Tri in the Sky

No Comments »

As I was wandering to the whole food store tonight I heard the droning of an aircraft I couldn’t identify. There was the beat of a helicopter blade, but I could trimotor.jpgidentify the comingled drone of a heavy engine. Then as the sounds grew closer a huge Ford Tri-motor roared over the trees a block away. The Tri-motor was cruising at no more than 1000ft accompanied by a helicopter shooting video. It was an amazing sight. The sun was at a lovely evening height giving a wonderful orangey ambience, the sky clear and I was transported to another era. I was drawn back to a time when an airplane was the novelty (rarity) that the Tri-motor is today. What would it have been like to have seen this virilely powerful metal beast soaring over a small town bringing the hope/promise/threat? of a faster communication and transport? The sheer size and mechanical wonder must have inspired an awe even more substantial than my serendipitous amaze.

The helicopter buzzing about the larger ship seemed like a hawk being menaced by a sparrow or two. Especially as another helicopter came shooting across the skyline heading in for a closer look as well. I will have to find out where the magnificent beast was heading. A new addition to the Canadian Warplane Heritage at the airport perhaps. Given that only 18 are known to still exist, I was blessed with a rare experience tonight.

Tags: History

McInnis on Exagerated Rumours of the Prairie Wheat Rollercoaster

No Comments »

Marvin McInnis challenges the widely held belief that Canadian agriculture was adversely affected by the First World War. His talk at the University of Guelph Rural Roundtable yesterday, marvin.jpgpresented a nuanced and revisionary look at the common story that wartime demand drove Canadian farmers to double acreage devoted to wheat and unwittingly create a dangerous monoculture. A situation that led to a massive collapse in GNP when the price of wheat collapsed after the war. McInnis’ earlier paper “Canadian Economic Development in the Wheat Boom Era” sets an appropriate stage for this further discussion. In this paper, McInnis questions the conclusion that Canada’s rapid economic growth during the first decade and a half of the twentieth century rested on western settlement and the ‘wheat boom.’ This has been a persistent and widely accepted view until more recent re-examination has questioned the role of wheat in this growth and determination that other factors were of greater consequence to this growth. This story though has supported the consequent one that envisions wartime demand and response to it as greatly affecting Canada’s agricultural economy.


Read the complete article… »

Tags: Canada, Environment, History

Ah…Mystery!

No Comments »

The latest additions to The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project were published today. gumch.jpg When I took a look at the three new mysteries I was reminded what a powerful addition to the teaching of Canadian history that this collection is. The new mysteries: “The Redpath Mansion Mystery”, “Death on Painted Lake: The Tom Thomson Tragedy,” and “Death of a Diplomat: Herbert Norman and the Cold War” keep raising the bar of how to effectively present material using the web. The project is a collabourative effort amongst Canadian historians to provide engaging and fun teaching tools directed towards high school and university level students. The mysteries are presented as self-contained websites, each one with its own theme and approach. Typically they provide compelling narrative and also offer a wealth of primary documents and other source material to aid in learning about Canadian History and historical methods. With the addition of these new modules, the breadth of the site is reaching a point of critical mass and offer a nicely diverse collection from throughout time and geographic area.

Tags: Canada, History

Comparing Word Clouds

No Comments »

The folks at Many Eyes recently introduced their new comparison cloud tool. Basically, it lets you visualise two fragments of text displaying word frequency for each in the same cloud. It’s an interesting addition to the more familiar word cloud. cloud3.jpg Using a standard word cloud you get a matrix of words with relative size, weight or colour highlighting frequency in a selected text. This quickly allows you to visually perceive an author or speaker’s emphasis on a particular theme or style of writing or speaking. With Many Eyes hybrid tool, words which occur in both text are abutted. You can now visually compare two texts from the same author for similar empahsis or quickly determine a difference between texts. In the example presented at Many Eyes, they compare the US presidential State of the Union addresses from 2002 and 2003. In this example they note the less frequent mention of Afghanistan and the increase in mention of Saddam. Whether this allows one to conclude a change in policy or not, it does demonstrate the use of the tool for provoking questions for further exploration.

On Saturday, the Ontario government officially announced how much funding each university in Ontario is to receive for maintenance and renewal of facilities. I just happened to see announcements from a few institutions appear simultaneously in my RSS reader and was struck by the rather different ways in which they presented this news.


Read the complete article… »

Tags: How To, Info Architecture, McMaster, Text Analysis

Keeping a Few Social Network Tools in Your Kitbag

1 Comment »

I use both GraphViz and OmniGraffle to construct charts involving relationships and processes.omnig.jpg Over the last few days I was noodling my way through a schematic of sectarian associations in Northern Ireland. Trying to get the players and organizations straight was simply impossible for me without some sort of visual aid. I did a quick scan of the usual suspects to determine whether anyone already had something that would suit my needs, but only found textual compilations. Although comprehensive, these required more than casual scans to get an immediate sense of who fits where. I put the chart before the horse this time and started drawing on a napkin. I presupposed that I would need to visually distinguish between political organizations and paramilitary ones, and also between religio/political affiliations. The colours green and orange sprang to mind as good visual cues ;-) Chronology was also a factor and I had an additional temporal dimension to consider. The napkin was overwhelmed.


Read the complete article… »

Tags: How To, Info Architecture, Visualization

Revolutions, Republicans and the Seasons

No Comments »

About a year ago I adopted the French Republican Calendar for my personal journalling. Why? Really for republican.jpg no other reason than to be different. It offered me the opportunity to learn the Republican Calendar through practise (a word-a-day sort of arrangement). The upheaval of the switch to a new system in France in 1795, caused confusion, was not widely adopted and in the end was discontinued by Napoleon during the Empire. This was not before such references such as the Coup of 18 Brumaire and lobster Thermidor forever embedded the poeticisme of the calendaring system in our historical memory.

Read the complete article… »

Tags: Environment, France, History

The Wisdom of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy

4 Comments »

I was entering some dummy citations into a social networked text sharing project on the weekend.
bandyCover.jpg Serendipitously I chose the genre of historical fiction and ended up reflecting on some of the more memorable books I have enjoyed. At the top of that list is the memoirs of Bartholomew Wolfe Bandy by Donald Jack. This multi-volume series was very deservedly awarded the Stephen Leacock Award for humour on three occasions. This is all the more appropriate given the very Leacockian style of the Bandy papers themselves.
If you have not ever been exposed to Bandy, I can not recommend these books enough. They are superb examples of the comedic novelist’s art down the line of P.G Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and George Macdonald Fraser. Set in early twentieth century Ontario, B.W. Bandy, the hero is an Ottawa valley farm boy who heads off to fight in the First World War. He meets real life notables along the way, enjoys some of the most brilliantly told adventures and despite the comedic delivery actually teaches much about Canadian history. These novels demonstrate the close connection between literature and history - the enduring importance and beauty of a tale well told.

Read the complete article… »

Tags: Canada, History

Noise in the Bloggosphere

1 Comment »

As I read through my RSS feeds in Google Reader today, thief.jpgI was once again struck by the increasing number of familiar headlines. By this I don’t mean similar themes continue to be explored (although true - Hilary is clearly a bad, bad, bad woman and John McCain throws kittens into wells), but rather that I had already read the articles that were popping as new posts. My immediate thought was that Reader wasn’t catching my ‘mark as read’ flags, or that I had inadvertently created duplicate feeds. Alas, neither the case. These are the same posts…simply with different authorship claimed. Note that I am not even getting into the automated blog post piracy that is designed only to attract search engine attention.

When you try to stay on top of all your news feeds with a reader and attempt to strategically manage the multitude of feeds, the collapsing of feeds into headlines makes this phenomenon rather obvious. As I considered this, I realized that there is a certain tiering in the bloggosphere. Digg, Redit and other aggregators are at the lowest level and explicitly point to other’s posts. At the ‘highest’ level you have blogs that create absolutely original, thoughtful and unique posts. Between these there are all manners of variants. Review sites are somewhere in this milieu and they account for a substantial amount of this overlap. Some new gadget is released and the sites all tend to either hear about it or get their hands on it around the same time. Yet, it is interesting to note (when you have far too many RSS feeds coming in) post gravity and proliferation.


Read the complete article… »

Tags: Blogging, Info Architecture

Life and Death In Bruges

1 Comment »

Bruges at Christmas time. A lovely medieval preserved town with a festive spirit and now blessed with two hit men laying low at a quaint hotel. How can one react to this movie? In Bruges is a treat!!

Characterization and the characters are superb. Dialogue is witty and fast paced. The scenery of Bruges is shot magnificently. There are little 10 second vignette shots that work very well. The movie follows the two hit men taking refuse following a botched job. The hunker down to await a call. As Vladimir and Estragon, Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleason) adopt entertainly different approaches to their enforced tourism. Maybe its just the Irish way, but I feel some Beckett here.


Read the complete article… »

Tags: Film, Irish

Kathy Garay on Manufacturing Majesty, 1207-2007

2 Comments »

Dr. Kathy Garay of the McMaster Library gave a lively and fast-paced talk exploring the nature of majesty to the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group. Her paper,”Manufacturing Majesty: Elizabeth of Hungary, Diana of England and the Construction of Royal Saints, 1207-2007,” reflected on the rather striking similarities between St. Elizabeth of Hungary and Lady Diana Spencer. stelizabethsmall.jpgParticularly:

  • Lineage
  • Texts
  • Marital Love
  • In-Laws
  • Beauty
  • Motherhood
  • The Third Person
  • Charity
  • Agency
  • Funeral Rites
  • Legacy


Read the complete article… »

Tags: History, McMaster
Original WP Theme & Icons by N.Design Studio Modified by Shawn Day
Hello   Admin Entries RSS Comments RSS Login