History of Digital Media

 

I have never watched the American animated series "King of the Hill," don't know much about it.  But boy, this image (found on Lawyers, Guns, and Money) spoke to me, a longtime PC/Windows guy.

History of SubStack

There are about 25 Christopher or Chris Moore SubStacks.  As far as I know none of them is mine. But recently I got an email from Substack reporting that a good friend of mine had subscribed to my SubStack.  

I asked the friend and he says he did indeed subscribe assuming it was my SubStack he would have access to, but now he thinks perhaps it isn't. But SubStack seems to have associate my email with something in order to congratulate me on my new subscriber.  Anyway, I repeat, as far as I am concerned I do not have a SubStack. 

SubStack may feel differently. If you understand what is going on here, your social media expertise would be welcomed.    

History of bookselling, and of paying for stuff

A friend of mine is actually on a book tour. Not a virtual Zoom tour at her desk. She's really gone from Toronto to Calgary and Edmonton, maybe elsewhere, promoting her pretty terrific and well-reviewed book, Wanda's War. I had thought the old-fashioned book tour -- Canadian authors hitting indy book stores in other provinces to promote their work to a handful of readers at a time -- was pretty much a dead thing. Glad to see it's not.

Last week SHuSH, the terrific book-trade news Substack by publisher Kenneth Whyte was considering the implications of the likely collapse of Indigo as a book seller, and finding most of the consequences pretty terrible. And indeed the numbers are dire -- Indigo's share of all books sold in physical bookstores in Canada, let alone online, is still pretty substantial.

But the exit of Indigo will surely spur on the already swelling revival of independent bookstores everywhere across the country. Indy bookstores, run by Canadians who love books and curate their stocks according to local tastes, have always been vital in the promotion and hand-selling of Canadian books by Canadian authors. It's pretty likely that the physical bookstore selling physical books is going to survive despite online sellers and e-books and public library e-circulation (none of which I boycott!). And the return of a big broad network of independent booksellers would be a big step in the revival of a Canadian book marketplace friendly to Canadian books. Maybe public policies that support a Canadian writing and publishing industry could even make a bit of a return.

(Update, June 16:  The Toronto Star also sees the bright prospects for indy bookstores. Not that they got the idea here -- the story has lots of reporting behind it -- but it's the same idea.) 

Today the New Yorker quotes New York Times publisher A.J. Sulzberger talking about how barely a decade ago the Times was losing money and ridiculed for having a paywall. It now has ten million digital subscribers and is thriving. Sulzberger takes the opportunity to condemn "the terrible conventional wisdom of the early Internet that 'information wants to be free.'”

If Bill C-18 survives Google's appropriation campaign, maybe even the internet will come around to paid content. Then it will only be Canadian schools and universities and a few aging law professors that are really committed to piracy as a business model they still call "fair dealing." There could yet be a future for writing and publishing in Canada.

 

Product testing: the Epson FastFoto scanner

Is this blog an influencer? Some media connections recently asked if I would accept a loan of a high end Epson photo scanner, just to see what I thought of it. Sure.

Historians (and local history researchers and genealogists and anyone with boxes of old Kodachrome images) do regularly enough access old photographic prints that have not been put out there at the other end of a google search. So, a hyperspeed photo scanner with built-in software to catalogue and organize your images, even  correct (if you want to) red-eye and colour-fade and overexposure and the rest.... that might be interesting.

So I have been playing a little with a loaner Epson Fastfoto FF-680W. It claims to be the fastest personal photo scanner in the world. It says it will scan, restore, organize and share any image you give it, will link wirelessly to your computer and let you to share jpeg and tiff images with all your social media. 

How's it do? Well, it was fun to see the scanner pull in and spit out prints at something just short of lightspeed, where our old scanner would be wheezing and grinding for a minute or so. It did link effortlessly and wirelessly to my laptop, so scanning and filing new images was pretty much a one-click operation. And the photos look great to me.

If you need high-volume, high-quality scanning of printed photos, it does the job. I was glad to have one to play with.  

But the 680W retails for between $650 and $700. And you know, I'm not sure many of us need one that much when we all have access to not-bad scanners that come virtually free with whatever printer we have. Particularly when for most of us, the supply of already digitized photos is what most of us spend much of our time working with.

Still, gotta say I kinda love having a nice digital copy of this family photo, the golden anniversary portrait (in a lowland Scots setting) of some ancestors of mine who were married in 1855. That youth toward the rear, right behind and between the happy couple, is my grandfather.  And the software did improve the condition of the image a bunch.

Blogger onscreen: The Yorkminster Park lecture

The talk I gave at the Yorkminster Park Speakers Series in Toronto on Friday went well, with a substantial and lively audience (that included a major national political columnist, a senator, and some noted political scientists and historians). The hardworking team that runs the series has already posted video of the talk online.  You can see it here  -- just click on the second image down, under my name. 

Readers in the Toronto area can follow the Yorkminister series here. Clicking the "Subscribe" button gets you regular email updates on coming events. 

Milligan on digital history reviewed

This month's Literary Review of Canada has a long review (only available to subscribers) by librarian Lisa Betel of Ian Milligan's History in the Age of Abundance: How the Web is Transforming Historical Research. I profiled Milligan and his work on digital history in Canada's History magazine in April and June of 2018, and it's good to see the full book now in print. 

Betel notes the sheer immensity of data that digital media make available for historical study, and the problems of managing such abundance:

Few if any schools are currently equipping future historians with teh technical skills to run database queries and understand the metadata, and Milligan advocates for a curriculum that includes such instruction.

She notes the ethical (notably privacy) issues -- though I'm not convinced they differ fundamentally from those faced any anyone who writes contemporary history. She also notes that the need for sampling and quantifying in coping with masses of data, noting Milligan's observation that "people are obscured... but still read into the historical record"  -- again, not an unknown problem in quantitative social history, but now perhaps reaching a new scale.  She, and maybe Milligan, comes out rather optimistic:

Milligan believes ... emerging technology will allow us to deal with large data sets, preserve the anonymity of individuals, and still incorporate their perspectives into the record."   

 Also in the current LRC, former Harper cabinet minister Chris Alexander reviews Roy McLaren's Mackenzie King in the Age of Dictators, taking some pleasure in the feet of clay of a Liberal prime minister blind to the perils of fascism. David Breault, reviewing Helaina Gaspard's Canada's Official Languages, notes how in the post-Confederation era, patronage allowed powerful francophone cabinet ministers to stock the senior civil service with fellow francophones, whereas the establishment of the non-partisan Civil Service Commission based its practice on English-Canadian norms, so francophone representation in the public service dropped dramatically.  And more, as they say.

Cool history watch: digitizing New France

I've done a little work on New France. I've mostly assumed that while there were some Protestants in New France, they were mostly merchants from the port cities of western France and pretty transient between the colony and the metropole. Maybe not entirely, it seems.

At Borelia, by way of Unwritten Histories, Stephanie Pettigrew goes deep into digital databases of individuals who married in New France but were baptised in old France and starts finding out a truly unwritten history: colonists of New France who may have made a Catholic marriage but had been baptised Protestant back home. This post may be a teaser -- no numbers yet, no lists of names, but at least one vivid example. Some Quebeckers may be about to start exclaiming: 'Stie, calisse, on etait protestant!

Update:  Speaking of Unwritten Histories, their annual guide to holiday gifts for historians is out -- and terrific.  (Might quibble a bit on the rule only allowing books from university presses by Ph.Ds  -- to my eye that eliminates most of the good ones!)

Photo History of Toronto from big data

Sidewalk Labs is a division of the Google empire which has recently entered into a development agreement with Toronto. Sidewalk gets to create a "digital city" in part of Toronto's port lands, and Toronto gets... well, the future, I guess.

There has been some pushback.  In what is possibly an unrelated step, Sidewalk has just released a fun digitized map of Toronto. Nearly 40,000 historical photos from the City of Toronto archives of buildings and landmarks, from the 1880s to the recent present, can now be explored by roaming over the map Sidewalk provides. Sidewalk stresses the images belong to the Archives and were digitized and coded by the Archives; Sidewalk just geocoded them to their locations. 

This is either pretty cool or a bit disquieting, or some of both. Sidewalk says:

What does this tool have to do with Sidewalk Toronto?
The Old Toronto tool is not directly connected with the ongoing project plans for Sidewalk Toronto, but it does rely on some of the same technologies that can support a future neighbourhood.

Canada's History to launch Treaty Relationship webinar

Canada's History Society, publishers of Canada's History Magazine, announces a Treaties and the Treaty Relationship webinar series aimed at teachers and students, and launching October 26. The series is run in collaboration with the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba, and will run bi-weekly until March 2017.

This initiative is a public education strategy for kindergarten to grade 12 that includes teacher resource guides and the opportunity for educators and students to hear from members of the TRCM Speakers' Bureau. These speakers share information and promote conversation to foster an understanding of the historical and contemporary issues that relate to treaties. These presentations speak to both the Canadian and First Nation perspective of treaties.

Online registration here.

Ryan O'Connor's History of Christopher Moore

Podcasting?  Am I supposed to be podcasting history too? There's tweeting, and blogging, and you know, books and magazines and talking to people.  How many media is enough?  Instagram, what the hell?

Happily, historian Ryan O'Connor IS podcasting history, so maybe I don't have to. And after he called me up recently, we recorded a long conversation about, well, me and my historical career.

All the autobiography that never turns up on this blog is now up at Interesting People with Ryan O'Connor.  It goes about a mile a minute for most of an hour, and you can play it from here  

Free Access to Ancestry's miltary records collection until November11

Ancestry.ca has been digitizing, indexing, and making available vast quantities of Canadian military records through its (controversial) deal with Library and Archives Canada.  You can still access the material via LAC, if you have the time and patience and archival smarts, but for members Ancestry makes the same material accessible pretty quickly and easily.

Until November 12 you can look into what they have as much as you like, including service files of 29,000 Canadians killed in service during World War II.

More info and access from Ancestry here.

Old wine, new bottles

Thanks to the fine folks at Concordia University's Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (with a little help from SSHRCC) we have a brand new website to play with, The Oral Historians Digital Toolbox , basically a clearing house for really cool stuff.

Says the announcement:

The digital revolution is transforming our practice as oral historians, placing new emphasis on the research process “after the interview,” and this resource provides access to the various tools that are enabling us to re-envision our work. Our research findings have also been outlined in a major report, entitled “Telling Our Stories / Animating Our Past: A Status Report on Oral History and New Media.” Available under the “Status Report” tab of our website, this document, authored in both sound and text, considers the placeof new media in oral and public history

This is a project in process--new links are invited. But what they already have is pretty awesome, such as voice to text and video and audio editing. Nor is it just for oral historians: online content management and webdelivery, GPS/GIS and mapping, tools for qualitative analysis, and word clouds are useable across the board. For example, for Jordan Kerr's historical gaze, History Pin (under the Heading "Augmented Reality") a programme that matches old photos with Google Maps and Google Street View, would be just the ticket.