Post Prairies Thoughts

Reading week has always been somewhat of a wasted week for me in the past. During my undergrad I would take advantage of the days off by sleeping in and then just doing nothing all day, or at least nothing school related. But, for 3 years of my undergrad I would usually be working during reading week and assisting other students that would be coming into the archive to work on assignments for their classes. However, as I mentioned in my last blog post I went into this reading week with a plan, or a schedule or list of things that I wanted to either finish or make a dent in. And fortunately I did just that, I finished some of the items that were on my list and for others I put large dents in them. And that is in spite of me getting off of my plane to and seeing this.



There wasn't a lot of snow but it was -25 which I was not a fan of.
















For my heritage designation assignment I was able to compile all of the data I have collected so far into one excel file; it is 3 sheets in total but it gives me a focused look at my research so far and is incredibly helpful. I also organized the folder that I made for the project, All of the aerial photos that I had gathered are labeled and accounted for, and I was able to grab good screenshots of the digitized fire insurance plans that were online. When first working with the fire insurance plans I was discouraged because I couldn't find the address that I have chosen for the assignment, so I chose not to take photos of them in the archive. It was an annoyance that I kept finding when looking through many of the different resources at Weldon and in ARCC; my address just was not in the city limits for London and when it was listed there was little information on it. However, I got over the annoyance and have a digitized tiff file of the area of the fire insurance plans where my address should be.

The major dent that I was able to make in my list of assignments and projects was in the final project for Digital Public History. I think I have settled on creating a story map of the major mining strikes of the early 20th century in Cape Breton, and focusing on 2 of the biggest players in the strikes - J.B. McLachlan, a major labour leader in Cape Breton's history, and William Davis, a miner who died during the 1925 strike and the reason why Cape Breton has a holiday named Davis Day or Miners Memorial Day. Those days are to honour Davis and all others who have died in the mines or fighting for the rights of miners. The stories of the strikes have the Canadian military on church steps pointing machine guns at the miners if they cross the town line into Dominion, and mining company police officers being tarred and feathered. Two particular strikes cover a large area of Industrial Cape Breton, or well large in the scale that men were walking for hours to strike and to fight for the rights of the working class. Also, I plan on adding points on the map of all of the former mine sites across Cape Breton, but once again this is difficult because I have yet to find 1 map with all of the locations. Sometimes it will show the seam that they are mining into, or the area in which an air shaft was located to pump air into the mine when the men were traveling kilometers out under the ocean. Locating all of the mines is going to be difficult, but fun because I'll be providing a key resource that will be incredibly useful for my further research one day, as well as other industrial or labour researchers in the future. Another major difficulty that I have run into is that (as mentioned a number of times) technology and I don't get along. So using arcgis is going to be a bit of a learning curve for me, but I'm excited to use it more. From my time using it in class I can tell it will take me a little more time than others to get used to. But, I've begun using Google Earth and started mapping out all of  my points and collecting their coordinates, so hopefully the arcgis component will only take me a few hours to truly get the hang of it.


However, my time away was not all spent working on assignments, projects, or very very basic early cognate research, I was fortunate enough to spend time with my family and recharge my batteries.







Obligatory grain elevator photo from Saskatchewan. I always try and get a photo of a different town each time I'm driving to or from Regina.

Had to go to the lake so I could be around water again, it wasn't the Atlantic Ocean but it sure made me feel back in tune with nature. Also, it was frozen enough for ski-doos to ride on it which shows just how unimaginably cold it is there already. 








Well, that is it from Prairie Daniel back to City Daniel for another 26 days of extreme crunch time. City Daniel is more equipped to deal with crunch time, the prairie life really just makes you want to nap a lot.

I need to find a great way to end these things that nobody else is doing, something outside of the box. Maybe I'll try this.

Onward and Upward Ya'll

Yep, it is a new thing nobody else is doin', nobody at all.