Categorizing Knowledge, Danish Style

A friend of mine spent a semester in Denmark and had an interesting experience with the library there. Instead of finding the call numbers online and going to get the books herself (which, as we all know, usually leads to the discovery of any number of other books on the same topic nestled snuggly together on the shelf), she had to submit a request for each individual book she wanted to a staff member who went to get it for her. She couldn't go find the books herself, because they weren't arranged in any way that would help her find them. They were arranged by size.

I had a somewhat similar experience when I lived in Montreal, where the movie stores were almost as difficult to navigate as Danish libraries. The movies were arranged alphabetically, but not by title. According, I suppose, to the whim of the manager, they were ordered either alphabetically according to the last name of the star, director, or producer, so that Indiana Jones, for example, could very easily be shelved under "F", "S", or even "L".

Libraries, and other versions of information repositories are, at least in theory, organized in a way that maximizes user access, and their resources are categorized into different branches of human knowledge.

But I wonder how much information is never found because it has not been categorized in quite the way we think. Today we type in "keywords" to help us find what we are looking for but there are many different ways to categorize human knowledge and many different ways to label things. What one person may find to be the most significant, another may find to be completely irrelevant.

The internet is becoming one giant communal information repository. People can edit entries on Wikipedia and tag images and texts in the way that they feel is best. There is no standard for categorizing information. Even if there was, there is no real way for it to be definitive, which is reflected in the myriad classification schemes used by libraries around the world. Still, I do love traveling through the stacks to find the book that I was looking for and realizing that somehow, the one that I really need, while it didn't come up in my search, is sitting right there.

I guess I would have trouble in Denmark.

To Keep or Not to Keep: Spam and the Culture of "Found"

We recently read Paul Graham’s 2002 article “A Plan for Spam” for our Digital History class and as a group, we came to the surprising realisation that we do not, in fact, get much spam anymore. So this got me thinking: What would an archive of spam look like? Would it tell us anything?

The idea of keeping what used to be “garbage” has been gaining currency in recent years. People are finding meaning in the things others throw away, from grocery lists to postcards. See, for example, Davy Rothbart’s Found Magazine (and the book he’s published) – there is an internet archive of the most random objects people find, and find meaning in. Today’s “find of the day” was a handwritten note asking Joey to give Grandpa more hugs because he feels left out. I had my own experience in that regard: last spring, I was walking across the Maryland Bridge in Winnipeg and I came across a manila envelope stuffed with pages of handwritten notes and drawings that had been mailed around 1991. I read the whole thing, but then decided to leave it where I found it. I couldn’t bear to throw it out, but I didn’t know what I would do with it if I kept it. Maybe someone else would find more meaning in it than I did.

Things like this are invested with meaning by the finder. But the internet opens up a whole new level of “junk” to be discarded or cherished: from spam, to old emails, to myriad inactive web pages, there is more potential garbage than ever before. But I don’t think the appeal of something like Found Magazine is in mass produced fliers or advertisements anymore than there is an appeal to an archive of old spam. The appeal is in the human element, and in the connection between the object and the finder. People send things to Rothbart because they felt a connection to them, and they think maybe someone else will too. I’ve never personally felt a connection to junk mail. In fact, I’d prefer to forget it altogether.

England, England: a study in re-presentation

I recently read Julian Barnes’ novel England, England in which a wealthy businessman recreates, or as one might put it, distils the essence of, England, on the Isle of Wight. All of the major tourist destinations and significant moments in English history are represented. Tourists begin to make a conscious choice between the real England and the Island, which is “cleaner, friendlier and more efficient” [1]. People make the choice between authenticity, which can be disappointing and far from clear cut, and a representation of England that was selected from stereotype and myth, from Robin Hood to double-decker buses, that is simple, uncomplicated, and exactly what they expected.

“Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is representation – let me fracture that word, re-presentation – of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironisation and summation of that world. This is where we live today. A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.” [2]

In the end, the Old England falls into economic disaster and reverts into a semi-primitive state. The allure of the Technicolor world of England, England, where you can shop at Harrod’s in the Tower of London and have Yorkshire pudding with Dr. Johnson, is too great. England, England is exactly what it is expected to be, which is easy, instead of what it really is, which is much harder.

No-one has done something in quite the same scale as Barnes imagines, but recreations of history are everywhere, from re-enactments of Civil War battles, to video games, and multimedia exhibits in museums recreating experiences like First World War trenches. Perhaps there is a certain correlation between these kinds of carefully designed experiences and Barnes’ fantasy world. In our digital history class, we have been imagining all kinds of historic appliances that can put us in touch with the past. Representations of history, whether digital or not, are all created with a specific agenda in mind, and are designed to deliver certain messages and invoke certain reactions. In the case of England, England, the “England experience” is designed to fit the visitor’s expectations. In a sense, it doesn’t seem that great of a leap from England, England as a physical space to England, England as a virtual reality experience in which the physical recreations are replaced by digital ones. And, really, what’s the difference?

It seems to me that there can be an almost religious quality to the experience of visiting an ancient historic site or seeing an artifact with your own eyes. But perhaps it makes no difference whether you are looking at the real thing or merely a replica of it, and maybe a historical agenda will be pushed on you either way. Maybe, in the end, Julian Barnes was on to something. In a sense this is exactly what museums are doing anyway. Maybe we should just throw up our hands and make everything into a sexy, multimedia experience and forget about authenticity altogether, whatever that means.

Maybe. But maybe not.

1. Julian Barnes, England, England (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1998), p.184

2. Barnes, 55

Website review: The Virtual Museum of New France

This website review is an assignment for our Public History class. Congratulations if you manage to get through it . . . you can check out the website at www.civilization.ca/vmnf.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization is one of the most respected museums in the country. It is a pity that its website is not up to the standards we might expect of such an austere institution. For those looking for a comprehensive website or online educational resource about New France, the Virtual Museum of New France, a project of the Museum of Civilization, appears to be an ideal place to start. This website appears to be geared primarily towards school children and provides some basic information about the history of New France, important personalities of the period, daily life for the different kinds of people who lived there, a few educational /interactive activities, and links for those looking for more information for general research or genealogy purposes. Much of this information could be useful for an interested, although uninformed, member of the general public, a young student researching a project, or a teacher looking for additional resources. Unfortunately, the website is woefully out of date in a way that is difficult to ignore. The graphics and layout are distracting and it seems that the museum could be making far better use of their considerable resources to create an engaging and interactive website.

The Virtual Museum of New France was created as a joint project between a number of private and public collaborators, drawing on collections and resources from across North America and Europe. Information is organized into the following themes: Explorers, Great Names, First Nations, People (such as voyageurs, Filles du Roi, soldiers, etc.), and daily life. There is also a special feature on education in New France as well as several educational tools. There is a glossary and timeline for quick reference, as well as bibliographies included for most of the topics covered.

The outdated nature of the website poses a lot of problems. The site is a little difficult to navigate due to a lack of side bars or appropriate internal links. In the People section, none of the topics have been updated in at least eight years and not only are visually displeasing, but can be confusing as subheadings often have unclear titles like “A colourful expression”. One can only search the whole Museum of Civilization site and not the Virtual Museum itself, so it may take some time of futilely clicking on these links before finding the desired piece of information. Some of the topics in other categories were more recently created and are both more pleasing visually and easier to navigate, such as “Living in Canada at the Time of Champlain”. Nevertheless, it still remains impossible to search within these topics. The only place to search specific words is in the glossary. This remains problematic since the definitions are short and no links to the longer articles available on the website are available through the glossary. Furthermore, a few of the definitions are only available in French.

Through the ambiguously titled “Youth Adventures”, one is led to several educational resources including a bizarre cartographic puzzle, a lovely New France ABC and an activity for school children about a young boy immigrating to New France. The ABC uses images of artifacts from the museum, identifying the objects and their use as well as providing historical context. The school activity consists basically of reading a young boy’s diary and reacting to it. The graphics are awful and there is no level of interactivity, but the diary provides useful context about daily life in New France.

The Virtual Museum comes off as a bit of a hodge podge. It appears that the vision the creators had at the outset was not entirely realized. It provides a useful overview of many aspects of life in New France, but some key subjects are largely ignored. The section on First Nations people provides almost no information and certainly does not deal with Europeans’ interactions with the first people of Quebec. The site rarely makes use of its considerable resources to provide users with access to artifacts or documents from the museum’s collections. There are a few images interspersed with the text, but the New France ABC is the only concerted effort to actually use existing resources.

When this website was created, it may very well have been considered cutting edge. Unfortunately, it has not kept up with the times. It has not been updated for about six years, and many of the external links are no longer valid. This is a shame since some of the more recent exhibits are quite charming and there is certainly potential for an institution like the Museum of Civilization to make a formidable online resource.

Archiving Lauren Conrad

I spent the weekend writing an essay on issues relating to archiving motion pictures. When I sat down to write a blog about some of the things I’ve been thinking about, I thought it would be about questions of art and history, or at least about something sexy like spontaneously combustible film. But when it came right down to it, I kept coming back to The Hills.


I’m going to put it out there and admit it: sometimes I watch The Hills (and I know for a fact I’m not the only one in Public History who does). And The Hills, like it or not, is definitely becoming somewhat of a cultural phenomenon. (If you are oblivious to this, I would recommend that you stay in the dark. It’s probably not worth your time – but in a nutshell, it’s a semi-scripted/semi-reality show about a bunch of beautiful young people living in LA).


Where does archiving come in? Although we are in the DVD age, and millions of copies of season 1 are already scattered around the world, the theoretical question is still interesting to me: what would – or should – a motion picture archivist do with the original reels of The Hills?
Motion picture archivists select documents for archiving based on one of three things:
a. Aesthetic or artistic value (I’m pretty sure no-one would argue it’s a work of art)
b. Historical or sociological insight (again, probably wouldn’t make the cut)
c. Emotional impact/intrinsic value. And here’s the kicker. Many millions of people tune in to watch the latest exploits of Heidi and Lauren each week. No matter how vapid and pointless the show may be, it’s struck a chord. And that’s worth a thought.


There’s a whole other question here. When we look at a motion picture we always have to consider whether it is a genuine event or a re-creation of one. Obviously most feature film is fiction. Documentary is, in theory anyway, a more honest representation of real life, although the presence of the camera means that it will never be entirely accurate. But The Hills takes fiction and reality and blends them together so you have no idea what’s real and what’s not.


So here we have a show that has zero artistic value or potential for historical insight. We don’t even know how much of what happens on the show is genuine and how much is staged. And millions of cheap DVDs are floating around the planet. But it's also a hugely popular show that's struck an emotional chord and has entered the cultural lexicon, at least for the moment. So do we keep The Hills? I guess the real question is, what would Lauren do?

Instant nostalgia: partying like it's 1989

We live in a digital age where everything is immediate. We no longer have to wait for weeks to get a letter in the mail from family and friends who are far away, but are instantly connected through email, webcams, and text messaging. So history appears to be moving faster than ever before. With each year that passes we are creating more and more records of our lives. So much is documented that the smallest changes seem monumental, from hairstyles to the design of our personal computers, and we are eager to categorize the events and changes we see in our own lifetime. David Lowenthal explores this phenomenon in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History where he suggests “modern media magnify the past’s remoteness.” [1]

The problem with focusing on our recent past is that perspective is difficult to achieve. Interpretation of past events changes over time, as it should, benefitting from hindsight and a broader of view of context and effects. In our eager race to document the ever more recent past, we risk losing a clear idea of the big picture while being bogged down by minutiae – missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

This phenomenon of instant nostalgia is all over the place in popular culture. Retrospectives and ironic celebrations of decades past are commonplace. As an example, we have been looking back on the decade of my early childhood – the 1980s – with a nostalgic sigh and a chuckle for years now. The Wedding Singer, an homage to eighties culture, came out in 1998, a mere eight years after the decade was over. Maybe the 1980s weren’t really that great (I don’t remember them too well myself but I had some pretty awful haircuts), but it’s not the Recession or the Cold War that people want to remember. It’s the little details of pop culture; the tv shows, the music, the toys, and the greatest contribution the 1980s made to humanity: the fashion. Maybe people aren’t really looking for answers. Life wasn’t simpler or better back then. Vertical blinds in pink and grey were not a good idea. So what is it? Are we so self-obsessed that we can’t look beyond our own lifetimes? Or is there just something about a past that is almost identical to our present, but just different enough, that is comforting?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with looking back on our recent past with such longing, but as Lowenthal reminds us, things haven’t really changed that much in the past couple of decades. So let’s keep some perspective. And keep our fingers crossed that the flock of seagulls hairdo (see above) remains a distant memory.

[1] David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusades and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge 1998), p.8

In defence of progress

I know technology can be scary (as some have expressed in our digital history class . . .). I too have been a bit wary of embracing new technology. In fact, I was one of the last people I knew to cave in and buy a cell phone and then an ipod. But here’s the thing: now that I have them, I can’t imagine living without them.

I have been looking at a lot of history websites lately, searching for the perfect one for our website review assignment for Public History. I happened upon the Virtual Museum of New France through the Canadian Museum of Civilization website. The thing about this website is, it was created in 1997 and hasn’t been updated since 2001. These are exactly the years that I was in high school, which doesn’t seem insanely long ago, and back then we thought technology was pretty good. But it’s amazing how far we’ve come. The site is difficult to navigate, barely interactive, and makes very poor use of the resources available to a national institution. I’m sure it was cutting edge back when I was in grade ten. But now it’s almost laughable.

The point? Someone looking for information on New France will have an enormously easier time now than they would have ten years ago when the website was launched. No matter how scary technology can be, and no matter how dizzyingly fast it changes, it seems to me that the more resources that are made available, and the easier they are to search and navigate, the better. It’s just too bad that the Virtual Museum of New France hasn’t kept up.

Historical song and dance?

What is truth? As public historians our job is a big one, and kind of a scary one. We are the ones who are actually getting it out there, whatever the historical truth may be. If we can decide on what it is. If such a thing even exists (the post-modernists among us would argue that it doesn’t). And the really big challenge is getting it out there in a way that people will actually digest, so that they will go away with something. How to distil whatever message, or truth, we have deemed important into a soundbyte that people will actually take with them? Is that even possible, or do we then just end up with parody?


Growing up in Winnipeg, one of my favourite summer events has always been Folklorama. For those of you unlucky enough never to have experienced this fine institution, it’s a two week festival where different cultural and ethnic groups in the city put on “pavilions” where they show off their culture and history through food, song and dance, displays of handicrafts and historical and cultural exhibits. Each community puts on their own pavilions, so they are all a little different in approach. But let me paint you a general picture: at the Brazilian pavilion, you drink Brahma and watch capoeira. At the Caribbean pavilion, you listen to the steel drum orchestra and drink rum punch. You drink Guinness and watch the Michael Flatley wannabes at the Irish pavilion. (You may be sensing a theme).


So what does all of this have to do with historical truth? I love Folklorama. But what I find so fascinating about it is the way in which different cultural communities in the city choose to present themselves. They all embrace the stereotypes, and in doing so, perpetuate them. But if you are hitting up two or three pavilions a night, can your brain really take in any more information? And if you are a tourist breezing through a museum or historic site with your three kids in tow are you really looking for a serious, thoughtful analysis or do you just want to be entertained?


As a historic interpreter I have certainly met many people who fall into both categories. We need to be able to identify the needs of the public and accept that some of them only want the Cole’s notes version of history. But I don’t think it’s about dumbing history down, or about pandering to the stereotypes people expect to see. It’s about figuring out a way to get your point across, whatever truth you believe is essential to pass on, and to get it across without losing your audience. And if that means sometimes you have to sing . . . so be it.

Beyond the Iron Curtain: re-imagining a Communist past for the tourist present

Call me crazy but I always had an idea that the Communist past of former Soviet Bloc countries was not entirely a laughing matter. Even in Hungary, where “goulash communism” made it one of the best places to be if you were unlucky enough as to be stuck behind the iron curtain, life was not a walk in the park. So the public historian in me had a field day last summer when I found myself behind said curtain. Turns out it was all a big joke.

Never mind the Museum of Communism in Prague whose cartoony mascot grimaces at you from every corner. I’m talking about a veritable communist Disneyland, the Communist statue park on the outskirts of Budapest (http://www.szoborpark.hu/index.php?Lang=en). The surprising thing was not that the government decided to keep this assortment of monoliths, which mostly depicted either Hungarian communist revolutionary Bela Kun or anonymous heroic youths striving for the glorious future. The surprising thing is how they approached it all. The giftshop is case in point. You could actually buy CDs entitled Best of Communism volumes 1 through 3. They had t-shirts and mugs with various slogans, including a satire of the three tenors (“the three terrors”), socks and pins bearing the hammer and sickle or the Hungarian communist party logo, and various other kitsch designed for the backpacker with a sense of homour. What they didn’t seem to have – at the giftshop or in the park itself – was anything that lent even the remotest sense of context to the statues we were seeing. Stalin was nowhere to be found. Lenin was being restored and was under a tarp. My travelmates and I had a blast there, despite the disappointment at having missed Joe and Vlad. But I have to ask: is this the responsible way to deal with a recent past that was truly devastating to a very large group of people? And it’s not just the statue park. Up on Castle Hill you can buy soviet era gas masks for the equivalent of $400 Cdn and pause for a photo op climbing over the very tanks that rolled through Budapest in 1956. And most Hungarians I met made constant jokes about their years behind the iron curtain.

Hungary is recovering from the economic wreckage of its half century under communist rule and is now welcoming tourists back in droves. Tourists bring money. Tourists want to be entertained. And so Hungary entertains. I still wonder though: is this more important than honestly coming to terms with an unpleasant past? And is it really appropriate to make light of a such a serious and recent piece of history?

I’m not pretending I’m not just as capable of laughing at the Soviets as the rest of you. And for the record I didn’t visit a single other museum while in Hungary, so for all I know there could be thoughtful and balanced exhibits of life under Communist rule all over the place. But the question of how to balance economic revival and very serious issues of national identity is an intriguing one. I don’t have any answers – but I would recommend checking out the park if you ever find yourself in Budapest. Just make sure to leave time for the Turkish baths . . .

Taking the plunge

Here it is. My first ever blog post. Shouldn't really be so intimidating, should it? But for someone whose academic career up to this point has consisted entirely of submitting papers which were most likely only ever seen by one person, the idea that anyone at all can read this is somewhat disconcerting.


But then again this is Public History, isn't it. And what we are trying to do, after all, is communicate with people outside our sheltered little academic world, a world in which people already understand the importance of what we are trying to do without being convinced.


This is in fact what I have been doing for some years, although never on the internet, a medium with which I have never felt entirely comfortable. I have spent a good part of the past five years on the front lines of this effort to bring something of our past to the general public, as a tour guide and costumed interpreter, and this has led to a lot of thinking about exactly why it is we do it. Is it truly possible to justify the money and effort spent? Who exactly is benefitting? And does it really make a difference? There have been days when I wondered if the little reconstruction of a furtrading fort on the banks of the Red River where I spent my days was nothing more than a playground for re-enactors or a pretty backdrop for wedding photos. I'm not suggesting that it is -- places like that mean a lot to me. But sometimes I wonder whether the lives of the people who visited us there were really improved by talking to me. And if they weren't, shouldn't I be doing something else with my time?


I'm only just beginning to figure out what public history is all about. I have a feeling the coming months will bring more questions than they do answers. But I'm pretty sure, even if I can't articulate yet exactly why, that what I want to do -- as vaguely definied as it currently is -- is actually pretty important. Here's hoping.