If there was a weekly prize for active historians in Canada, Ian Mosby would have been last week’s winner. Canadian national news media (including print, radio, television, and web) prominently featured Dr. Mosby’s recently published Histoire Sociale/Social History article, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities […]
Knowledge Mobilization
30 posts
This is amazing. This afternoon, I read a 1854 petition written by William Lyon Mackenzie to the Legislative Assembly of Canada demanding £500 compensation for travel expenses incurred during his tenure as a government director for the Welland Canal Company. I read this bizarre and fascinating 157 year old historical […]
Late last month, the federal government surprised statisticians, businesses, economists, academics and many other Canadians by announcing an end to the issuing of a mandatory long census form. With little explanation and unsatisfactory justification, the government has proposed to very significantly diminish the quality of the national census. The outcry […]
This October the NiCHE New Scholars Group will be hosting its own virtual environmental history workshop for graduate students. Using a combination of different online tools, including Skype, Google Groups, and Picasa, they will attempt to bring together a geographically dispersed group of graduate students studying different aspects of environmental […]
Digital technologies are changing the way we read history. With the popularization of consumer electronic e-readers like Kindle, Sony Reader, Kobo, and (yes) iPad, many textbook publishers are trying to take advantage of this opportunity to reach digital reading audiences. Unfortunately, the Kindle DX digital textbook pilot program at Princeton […]
Last week the federal government tabled its long anticipated copyright reform legislation for first reading in the House of Commons. The Copyright Modernization Act or Bill C-32 attempts to overhaul many of the out-dated provisions of Canada’s copyright law that have fallen far behind major technological changes of the last […]
Cory Doctorow recently posted a link to a great short documentary called “When Copyright Goes Bad”. It explores, in brief, some of the implications of modern copyright law for consumers, artists, and educators. I thought this served as a pretty good resource for explaining some of the current debates surrounding […]
Last week, we hosted a writing workshop for history and geography graduate students at the University of British Columbia called “Reaching a Popular Audience” sponsored by the Network in Canadian History & Environment and The History Education Network. The intent of the workshop was to introduce graduate students to some […]
Historians know that our work is entirely dependent on access to and availability of sources, especially archival primary sources. Anyone who has spent months (and sometimes years) awaiting approval of a Freedom of Information Act request in Canada knows how frustrating limited access can be. It is a barrier to […]
After months and months of hype, the long-awaited Apple tablet – the iPad – has arrived. It’s actually a real thing. Perhaps I too have just been caught up in the media spectacle that is an Apple product launch, but since I wrote a post back in November about the […]
If you’re a historical researcher, the Library and Archives of Canada wants to hear from you. LAC recently released a survey on the relationship between historians and the archives that focuses particularly on the digitization of archival materials. Unfortunately, it seems that LAC is under pressure to use digitization as […]
Over the summer, I posted a quick story about the need for historians to take part in the Canadian copyright reform consultations. The Canadian Historical Association did just this with an excellent submission to Industry Canada and the Department of Canadian Heritage that outlined many of the main concerns for […]