History Digital Initiatives

MB: Living and Writing the Early Years of Parks Canada

Alan MacEachern et al. — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:10:35 PST

Mabel (MB) Williams was a file clerk when she joined the newly created Dominion Parks Branch, the precursor to Parks Canada, in 1911. Within a decade she was the agency's lead writer of promotional material, and the author of a series of guidebooks that would be the centerpiece for tourism promotion of the national parks, of the Canadian Rockies, and of Canada itself. Soon she was in charge of most of the bureau's publicity work in both print and film. But when her entire female staff was laid off early in the Depression, she resigned in solidarity. Williams spent the rest of her life struggling to make it as an author, succeeding only when she returned to the subject of parks.

MB: Living and Writing the Early Years of Parks Canada is an archive and exhibit that tells the story of an extraordinary, ordinary Canadian. In doing so, it deepens our understanding of a defining era in Canada's environmental history - offering insights, for example, about the development of the national park system and about the life of Grey Owl. What anchors the site is an unusually rich and varied collection of sources from MB's life: more than 30 personal letters, recently archived and as yet little used by historians; 9 published guidebooks, long out-of-print; and an oral interview from 1969, never before heard.

Wartime Canada

Jonathan F. Vance et al. — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 20:41:46 PST

"Wartime Canada was envisioned as a way to make the visual heritage of the nation at war freely available in digital form. Our emphasis is on the kind of material that is usually regarded as disposable – the very material that was omnipresent in the lives of Canadians in wartime."

How to Write a Zotero Translator: A Practical Beginners Guide for Humanists

Adam Crymble — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:01:47 PDT

The citation management program Zotero is a wonderful tool for researchers everywhere. Citations from the web may be "grabbed" simply by clicking on a in your web browser address bar. The citation information displayed on the screen is then saved to your Zotero collection with little or no additional effort. However, for this to work, each and every website must either follow standardized metadata guidelines, or must have its own personal "translator" that tells Zotero which words on the screen correspond with which bibliographic fields. Computers are stupid; translators make them smart.

Most users who know about the citation capture feature are enthralled by it and want more. The Zotero forums receive multiple requests daily from users hoping their favourite site will be given this capability. Unfortunately, there just aren't enough Zotero programmers around to keep up with the demand for translators, and more intensive coding-projects take priority.

Luckily, Zotero translators are fairly easy to create (as far as computer programming goes). This guide seeks to help take some of that load away from the Zotero staff by teaching the community of Zotero users how to create their own translators and to share them with others.

The Programming Historian

William J. Turkel et al. — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 18:01:47 PDT

"The Programming Historian is an open-access introduction to programming in Python, aimed at working historians (and other humanists) with little previous experience."

Back to the Island: The Back-to-the-Land Movement on PEI

Ryan O'Connor et al. — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:49:43 PDT

"Welcome to a site dedicated to the back-to-the-land movement on Prince Edward Island. There is a series of interviews of back-to-the-landers conducted by Ryan O’Connor in 2008. There is a single narrative history of the movement, by Alan MacEachern. And there is an opportunity for other back-to-the-landers, their children, or anyone else to contribute their own stories or photos about those days."