Site Visits, Walking Tours, and Podcasts

The past week was Banting filled, with some mild walking around the city, with just a hint of structuring and editing a podcast.

On Tuesday we as a class visited Banting House, and were given a tour by the museum curator Grant Maltman. Much like I had assumed I knew very little about Banting, or his life, and the vast amount of experiences and contributions he had in his lifetime. The tour made it clear that the project that we are working on with Banting House is going to be beneficial in so many ways. Having a solid collection of research regarding Banting will allow for his story, and his life to be experienced fully and by all of those who seek to learn more about the man who gave the world so much, and is not just simply the "Insulin Man".

Wednesday was another off-campus opportunity for our class. We had the opportunity to go on a historic walking tour called "The Curse of Peg-Leg", and get an understanding of what challenges await us in creating our own. I consider myself a hands on learner and I greatly benefited from actually having, for lack of a better phrase, boots on the ground. Instead of just sitting at home, the office, or in class and listening to the tour, we walked it. We got to see first hand the difficulties that surround navigating a city with seemingly endless construction, and trying to find a small nook so we could stop and actually try and listen to the tour in the designated areas. The tour itself was entertaining and left me wanting to know more. Which to me is what Public History and more specifically short forms of Public History are intended to do. The audience is able to experience a "highlight reel" of some of the key points of the history being presented, and then hopefully left with the notion that there is more to be learned. Deciding on the topic we will be doing for our tour is also something I'll be excited about finalizing (hopefully) soon.


Podcasts are really enjoyable to listen to, especially if you have a long commute like myself, but boy are they difficult to get right. My only experience with audio recordings of history was my contribution to a Virtual Museum of Canada project I worked on in my 4th year of my undergrad. I was tasked with reading WW1 letters written by a Cape Breton soldier, and transcribing them and ultimately helping to layout the narrative that we wanted to share from his letters sent back home. After that was completed, I was asked to lend my voice to this man, this person who was my age a century ago. It was an incredible experience, and I got to know him, in a way. He was actually pretty funny, or unintentionally funny, whether that was a way to cope with what he experienced or just who he was as person we'll never know. But, I went in the sound-booth for 2 or 3 days and recorded takes on takes on takes of this the man's words. They were foreign coming from my voice, but after recording half of what we had selected, I found him. I found this man, who was soft spoken, but knew when he had to show his authority, and who was inherently funny. My only experience was the research leading up to the recording, and the creation of a quasi-script made up of his letters. I never had to do any of the editing and of boy, let me just tell yah that uh yeah I definitely have the utmost respect for audio-engineers, podcast creators, and anyone who finds pleasure in creating audio recordings of any kind.

In my podcast I chose to read a poem, and that poem happened to have some Gaelic in it. As a Cape Bretoner you may assume I know how to speak Gaelic, and to that I say, nope. Big nope. However, it was really fun having to learn how to pronounce even 3 words in a completely different language with Fh's being silent and so on. There are only 3 words in the poem that are in Gaelic, but I actually wanted it to be spoken correctly so I did the research, or to the best that someone can while researching a dead (but being revived) language. I have known a few Gaelic speakers while working at The Beaton Institute, and sat in on Gaelic academics speaking about the language and its revival. If they were to ever hear my attempt I hope they would be proud and even just for fact that I could have just said the words in English, but chose not to.

Keep an eye and ear out for all of the Digital Public History students podcast's that will be getting posted between now and October 2nd.

Daniel

Week 2 - The One With All the Ideas

The second week of classes came out swinging with the solidifying of assignments and due dates, and everything academic that I have come to know. However, unlike in my undergrad, I actually have ideas for these assignments as soon as I knew what they were. I may be setting my sights too high for some of them, but I'll get to that a bit later.

Monday's class in History 9806A: Understanding Archives - we were given our first of 3 exercises. The first one being, responding to a genealogical request. During my time at the Beaton Institute Archives I had been tasked with responding to, or gathering the information for genealogy requests. When I was given the paper I started reading and a few quick ideas came to my head immediately, but I don't want to go into this assuming I know everything. Because well, I don't. I've spent some time with these types of requests, and I know how I would like to be responded to, or how I would like someone to respond to my 90 year old grandmother if she had sent off  this genealogy request. But, truly I want to respond in the best way and not having access to my familiar resources, i.e. Cape Breton Post microfilm, C.B. church records, C.B.  City Directories; I am stepping quite happily out of my comfort zone and I think it's going to be a fun exercise.

Tuesday's Public History class was a whole other ballgame as well. Getting the opportunity to choose a piece of property for our heritage designation assignment was incredibly exciting. I chose a house in close proximity to a large industry/place of work in hopes that it may have had some relationship with the said industry. In Industrial Cape Breton, those who held high up positions in the Sydney Steel Plant, or in any of the various mines, would have often had houses specific for those who held certain titles. In fact in some cases, castles (yes Cape Breton is just as magical as Disney World), but that's a whole other story for somebody else to talk about.            

Once again with this assignment, I have had some experience with looking at addresses for the municipality, as well as local researchers and those abroad. I enjoy looking through city directories and learning the shorthand for the jobs people held and other various shorthand terms associated with their entry. Fire insurance plans are also something I've had experience with, and the main piece of advice I would give any of my classmates is use google earth to position yourself. Street view and a current map that you can navigate around is great for comparing fire insurance plans to what we now see in our daily lives. Kyle Gonyou had visited our class and spoke to us about the heritage designation process, and luckily told me that there are some great aerial photos of the address that I chose. Which for those of you who don't know (and why would you); I really enjoy archival photos and trying to be a detective and make out any small detail that would go unnoticed unless you spent wayyyy too long looking at them. 

Finally, in Digital Public History we discussed digitization, and the abundance of information that now exists due to the ever expanding internet. I did not get a chance in class to mention this, but it is something that has always stuck with me, both in my personal life as well as professional. For example, when we scan a single photo at 2400dpi and their file size is 1.73gb we are filling up space. Regardless if it is physically on site in a hard drive or in the cloud, aka in another hard drive somewhere offsite. It is taking up more space in the world, mind you, it is less space than it currently physically takes up, but it is still additional space. Basically through this rambling what I wanted to bring up in class and discuss (even briefly) was our digital footprint, our impact on the world in another physical space. It is something odd that often comes to the forefront of my brain when I think of digitization on such a large scale. 

Amazon's AWS is a great example of a global cloud storage system that is mind boggling. Amazon even hosts Netflix on their servers (https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/netflix/). The potential to use this service for mass digital archival purposes is there, it is, but I sometimes struggle to fully appreciate the mass of information that we need to preserve before it lost to decay. Also, the amount of information that should be readily available to people, that just isn't. And at the same time we create endless copies of items that create another small yet not insignificant footprint on some server farm in California. I am writing this speaking about digital footprints on the world while fully knowing I am going to post on Instagram a few times while I am here with multiple photos at a time, so people back home can see what I've been up to. Maybe what I am truly confused by is not the digital footprint, but rather the information that is currently filling up digital space in the world, and comparing it to the information that is imperative to be saved and preserved and the disproportion between the two.

This week has filled me with excitement and more ideas for assignments and future projects that I want to one day work on. I was unaware of Historypin, but oh does it bring a couple of great (potentially out of my reach) ideas to my head. 

I promise I will eventually figure out how to better format the front page of my blog, and make it more me (whatever that means). But, until then I promise you the photo I have as my current background is a photo I took of a cloud shaped like Cape Breton Island while at the Fortress of Louisbourg in Cape Breton. 

Until next time,

Daniel

Hello!

My Name is Daniel, and welcome to my first blog post ever!!

I'd like to say thanks for joining me in my Public History journey. I'm not quite sure how blogs are typically written, but I guess this will be a glimpse into my historical psyche. 

To start off I'd like to position you all into where I am from and how it has enabled me to grow as a historian. I am from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia; and even more broadly, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. 

Glace Bay is a former mining community on the East Coast of Cape Breton Island, and has been an established town since 1901. At the time of it's establishment the town's first mayor D.W. Burchell stated "...there is reason to feel that Glace Bay will one day take its place among the leading cities of Canada". It was a time when "coal was king" and it was looking like Glace Bay was destined to make its mark on history as the city built by coal on the Atlantic coast. However, due to deindustrialization that destiny never came true. Industrial Cape Breton suffered enormous losses economically, and in relation to its population when the coal mines closed. However, the coal mines officially closed in Cape Breton in 2001. Which meant that the people of Glace Bay had 100 years to acquire immense amounts of history and stories from their time as a coal community. That was the town I grew up in, and this is the place where my love for history began. Hearing the stories and seeing the photos of my ancestors who worked in the mines and who worked at home to keep everything else in their daily lives running smoothly. 

In Digital Public History fashion, here is a short video by the National Film Board of Canada that showcases the relationship between Cape Bretoners and coal.

https://youtu.be/KRP72u2tyKY

It wasn't until my time at Cape Breton University, and the Beaton Institute Archives that I truly had the chance to express my historical love for my community and my island. My first ever experience with Public History was at the Beaton Institute. I was able to work at the front desk as a "Student Research Assistant" and held that part-time position during my undergraduate degree for 3 years. Daily, I would be digitizing textual documents, and negatives from around Cape Breton.

Over the span of the semester I will be sharing a brief mentions of my past experiences with Public History, and new experiences I will be having studying at Western University.

 I hope you enjoy my blog posts, and do not tire of me talking about Cape Breton.

-         Daniel