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
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