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“Editing As Activism”: Fighting Bias and Misinformation On Wikipedia

This post reflects on a Wikipedia lecture and workshop that took place at McGill University. Before this lecture, It had never occurred to me that Wikipedia was a powerful source of information. My education had conditioned me to dismiss Wikipedia as unreliable, and assume that it had no real effect on public knowledge. However, globally…

Home Movie Preservation: Westmount Public Library

What is a Home Movie? Home movies are amateur films that capture private moments that are not available on commercially produced films. This type of film making usually concerns itself with aspects of family life, such as family reunions, personal vacations, celebrity sightings, and community events. In recent years, amateur film and film making have…

Digital Archive Project: Declassified BW Report June 1945

As I have previously mentioned, I am currently researching, analyzing, and annotating documents for ALPHA Education’s Digital Archive Project as a volunteer. For this project, I was asked to discuss the content and broader historical context of each document.  Annotations are also expected to connect documents to APLHA Education’s mission, which is to foster awareness of Asia’s…

“Place Names Are Powerful”: Counter-Mapping Indigenous Spaces & Place Names

Colonialism & Erasure Walking around the streets of Toronto, it is difficult to see traces of its long Indigenous history. As a direct result of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing and naming place were replaced with European knowledge systems. While Indigenous place names convey local knowledge about physical landscapes and their histories as a means for navigation, colonial place…

More Than Just A Meme: How To Make Animated GIFs

I came across a tweet by The Archivist that displays a time lapse GIF made from layered historical photographs of Fairmont Hotel in Vancouver. I found it very  interesting to watch as GIFs are typically used as memes to provide humour. However, as “flip books of the Internet,” GIFs can, and have, functioned beyond memes to illustrate tutorial…

“Internet History Is Fragile”: Archiving and Preserving The Web

“Once it’s on the internet, it’s there forever.” That is the popular sentiment. But what happens when web data has been altered or deleted, how do we access the original data? Recently, there was public outcry in response to the removal of several pages from the official White House website by the Trump administration. Pages on…

Annotating History: ALPHA Education’s Digital Archive Project

I recently started volunteering for an educational non-governmental organization (NGO) called ALPHA Education. ALPHA Education works to promote awareness of the events of World War II in Asia to foster reconciliation, dialogue, and cross-cultural understanding. In part, this is achieved through providing educational resources and lesson guides that can be used by teachers and students. To add to…

Rethinking Social Media Use As Personal Archiving

I came across an article that made me rethink Facebook as merely a platform for sharing and searching information. Published by Cornell University, The Many Faces of Facebook: Experiencing Social Media as Performance, Exhibition, and Personal Archive argues that people experience Facebook through performing and reflecting on their life experiences and identity. It was found that users curating…

Describing The Archive: Multicultural History Society Of Ontario

I am currently volunteering for the Multicultural History Society of Ontario (MHSO) as an archival assistant. The MHSO archives is currently going through their collection to create in depth archival descriptions to provide researchers with a broader selection of keywords when searching for areas of interest. As a volunteer, I was asked to asist in the…

Crowdsourcing History: Smithsonian Transcription Center

Increasingly, historical documents and resources are being digitized, making massive amounts of data available online. In turn, this historical data has become an important source for public historians and researchers looking to uncover historical narratives and voices. Crowdsourcing labour is an important means for public historians and institutions to effectively produce access to historical data online. Crowdsourcing,…

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