The latest additions to The Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History Project were published today. 
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.
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. 
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.
I use both GraphViz and OmniGraffle to construct charts involving relationships and processes.
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 ;-) I was able to access the CAIN database which provides a superbly authoritative compendium of organizations on on ‘the Troubles’ and politics in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the present. Chronology was also a factor and I had an additional temporal dimension to consider. The napkin was overwhelmed.