Making Promises You Can't Keep!

I guess I should be glad I didn't actually promise to follow up my "What I did in School Today" blog as its pretty clear that chronicling on even a weekly basis is entirely beyond me. I'm hoping to post a blog regarding what I did with the last few weeks of class time sometime in the near future, but I'm not holding my breath. Thankfully, my audience is limited entirely to my classmates, mother, and Dr. Turkel so at least I'm not disappointing a large angry mob.
This does segue fairly well into one of my challenges this semester. As I'm sure all of my less than angry mob of 13 followers know, this semester I was enrolled in History 9832: Interactive Exhibit Design. The course is almost entirely project based with brief breaks to learn important skills. Part of those projects was chronicling our progress, challenges, failures, and successes. I have been less than reliable in my reports. I'm not entirely sure why that is. As I mentioned in Let's Start at the Very Beginning my first real post on this blog, I've never been good at chronicling. I don't keep a diary, I don't even really have any day to day routines that would be the same if you visited me at home on any three random days. As a result, in the next week or so I should be posting all of the half finished blog posts I've had sitting around in my Interactive Exhibit Design folders since the various associated adventures. I'll also be doing my last major push to finish something (anything!) for April 15th when we have our final class show and tell. Nothing like finally posting most of a semesters worth of work in a little over a week!

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. 

The Historical Film

X-men Origins: Wolverine begins with the caption “Northwest Territories, Canada, 1845.” The scene opens to a young boy sick in bed in a relatively nice home with a roaring fire in the hearth. Shortly after this the movie becomes the comic book story that it is supposed to be when the young man sprouts deadly bone spursfrom his knuckles and kills a man he didn’t know was his father. The young man, Logan, then escapes through the trees to participate in the American Civil War, the First and Second World Wars and various other conflicts but not before the viewer is presented with a less than accurate image of Canada in 1845. 

Most Canadian historians know that in 1845 first and foremost, the Northwest Territories didn’t exist. They weren’t formed until 1870. We also know that in 1845 any further West than the current boundaries of Ontario and much further North than the Canadian/ American border there really wasn’t much going on. People were few and far between and there were very few settlements. That’s not to say that what is presented in the film couldn’t have happened. It is however, extremely unlikely that in 1845 there was a European settlement built up enough in the Northwest Territories to have multiple well built houses with more than one hearth. In Ontario at this time outside of townships most farm houses had one central hearth, and on the prairies immigration had barely started and building material was so scarce that the few families who were there lived in one room soddies. Moreover, its unlikely that any settlement at that time would have been established long enough for a man to have a 12 or 13 year old boy born on the settlement. To top that off, its extremely important to note that more than half of the Northwest Territories are above the tree line so the chances that Logan would escape through a thick woods is very low.

I site this example because its the last time I can recall really getting angry about historical inaccuracies in a film. I have to face the facts, I’m probably the sucker for believing that a fictional film based on a comic book should be historically accurate but it really does demonstrate for me just how insidious the images and notions that we get from film can be. I don’t doubt that of the millions of people who watched the film many knew nothing about the Northwest Territories and any number of those knew very little about Canada most of those people now when thinking about Canada’s past will imagine that well constructed, richly appointed home and the thick forest through which Logan escapes. As Roberta Rosenstone tells us, we as viewers are often unaware what the “look” of history presented in film is doing to our sense of history. Perhaps the most insidious part of the images presented in Wolverine is the idea that the things presented, like the ornate bed, and wooden mantel piece are the past and the people are less important. This allows the director to place Wolverine in the Canadian bush and do whatever he wants with him because it looks right. In the meantime that same editor hasn’t determined if it looks right for the particular place in which he has set the film. If a film like X-men Origins: Wolverine, which I’ve already conceded no one should expect to be historically accurate, has the potential to cause problems what then do historical films like Braveheart, The Patriot, or Titanic do to our understanding of those historical events?

Admittedly, neither of the three movies I mention above made me angry. This is in part because they were all released between 1995 and 2000 when I was between the ages of 12 and 17. At that point in my life besides a passing interest in history and a love of historical fiction I knew nothing about any of these events that hadn’t been presented to me in reference books or children’s fiction. The reality however is that even now if I hadn’t read about historical inaccuracies in each of these films, I might not be upset by them. Like many historians I’m sure I see myself in Rosenstone’s impolite question: how many historians learn the history of fields outside their expertise from films? I certainly do, I can openly admit to being a lover of historical fiction. I am also of the generation Rosenstone discusses in her book Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to our Idea of History. Film was a relatively regular part of my classroom experience. If I remember correctly the first time I saw Le Retour De Martin Guerre was in 11th grade advanced french class. We also read Jeanne Fille de Roi that year. Martin Guerre made another appearance in a university level class on the early modern family. However, what I’ve learned from my historical education is that one should always take the histories presented in this format with a grain of salt.

In chapter two, “The Historical Film: Looking at the Past in a Postliterate Age” of her book Rosenstone discusses in considerable detail exactly what films like the four I mentioned above do to our sense of history, though she discusses films like Reds, Glory, and The Last Emperor. According to Rosenstone these films show us history as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, she says that they always have a message, more often than not that things are getting better or are better. They may also be designed to make us feel lucky that we do not for example have to endure the horrors of the holocaust. The Patriot, for example, ultimately leaves the viewer with an understanding that the American Revolution was glorious and the British were evil oppressors of American freedom- a rather one-sided understanding.

She goes on to say that mainstream films present history as a story of individuals- either already renowned or made to seem important as in the case of Benjamin Martin the protagonist in The Patriot. Braveheart’s William Wallace already a popular figure has become infamous, deserved or not. This focus personalizes the films and the history, perhaps making it more accessible, something that in my experience it seems students are coming to expect. Moreover, this emotionalizes history, something we as historians are taught to avoid and yet again students seem to be looking for an emotional personal past.

Mainstream film also presents history as a complete, simple past.  There is no discussion of alternatives, no room for interpretation. The imagery in X-men Origins: Wolverine is definite, there is no room for questioning, nor, for example is there any real discussion of British Loyalists in The Patriot. American’s were patriots or they were the enemy, the movie does not accept that there were many American’s whose loyalties were torn by the conflict.

So, what then are we left with? We believe in William Wallace, the British were evil abusers in American, and men went valiantly to their deaths aboard the Titanic. But does film not have its own uses in the history classroom, much like art, and music? I believe it does if we teach students about the limitations and constructions of film. History is often dry, boring, historical film, and literature for that matter provide an opportunity to engage with history. In particular, we have a long history of engaging with heroes, gods, goddesses, and the ordinary man who when faced with adversity has the power to stand up and fight. I believe, as Rosenstone asserts, that historical film is a new form of history much like oral history and folktales.

Last week in Interactive Exhibit Design we were playing with firmata, or so we thought. Braden, Jordan and I set up a circuit, first with a button press as shown below and the following two codes run separately on Arduino and Processing (which should have been our first hint that we were not actually sucessfully using firmata), then with the same two codes and a potentiometer.

Our button circuit connected to the Arudino

The potentiometer circuit. The gator clips were unwieldly but much easier to use.

Processing Code: Many Thanks to Tom Igoe

/*

Sensor Graphing Sketch

 This sketch takes raw bytes from the serial port at 9600 baud and graphs them.

 Created 20 April 2005

 Updated 5 August 2008

 by Tom Igoe

 */

import processing.serial.*;

Serial myPort;        // The serial port

int graphXPos = 1;    // the horizontal position of the graph:

void setup () {

  //size(400, 300);        // window size

  size(800,100);

  // List all the available serial ports

  println(Serial.list());

  // I know that the fisrt port in the serial list on my mac

  // is usually my Arduino module, so I open Serial.list()[0].

  // Open whatever port is the one you're using.

  myPort = new Serial(this, Serial.list()[0], 9600);

  // set inital background:

  background(48,31,65);

}

void draw () {

  // nothing happens in draw.  It all happens in SerialEvent()

}

void serialEvent (Serial myPort) {

  // get the byte:

  int inByte = myPort.read(); 

    // print it:

  println(inByte);

  // set the drawing color. Pick a pretty color:

  stroke(123,189,158);

  // draw the line:

  line(graphXPos, height, graphXPos, height - inByte);

  // at the edge of the screen, go back to the beginning:

  if (graphXPos >= width) {

    graphXPos = 0;

    // clear the screen:

    background(48,31,65); 

  } 

  else {

    // increment the horizontal position for the next reading:

    graphXPos++;

  }

}

Arduino Code: Thanks DojoDave!

/* Basic Digital Read

 * ------------------ 

 *

 * turns on and off a light emitting diode(LED) connected to digital  

 * pin 13, when pressing a pushbutton attached to pin 7. It illustrates the

 * concept of Active-Low, which consists in connecting buttons using a

 * 1K to 10K pull-up resistor.

 *

 * Created 1 December 2005

 * copyleft 2005 DojoDave <http://www.0j0.org>

 * http://arduino.berlios.de

 *

 */

int ledPin = 13; // choose the pin for the LED

int inPin = 7;   // choose the input pin (for a pushbutton)

int val = 0;     // variable for reading the pin status

void setup() {

  pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);  // declare LED as output

  pinMode(inPin, INPUT);    // declare pushbutton as input

}

void loop(){

  val = digitalRead(inPin);  // read input value

  if (val == HIGH) {         // check if the input is HIGH (button released)

    digitalWrite(ledPin, LOW);  // turn LED OFF

  } else {

    digitalWrite(ledPin, HIGH);  // turn LED ON

  }

}

When we connected the potentiometer we saw this:

Unfortunately through all of this we thought we were using Firmata, a firmware that can be uploaded to the arduino to allow Processing to talk directly to it without having to run two programs at once. As anyone who knows this stuff can see, we weren’t. The first and biggest hint is that we were running both Arduino and Processing to make our visualization work. What we did learn is that firmata is much harder to get working than we had thought!

At long last, the ideas!

I started thinking about my potential Interactive Exhibit Design projects after classes ended last semester. Right away I latched onto the idea of the problems of exhibiting oral history. I’ve always found that oral history exhibits and audio tours can make museum visits a very individual experience. Moreover, I have yet to find an audio guide that provides a seamless experience, most like the Metropolitan Museum of Arts WiFi mobile device formatted website require you to browse to the exhibit you’re interested in, enter an exhibit number, or plug a rented unit into a slot on the wall. My hope was to at least come up with a great idea for creating a seamless, group oral history experience. As yet I haven’t been able to come up with anything that I think could actually work, so I’ve moved on to a few more realistic projects. 

The first project that I want to complete after reading week (next week) is a google SketchUp model of a company house, probably from Glace Bay or New Waterford. It will depend on which I can find the most archival information on while I’m home in Nova Scotia for a few days and can visit NSARM. Worst case scenario I may be able to ask a friend of mine who is a volunteer firefighter in Glace Bay if he has access to the fire insurance plans. I’m mostly interested in this project because I want to learn how to use SketchUp as it is, from what I’ve heard, rapidly becoming an industry standard.

Another project I’ve been thinking about involves a gps enabled audio walking tour. I’d like to program an arduino with a gps shield and an attached mp3 player. The idea is to create a seamless audio tour based on the London Public Library’s Walking Guide to Historic Sites in London. I’ll need to learn arduino gps code and I’ll have to figure out how to connect an mp3 player to the arduino (if there isn’t already a shield for that I just haven’t found yet). I’d also like to eventually learn how to code for the iPhone or another smartphone to potentially make this a mobile app.

The final project I’d like to work on is the project that until recently I’ve been using to procrastinate on the rest of my projects. When we started playing with sensors in class I got it into my head that I’d like to design a wifi enabled sensor that would tell me when I need to fill my cats’ water dish. The project would involve a level sensor of some sort and a code that would, when the alarm on the sensor was tripped, email or tweet to let me know. For this project I’ll need to work with an arduino, a sensor, and a wifi shield. My father and I have talked about this project a bunch and we’ve got a pretty good idea of what sort of sensor I’d need, but I’ll talk about that in a later post.

Throughout all of this, I’m also considering doing some research probably on Nova Scotian labour/environmental history (perhaps the tar ponds and the Sydney Steel Plant) and I’d like to put together one or more podcasts with GarageBand. I very recently started playing with GarageBand making a ringtone and it was fun and relatively simple. I think it would  be really interesting to try recording and cutting together a podcast.

A final project I’ve considered and scrapped was a game that I wanted to eventually code for the iPhone. I scrapped the idea for two reasons, the first was that I wasn’t prepared to hand draw it or draw it in processing, the second, I was beginning to feel like I couldn’t adequately do the other ideas I had and I was much more interested in pursuing them.

I’ll post more details on the projects and where I am with them thus far as soon as possible. I’ll also be posting with more detail regarding some of the things we’ve done in class and some video we shot last week.

Interactive Exhibit Design: A First Foray

Part of my Interactive Exhibit Design (IED) class this semester is blogging about my ideas, projects, and progress. Up until now, I’ve been really hesitant to do that despite the fact that it is a course component. I’m not totally sure why I was so reluctant to blog but I think it probably had a lot to do with the fact that until very recently I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for my project(s) and the fact that I didn’t until perhaps two weeks ago feel all that confident in my skills and ability to actually make my ideas happen. It also probably helps that Dr. Turkel gave me the go ahead to actually finish the project I had been using to procrastinate. 

I think the most incredible thing about IED is the world that the class is opening for myself and my classmates. Things that we might not have ever thought about doing are approachable now. We can create virtual 3D landscapes, make a hockey game into an interface and make a t-shirt do something cool. We’re also learning what we can and cannot do ourselves (thought I’m still holding out hope for Objective C). We’ll know when we need to call in the professionals and when we’re the only professionals our employers need. Its exciting, uplifting and empowering! 

I’ll be following this post up with a description of the projects I’m interested in working on, including what I think I’ll need, what I need to learn, and what I think the final product might look like.

Reflecting on my First Forays into the Digital Humanities

Like Dana I’ve never been asked to formally reflect on a class before but I’ve found that ultimately it is an interesting and worthwhile exercise. This reflection has allowed me to go back and consider my initial expectations, what I’ve learned, how my approach to public history has changed, and what I hope to learn in the coming semester. 

Practically from the moment I first navigated to the history department’s website and viewed last year’s digital history wiki page this past June I’ve been excited for History 9808: Digital History. I didn’t know what half of the topics were, for example I had to ask my brother-in-law what spidering is, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I think on some level I viewed (and still view) the Digital History class as the epitome of what a public history class should be: current, informative, and hands-on. Moreover, in my opinion the class addresses a topic that is distinctly lacking in most humanities, social sciences, and liberal arts degrees. In my undergraduate education the extent to which we were taught to effectively use the digital sources available to us was minimal. It was limited to a library research seminar here or there and in St. Mary’s required historiography course a guest lecturer who very briefly discussed digital history as an emerging market (a lecture that while a worthwhile introduction proved to barely touch upon what is available to us as historians in a digital world). Moreover, I felt like I, to some extent, had a bit of an advantage. I’ve been actively using the internet to communicate, play online games, and research for almost 10 years now. I felt on some level that I had a deeper and more meaningful relationship with digital technologies than the average person. Little did I know that my meaningful relationship barely scratched the surface of what the internet and digital humanities had to offer.

Probably the most meaningful thing I’ve learned this semester is just how little I know, and more so, just how much there is out there to learn. I’ve learned about copyright, open source technology, folksonomy, information trapping, collective intelligence, markup, mashups, and augmented reality. I’ve tried my hand at blogging, twitter, html, css, some basic text mining, image manipulation with The GIMP, and website design using Google Sites. The class also had a look at one of the many interesting sources available to us free on the internet The Eaton’s Fall and Winter Catalogue from 1913-1914. Outside of class I was lucky enough to try google wave and got the class into it as well with Tim’s help. I joined a number of academic waves and I’m hoping in the new semester to use it more actively as two of our classes will revolve more directly around group projects. I have on more than one occasion been confronted with topics that were completely new, for example: folksonomy- though in that case, it was perhaps more an issue of not knowing the appropriate name for a concept it turned out I had encountered before. I have yet to completely wrap my head around CSS, when I finally did get my CSS assignment working I had no idea how what I had ultimately done was different from an earlier permutation that for whatever reason was broken and did not work. Moreover, although I understand that APIs are good and useful I have not yet quite wrapped my head around how I use them. Apparently there’s  a book for that, though here is a question: is it available online?

Digital History has also changed my approach to Public History, where before I had an almost snobbish disregard for digital sources, now I look to them first. I have a new set of skills that to a certain extent make digital sources more useful that print sources and I know where to find the information I need and I know how to extract the answers I need from it. Moreover, I’ve learned to use the internet to my advantage I can create a working website and will hopefully be well versed in online interactive exhibit design after next semester.

When I started my MA in Public History I imagined that after my 12 months at UWO I would  be prepared to find employment with a museum or local history group. Perhaps I would be researching and designing exhibits or collecting oral histories, or maybe I’d decide to stick to a more directly academic context and I would contribute to the study of social memory and continue to be a good Atlantic Canadian historian by continuing to explore why the history of Atlantic Canada remains largely underrepresented on a national scale. Digital History has opened my eyes to so many different possibilities from digitization and visualization to publishing online and exploiting new and different sources. Moreover, digital history has helped me to understand the importance of a web presence, and has made the idea of becoming an independent contractor far more palatable. I feel ready for the world of public history with my handy digital humanities toolbelt and theoretical hard hat.