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 Unfortunately, the website is woefully out of date in a way that is difficult to ignore.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The outdated nature of the website poses a lot of problems.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