What I did in School Today!

Not too long ago I thought to myself, “I do a lot of really neat things at school.” Shortly thereafter I started thinking how neat it would be to post a daily blog regarding what I did in school each day. I wish I’d thought of it sooner- say September when I started this blog but instead here we are: What I did in school Today!

March 3rd, 2010

Today in Interactive Exhibit Design we looked at Digitizing, Drawing, and Cutting 2D models. Dr, Turkel showed us some cut out models he had been painstakingly cutting on his Craft Robo for a conference. That machine is incredibly loud! After that we discussed programs like Google Sketchup and Adobe Illustrator as well as free options like Inkscape that unfortunately don’t work with the Craft Robo. We then went on to use the vinyl cutter to cut out the word Monkey for Tim. I’m nosy Tim, I want to know, but I won’t ask right out (I’ll just hide it deep within a blog.)

March 4th, 2010

It was a fun day in Introduction to Public History: our second Material Culture Workshop and our first hands-on day with the J.P. Metras collection. We learned how to whip stitch a permanent label into the collar of a piece of clothing and ironed out how we were going to catalogue the items using PastPerfect a museum collections management software. There was fun to be had all round. Many of my classmates had never sewn before and we definitely has never seen some of the sport uniform items we were working with.

March 8th, 2010

Today in Social Memory we looked at the Canadian Centennial and the American Bicentennial. The highlight of the class was probably Tim’s American Revolution in Stamps presentation- I wish there had been music Tim! We finished up by splitting into groups: Public History students vs. Regular History students. Dr. Vance asked us to design a commemorative stamp for the Canadian Centennial. Ours is pictured below. I think it was the best! Our design elements were the maple leaf representing the provinces, a railway representing the significance of the railway in the creation of the country, and the Centennial train which brought the Centennial festivities to the entire country.

March 10th, 2010

Dr. Turkel was out of town today so we had access to the NiCHE lab to work on our projects if we chose. I elected to go home and mark papers as I had a deadline looming in a week.

March 11th, 2010

We spent our class in one of the Geography computer labs today learning a little bit about how GIS works and discovering the potential of the program for analysis. We were led by Don Lafrenier a geography grad student who has been participating part-time in our Intro to public history class. We used GIS to plot data about the Talbot Street area and London’s downtown core. Among other things we looked at how many of the people in the city directory in 1891 owned their homes and how many rented. I learned yet again why they tell us to save often when ArcGIS decided it didn’t want to perform the task I had assigned it and crashed losing all of my work thus far.

March 15th, 2010

Today we started discussing War and Memory and in particular the difference between individual memories and collective memories of war.

March 17th, 2010

We had a day to just work on our projects today. I spent it reading the manual for the H4 Handy Recorder by Zoom and playing amateur videographer with my iPhone. A blog entry on the Handy Recorder should follow shortly and we should see videos posted by Dana and Jordan in the near future. When we do, I shot them with my iPhone 3GS. They’re pretty impressive little phones.

March 18th, 2010

Unfortunately I put my back out on Wednesday evening and on Thursday still couldn’t really move so I had to stay home in bed. I’m actually really disappointed, this was a class and a guest speaker I had been anticipating. I did however write a blog entry about historical film.