History of Better Living Through Tech

As part of the recent Creative Nonfiction Collective online conference, I took part in a Zoom workshop by Omar Mouallem, the dynamic young Edmonton writer and journalist and founder of Pandemic University. " Organized Chaos" was a presentation on research tools and practices for writers. While listening, I was following some private Chat conversations among some, ah, older writers, not quite so digi-savvy as Mouallem.  

"Whenever I start a new writing project, I like to open a lot of folders," said Mouallem early on, screenshotting a view of his laptop with a bunch of digital folders lined up. (From the Chat: "A lot of my folders are cardboard.")  

He referred to Scrivener, spreadsheeting almost anything, mapping research locations with Google Maps, and using CiteFast, a thing that turns turns URLs into customized bibliographic citations (Chat: "He's never heard of index cards!") 

Then he demonstrated writing in a notebook with a pen -- except the pen was digital and the notebook uses special paper. When you are finished scribbling your notes, you plug in the pen, and somehow you get a word-processed text of all that you just scribbled down. (Chat: "Then you plug in the pen?")

But maybe the most comprehensive "head-explodes" responses was after he asked if we knew about about Otter.ai.  Ten years ago, he said, when he started doing these workshops for journalists, people always asked about a tool to make automatic transcripts from digital recordings. You know, you interview someone for an hour, and then you face days playing back the sound on your little digirecorder and trying to type out a useable transcript? Well, there never was much of a solution to that. Now there is.  

"If you have a heap of digital files of audio interviews you created over the years, you might look into Otter.ai, he suggested. (Chat -- and this time it was me: "Okay, if you don't see me at the rest of these sessions, it's just that I have to go talk to Otter for a while.")

I did. It does the first few transcriptions free, in about fifteen minutes, and I had 'em lined up in no time.  I need to do a little wrangling the Otter, but there are transcripts. I did not have to do them by hand myself, or by hiring someone. I'm hooked.

Had some headblowing experience of your own with some of these technologies?  Share.

History by analogy

Mackenzie, come again?

Borealia, the early Canadian history site, offers a little essay, a "cautionary tale," about the march on Toronto of the Upper Canadian rebellion of 1837 that sets up an odd, maybe perplexing, analogy to the recent Truckers' Convoy to Ottawa.  

I'm not sure what message the essay seeks to convey. If you sympathize with the rebels of 1837, you ought to have supported the truckers? Governor Bond Head's torching of civilian homes and other acts of vengeance are the same thing as Parliament's invocation of the Emergencies Act? Or just that all official actions against protest or violence are equally illegitimate? ("The issue of potential government overreach remains, and is even exacerbated, as it transcends the political spectrum when considering the modern issue.")

Or maybe that historical arguments are improved when they offer more than simple analogy and juxtaposition of past and present events.  

Naming in law and naming in contemporary history

Yesterday Ontario judge Anne Molloy convicted the Toronto van murderer who ran down and killed ten pedestrians on a Toronto street, in a judgment that recommends that his name not be used. The judge referred to him throughout as  "John Doe." Molloy argues that since the murderer's motive was fame, it was appropriate not to reward him with more fame. 

Today his name has been widely published in the media. So there is pushback to her recommendation.

 It's not a new issue. Years ago I blogged an item on the anniversary of the murder of female engineering students at the Université de Montréal in 1989, partly because I happened to be administering an exam to a history class the morning after the shooting and retain a vivid memory of the collective sense of shock and horror felt in the class. I got an email in response, urging me not to give the convicted murderer the celebrity he wanted. It seemed persuasive then; it still does.  

Today I see criminal law practitioners argue in the media that the courts' role is to hold people accountable, and accountable requires naming. It is also suggested that Molloy's decision will create precedent for people convicted of crimes to avoid accountablility by demanding the same treatment the van killer got. But surely declining to name is a choice, not an obligation.

Not naming comes up in legal history, too. Some years ago, when I wrote a history of a British Columbia court, I included detailed accounts of ten cases that illustrated how the court had worked over the decades. One, a fairly recent divorce case, illustrated how courts have come to deal with family property and support questions. It was only after the book was published that I had second thoughts about having used the divorcing parties' full names (as, indeed, my source, the published case report, did.) The still living individuals' names were not important to my story. I was only using their case as an example of evolving legal practice in family law. I could have anonymized them and spared them perhaps unwanted scrutiny of their particular marriage. 

Thinking about that, I learned about "anonymous citation," in which legal scholars writing about case law in legal journals and the like may refer to still-living parties as "A" and "B" or "John Doe" and "Jane Roe" to spare them unnecessary publicity. If I wrote another court history, I'd likely follow that trend wherever the circumstances seemed right. 

So lawyers are already exploring ways in which prudence and consideration can lead to withholding names -- not as censorship, not as a restriction of free speech, but as courtesy and sound judgment.  Writers of contemporary history, as well as journalists covering sensational crimes, may sometimes want to consider following that lead.

Updating the DCB

Got to applaud the idea of “updating” some of the entries in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography as part of its elegant new online presentation. It is no slur on that great work to say that anyone who has done much research in the DCB must have come across what might be errors or inadequacies. And even if there were no actual errors, biographical scholarship continues on with new questions and new sources that should not go unacknowledged forever.

But are the editors doing the right thing by silently rewriting signed entries that are still adorned with the name of the original contributor, and without giving any indication of what has been changed?

F’instance:  the DCB Online lists among its updated biographies John Rastell the younger from Volume I, published 1966. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read it before, but it’s by the distinguished Irish historian David Beers Quinn, a master of the tricky history of early transatlantic voyages.  So what's updated in the update?

Reading the updated version online, you have to wonder: did the mighty Quinn screw up the Rastell bio big-time? Or are the DCB editors just embroidering around the edges?   From the online edition, it is impossible to tell, but the online entry is still signed “D.B. Quinn,” as if he had signed off on every word. Quinn has been dead since 2002. Is this biography now a Quinn or a "Quinn"?

Just thinking: wouldn’t it be better for the online, updating DCB to publish biographies in need of revision in their original signed state, with a dated update by the editors at the bottom, setting out the new information that should be added and the sources that underpin it as of the time of revision.

By the present practice, we get an ever-growing dissonance between the published DCB-on-paper and the slowly changing versions online. Increasingly, we will get online entries that have the imprimateur of the historian whose name is given at the bottom, but which have been silently and anonymously re-written to a greater or lesser extent. 

John Rastell?  By comparing the online updated text against the printed original, I find that all the DCB has added are conjectural birth and death dates, a punctuation change or two, and a substitution of “Newfoundland and Labrador” for “Newfoundland” in one place. Quinn’s scholarship endures. Not that you would know from the way the online revision is presented.

(Still a big fan and a constant user)

ActiveHistory's how-to: searching your First World War Ancestor

Step-by-step instructions for some basic genealogical searching, from the ActiveHistory team.  Nice work.

At ActiveHistory, Ian Milligan provides very detailed "Step by Step" instructions for searching for the military records of individual Canadians.  But one of the key steps is "Go to Ottawa," and there he's soliciting help.  If you are working in those sources, you can be one of his volunteers

Milligan is kind enough to suggest this is an aid for students.  But even experienced historians have lots of collections and archives they've never worked in and don't know their way around. With enough volunteers, maybe A/H could extend this "step-by-step" to other popular research topics. (E.g., I still don't know much about our nearly hundred year old house.)

(Image from Google Images: no relation)

Evaluating Sources

At History News Network, the Americanist Daniel Crofts writes a fascinating piece about one of the methodological challenges of the trade: how to assess the authenticity of an anonymous and quite possibly fraudulent diary full of potentially valuable insights into an important historical moment. It was indeed composed after the fact, he concludes, and many of its conversations are more-or-less invented, but it's a useful source nonetheless.

Never really had to do this myself, but I've had my spidey-sense tingling once in a while -- could this be a fake? Never yielded to the temptation to create a fake either... but I can see the attraction.