isn't a formal mechanism for a caucus to remove a leader in Canada and replace them with another leader. Arguably, the existence of such a formal process would quicken caucus revolts, as within political parties in the UK and Australia (See for instance the brief discussion of Margaret Thatcher's ousting in 1990).

So I believe Simpson's argument would be that if such rules existed within the Liberal Party, Jean Chretien would have been ousted by Paul Martin far sooner. And that, in general, such a formal process would be a formidable check on a Prime Minister's power (which is debatable).

An interesting comparison is the replacement of Stephane Dion with Michael Ignatieff. This was essentially a caucus decision, although backed by the party structure. Nevertheless, the decision was required to be validated by party members at the following convention.

Thanks Robin. I'd only suggest that the caucus itself is the "formal mechanism"; it may make what rules it chooses to guide the process, but it already has the authority if it chooses to use it. Or not to use it, as when the Liberal caucus allowed final authority over the Dion/Ignatieff switch to be retained by the party apparatus and the self-appointed convention.

100 Greatest Events in Canadian history?

The Canadian Encylopedia online has a time line "The 100 Greatest Events in Canadian History." Doubtless something in this selection (or not in it, more likely) to offend practically anyone who knows some Canadian history. But kudos to James Marsh for taking a shot at it.

New Books: Fleming on Peter Gzowski

Rae Fleming's biography of journalist and radio hero Peter Gzowski looks like being one of the first out of the big fall books.

First review I've seen is Robert Fulford's in the National Post. Fulford is acerbic about his longtime friend Gzowski but unreserved in his praise for Fleming's book.

I can’t say more for Fleming than that he’s made me think freshly about a subject I believed I knew well. He’s given us an absorbing, provocative book about a man who was even more complicated than most of us imagined.

Fulford is almost the only Canadian book reviewer of any significance still writing in mainstream media (if the Post counts!), but he does play to his audience (see the ranting comments for the sense of who that audience is). He writes that Gzowski

subscribed to the bizarre CBC doctrine that a representative panel of Canadian opinion consisted of a Red Tory, a left-wing Liberal and a member of the NDP.

Actually, whatever Gzowski's politics, the bizarre doctrine he actually subscribed to was the faith that when you found three people who made great radio, you let 'em run. About the same time that the Camp-Kierans-Lewis panel was thriving, Morningside also featured a business panel. None of the three was a critic or analysis of business. all were practitioners and cheerleaders for the business ideology, but they too made lively, sharp, and skillful radio every week. Gzowski and his team recognized radio talent when they saw it and gave them free rein.

Publisher info here. R.B Fleming website here.

History of love at the fair

Just in time for the opening of fall fairs all over the country, the CNE Archives has moved itself out of the backrooms and into the media spotlight by its new exhibit, Love, Lust, and Longing at the CNE, that commemorate the history of getting together and getting it on at the fair since 1879.

There's also a speed-dating project, so they seem to be planning on making more of that kind of history.

Photo: National Post, from CNE Archives

Be an intern on Christopher Moore's History Blog

We have here a respectably-sized readership that is interested in history, Canadian and otherwise. I’m thinking my interest in expanding the coverage we have here may coincide with some student readers’ interest in being part of this blog

I’m thinking: blog interns.

I’m looking to take on a few historically-interested students (or reasonable facsimiles – always sympathetic to the self-educating!) who would commit to offering this blog an original posting, say once a week, and might also participate in some collective projects we may dream up.  No one under eighteen, please.

Ground rules/guidelines:

• Interns’ posts will be historical in some way: about history, about history teaching and learning, about history books, films, exhibits, about historical controversies.  Non-Toronto history coverage would be greatly welcomed. No intern posts on contemporary politics, please.
• I’ll monitor posts at the start, but reliable contributors should expect to be posting directly before long. All intern contributions will posted in the intern’s name and will remain the intern’s intellectual property for any other use.    
• As a contributor to this blog, you might gain experience for your own future writing and publishing on historical turf. Other than that, no pay, no perks, no credentializing, not much anything. 
• I hope an internship would last about the length of the academic school year.  Internships will be non-renewable. 

That’s about it. If you are interested, send me an email, briefly setting out who you are, and I’ll be in touch. Teachers: if you have or know of students who might thrive in this project, do let them know about it.  Internships could start soon after Labour Day.

(Note to non-students: If you are practising, publishing, or otherwise a historical grown-up, it seems to me you could as well be running your own blog, not apprenticing here, so I have a youth preference – but I may be persuadable.)

Investigator doc on CPAC this weekend

The Franklin-expedition wreck discoveries that northern exploration enthusiasts are really waiting for are the Erebus and the Terror. 'Cause they really are lost. No one knows precisely where or even when they sank or wrecked. Finding them might produce new answers, or new puzzles, about the end of the ill-fated Franklin naval expedition of the 1840s.

That has not happened yet. Instead this summer Parks Canada announced discovery of HMS Investigator, one of the ships engaged in the search for Franklin. This was no small feat of underwater archaeology, given the location, the age of the wreck and so forth, but less exciting, because everyone has always known exactly where the Investigator was: captain and crew survived to tell the tale and draw the map.

This Sunday, the Canadian Parliamentary Access Cable Public Affairs Channel presents a very up-to-date documentary on this summer's Investigator project. Why CPAC? Well, apart from the fact that History Television never does anything this ambitious, CPAC's promo may suggest part of the reason:

Join CPAC for exclusive broadcast footage of the journey to Mercy Bay in the Northwest Territories, and for a look at what this discovery signifies for Canada’s claims to the north. (italics added)

What does the Investigator wreck signify for Canada's claims to the North? Is that why a cabinet minister was onhand?

"The Hunt for HMS Investigator: History and Canada's Claim to the Arctic" is on your CPAC channel Sunday, August 22 at 9 pm. CPAC promo here. Looks like great footage.

Update, August 26: Good program, actually, though I'm a sucker for Arctic filming almost anytime. CPAC is rerunning it periodically on TV, and it's viewable from CPAC online too.

TorStar on copyright and the universities

Toronto Star has a perceptive editorial on the copyright bill and the folly of authorizing big educational institutions to appropriate copyrighted work without payment or permission.

Many historians and history students identify themselves with their academic employers and calculate that this free ride for the boss may mean more for themselves. They stand with Conservative cabinet minister James Moore, theorizing that copyright appropriation, being "good for education," will be good for them. Even CAUT is doing company unionism here, supporting what it takes to be a freebie for the employers.

But piracy is a bad thing even when practised by universities and school boards. And the idea that academic institutions have the right to freebies, a right to appropriate the knowledge of scholars and intellectuals, is a dangerous and pernicious one in any case. Universities increasingly want to argue they own the teaching of their professors and graduate students: when they videotape that lecture, they want to presume they can replay it forever, perhaps thereby dispensing with the services of a real employed lecturers.  They want to maximize their use of vulnerable adjunct faculty and sessionals, who will do more classroom hours per dollar while providing un- or under-paid research and scholarship in hopes of snagging an elusive tenure-track position. These efforts to transfer to others the cost of  the knowledge base that universities then monetize are all steps in the proletarianization of the faculty (a rather comfortable proletariat, sure, but still...)

Appropriating the published work of historians(employed by universities or not) is a long step in that direction. For the sake of their own scholarly independence, academic scholars ought to be resisting not supporting it.


Update, August 20: Mikael Christensen writes:

I'm a recent addition to your corner of the internets, and feel the need to point out some issues I had with the posting regarding the Toronto Star's editorial on copyright revision. Specifically, why the Star seems so upset about the provision for education copying. Just a tease for the rest of the letter, it's got nothing to do with adjunct faculty or universities owning ever more IP rights of their professors work. That's what you as I assume an academic are projecting onto them. [Not an academic, Mikael, just a writer -- Chris] What I believe very strongly to be the true nature of the Star's objection is the revenue that comes from http://pagesofthepast.ca/Default.asp, the online archives of the Star. Newspapers are as I expect you know facing dramatically shrinking revenues, and something like historical archives that most universities and school boards will pay for licensing rights to, will help stem the tide of losses. So it's not academic altruism, a quest to right the wrongs of out of control universities, it's another newspaper watching out for itself. But hey, there's no reason you cant hang your hat over that reason and appropriate it for yourself. I know lots of historians that do that to this day, we just don't treat them as very professional.

History of moiling for gold

The thing about the great Klondike gold rush of 1898: they never found the source of the gold. All the gold that came out of Bonanza Creek and the other gold beds was alluvial. That is, erosion had washed it downstream from somewhere else and left it scattered down the streambeds.

Shawn Ryan, itinerant prospector, after years living on the modern equivalent of hardtack and beans, may have found the source. Apparently his share options alone represent a motherlode.  He's so much better off he can afford to move from Dawson to Whitehorse, and it makes him feel like Jed Clampett.

This month at Canada's History

Canada's History [memo to brain: for Beaver, say Canada's History] for August-September includes my profile of Elizabeth Abbott and her recent book A History of Marriage. The issue's lead articles feature Canadian pirates -- the historical "arrrh, matey" kind, not the filesharers and university administrators and suchlike.

On the Canada's History website, they run a thingee called History Idol: historians and others talking about someone of interest in Canadian history. As part of that, Mark Reid got me talking about George Brown here, and while I would not have chosen the word "idol" maybe, it's a nice little bit.

Jane Austen, historian

Someone who visited Bath, England, recently brought me back "The History of England by a partial, prejudiced & ignorant historian" -- the first preserved work of Jane Austen, then aged 16 ("n.b. There will be very few dates in this history"). Young Miss Austen is already a sharply opinionated writer, already showing her command of the language and her gift for stinging understatement. On Henry VIII:

Nothing can be said in his vindication but that his abolishing religious houses and leaving them to the ruinous depredations of time has been of infinite use to the landscape of England in general, which probably was a principal motive for his doing so, since otherwise why should a man who was of no religion himself be at so much trouble to abolish one which had for ages been established in the kingdom.

Jane Austen offers more on history in Northanger Abbey (the abbey, now the estate of General Tilney, being one of the religious houses seized for the benefit of the greedy, accumulating Tilney ancestors). History, we read, is:

the quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome, and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.

Note that these are the opinions of Catherine Morland, not the author's own declaration, and Catherine Morland is young, innocent, and has a lot to learn. She is indeed partially corrected here by Henry Tilney, who will be the instrument of her education, sentimental and otherwise. Still it's nicely sharp and contemporary -- and no doubt widely known but it was new to me.

Economic History of British Columbia

If California legalizes marijuana, BC's in serious trouble, sez The Guardian.

(Mind you, given that it's not exactly the Guardian editorial board but a "creative consultant" from my old hometown of Nelson, BC, who makes the argument, the possibility of an agenda cannot be discounted.  Reliability of the statistics quoted is, hmmm... are these guys smoking something?)

Boy in the Picture

I know a writer named Ray Argyle. When Ray Argyle was a kid in Creston, BC, he knew an old gent named Edward Mallendaine. When Edward Mallendaine was a kid, he squeezed himself in behind an old gent named Donald Smith for what has been called the most famous photo in Canadian history, the shot of the driving of the CPR's last spike at Craigellachie in the BC mountains in November 1885. (I know a guy who knew a guy who knew... gee, shucks.)

Now Ray has a young people's non-fiction book out about Edward Mallendaine's moment of fame. They are launching it at Revelstoke, which must have the nearest bookstore to Craigellachie, tomorrow, Sunday August 15.  Go, Ray.

Book Notes: David Mendel on Old Quebec

Okay, we had lunch with David Mendel (and Yves Beauregard, editor of the Quebec history magazine Cap-aux-Diamants) in Quebec City the other day, so I'm prejudiced. But David's guide to Quebec really is one of the best conceived historical guidebooks I've ever seen.  And this one, on the monuments and buildings and history of old city within the walls, is only the first of a four-book series.

Representative democracy and popular protest in BC and Australia

British Columbia politicians brought in laws to enable mass petitioning to produce reviews of legislation in 1995, and now they will have to live with it. It has now been certified that the anti-HST petition has enough signatures to require a legislative review. Should the review not satisfy the petitioners, recall petitions also become possible.

The Campbell government is now reaping what it sowed, both by its support for direct democracy measures and by the dishonesty of its campaign promises on the HST issue. But representative "government by discussion" is generally superior to the typically demogogic, hyperbolic mass frenzy of petitioning and referenda, and the fact that the petition success seems to have restored to influence the corrupt and incompetent ex-premier William Vander Zalm underlines the problems with direct "democracy."

That same preference for genuinely representative democracy made me approve of the abrupt removal of Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd last June when he lost the support of his parliamentary caucus. Leaders ought to be accountable -- and to whom better than the elected representatives of the people. Wish we had that process here.

But maybe Australians don't altogether agree. New PM Julia Gillard has been sliding in the polls during the leadup to the August 21 election, and disapproval of the "ruthlessness" with which Rudd was removed seems to have been a factor. 'Course rising unemployment and other economic problems might be behind it too. (Update, August 16: that Ms Gillard is an ambitious unmarried woman -- could that also be a factor, d'you think, mate?)

Auz uses a preferential vote system. Since most of the minor parties are on the progressive side, it's possible Gillard's Labor will lose in the first-preference counting but catch up when second choices of minor-party supporters are tallied up. That should be heaven for most electoral reform wonks; one wonders how the Australian voters will feel if the "losers" win.

The Australian Senate (elected, powerful, and severely gerrymandered in favour of the smaller states -- much like the US Senate) is filled by a form of proportional representation, which means it will probably be filled with "unrepresentative swill" (the memorable description of ex-PM Paul Keating) and will oppose whatever government is supported by the lower house. Coverage from The Australian here, Sydney Morning Herald here. Curiously neither seems much taken with the horse-race "who's ahead in the polls" coverage that dominated Canadian media coverage of Canadian elections.

Update, August 13: Stephen MacLean draws our attention to a G&M online debate on BC's recall/initiative laws.

Update, August 20:  For anyone trolling this far back, the blog called Crooked Timber has some interesting material on the Auz election here -- don't miss the comments.

Read this book...

 ... because the best way to remember historians is by their work.  Postwar is a terrific survey of European history from 1945 by the British/American historian and commentator who died at 62 last week. It's full of pithy understandings of seemingly all that was going on during a momentous half-century.

Tony Judt is mostly being recalled right now for his commentary and his opinions. But what really impressed me about Postwar when I read it a few years ago was not the opinions, it was the history.

He concludes the book with what seemed to me much too much reflection on the present and future of Europe. "Old Europe and New," "Varieties of Europe," "Europe as a Way of Life," and his "Essay on Memory" constitute a good hundred pages of what seemed to me like a whole series of false endings rooted in vague contemporary musings. In the rest of the book, speed is one of his virtues. Every subject is broached and covered in remarkable precise and brief fashion, and then on to the next issue. That "just the history, ma'am" style is the book's great virtue. It falls away when he turns philosopher at the end. [my own unpublished notes]

Not that I didn't like the book, for I was tremendously impressed with it. But it's the historian I really admired.