Research

Upcom­ing Talks

I had a great time giv­ing a talk for the Guelph Museums on 11 Octo­ber at the Wel­ling­ton Brew­ery. It was a per­fect set­ting for a lec­ture on Saints, Sin­ners, Brew­ers and Pub­lic­ans: Drink­ing in before Pro­hib­i­tion in Ontario. The power­point slides that accom­pan­ied the talk are avail­able
I presen­ted some of my cur­rent research in liquor and licens­ing at the Global Approaches Con­fer­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Guelph, 9 August 2007! The present­a­tion was entitled: “Liberty, Mor­al­ity and the Right to Drink: Liquor Licens­ing, Trade Organ­iz­a­tion and Polit­ical Pat­ron­age in Late Nine­teenth Cen­tury Ontario.” Excit­ing! Watch for some more inform­a­tion from this talk soon.

Areas and Mater­i­als of Interest

I cur­rently con­duct­ing research on liquor license enforce­ment in Ontario, Que­bec and Man­itoba. I am also invest­ig­at­ing the vari­ous Licensed Victu­allers Asso­ci­ations in Canada, the US and the UK to explore trade organ­iz­a­tion and its effect­ive­ness in fight­ing the impos­i­tion of pro­hib­i­tion in the late nine­teenth cen­tury. I am also invest­ig­at­ing chat­tel mort­gage records a valu­able resource for explor­ing the mater­ial dimen­sions of hotel pro­pri­et­or­ship.
I have provided repos­it­or­ies of my research, includ­ing con­fer­ence papers, data­sets, visual sup­port mater­i­als as well as things which I have done purely for fun on this site. The fol­low­ing are available:

Con­fer­ence Papers
These are made avail­able as rights, time and my interests allow.

Data­sets
More PhD data­sets com­ing soon. In the mean­time also check out the ones that I share from the MA work below.

My World of Maps
I love cre­at­ing maps. I have been doing so since I was 11. Luck­ily I still have many of these early maps of mine, drawn on onion skin and even­tu­ally labeled very care­fully with Letra­set rub-on let­ter­ing. I have always found car­to­graphy (well maybe I am over­sell­ing my map-making abil­ity) quite fas­cin­at­ing and con­tinue it to this day. Much of my quant­it­at­ive work dur­ing my MA and PhD have involved visu­al­iz­a­tion of numeric data in a visual form…often maps and cer­tainly has led me into GIS exploits.
Here is a little (expand­ing) gal­lery of some of my latest creations.

My MA Research Work
My M.A. research explored the nature of pro­pri­et­or­ship in late-nineteenth cen­tury Ontario. In car­ry­ing out my research I worked with a wide vari­ety of source mater­i­als and com­piled some extens­ive data­sets. Some of this data was rep­res­en­ted visu­ally through charts and graphs, while other sets I mas­saged into a vari­ety of vir­tual rep­res­ent­a­tions using GIS. I have moved the ori­ginal research web­site to this server. How­ever, this link will open in a sep­ar­ate win­dow or tab, as it is not tied dir­ectly into the nav­ig­a­tion struc­ture of this blog.

Cur­rently Unclas­si­fied Stuff
I am con­stantly adding inform­a­tion to this site. This area con­tains mater­i­als which just don’t fall cleanly into the cat­egor­ies that I have defined for myself.

Visual Sup­port Mater­i­als
I like to express myself visu­ally. Often this is more effect­ive and comes more nat­ur­ally to me than try­ing to express myself through words. Here are few examples of some of the mater­i­als that I have cre­ated over time to illus­trate con­cepts, ideas or rep­res­ent quant­it­at­ive data.