Projects
Vertov: Annotate Media Files
Vertov is a free media annotating plugin for Zotero, an innovative, easy-to-use, and infinitely extendable research tool. Vertov allows you to cut video and audio files into clips, annotate the clips, and integrate your annotations with other research sources and notes stored in Zotero. Vertov is a free, open source Firefox 2.0 extension/Zotero plugin written in Java and JavaScript. The Vertov issue tracker allows anonymous browsing of tickets, changesets, and source code. If you are interested in contributing to this project, please post on the zotero-dev mailing list.
S.A. Rochlin Collection of South African Political and Trade Union Organizations
This online archive catalogues rare records of South African communist and labour organizations from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, including 471 original documents, 90 pamphlets, and the issues from 46 periodicals and newspapers. The database is searchable by author, title, organization name, resource type, and keyword. The Collection is currently being digitized at Concordia's Vanier Library. Eighty-nine items can now be downloaded as PDFs; more will become available in 2008.
Remembering Acadie
This site provides a journey through the memory of Acadians, the French-speakers of Atlantic Canada. In 2004, they celebrated the 400th anniversary of the first effort to create a French settlement in North America, in what was to become their part of the world. A year later, in 2005, they marked the 250th anniversary of their deportation, what they call their Grand dérangement (or Great Upheaval), at the hands of the British. This site provides both images and sounds connected with these two anniversaries, including reference to how they were marked on earlier occasions. Along the way, attention is paid not only to how Acadians marked these anniversaries, but also English-speakers who ended up inhabiting the sites of the earliest Acadian settlements and First Nations People, who befriended both the French settlers in the early seventeenth century and Acadians at the time of the deportation. This site is designed to to accompany the book Remembering and Forgetting in Acadie: A Historian's Journey through Public Memory, written by Ronald Rudin and published by University of Toronto Press. It also touches on issues that are addressed in the documentary film Life After Île Ste-Croix, produced by Ronald Rudin, directed by Leo Aristimuño, and distributed by the National Film Board of Canada.
Consistory Court Database
A database featuring testimony offered in the main church court of the diocese of London. The London Consistory court had wide jurisdiction over issues touching sacraments or "sin," understood broadly--Londoners with disputes concerning marriage, defamation, sexual offences, debt, testamentary disputes, and other matters brought their suits to this court. The testimony entered in the court's records offers invaluable evidence for our understanding of many aspects of late medieval history, including marriage, sexuality, law, urban life, labour, credit, material culture, concepts of honour and reputation, literacy, the workings of the ecclesiastical court system, and religious beliefs and practice. This online resource is projected over the next several years to present all the surviving medieval records of litigation in this court (about 1100 depositions and examinations altogether), both in transcription of the original Latin of the documents and in modern English translation.
The Guantanamobile Project
The Project informs and collects public opinion about the U.S. detention of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This site serves as an information database about these detentions and includes video interviews discussing Guantanamo and its global implications. The interviews were mostly filmed in the year following the 2004 Supreme Court decision on Rasul v Bush, as project members toured the South and Midwest in a mobile media van.
Making Research Open Source
This project, funded by an SSHRC Image, Text, Sound and Technology grant, will create plugins to enhance Zotero, a new open source research tool (http://www.zotero.org), produced at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Participants will build utilities for collaborative video/audio analysis, biographical research, visualization tools, and interface that will make Zotero compatible with Canadian and Quebec citation styles and online archival collections. Project participants hope that this software will ultimately create new communities around documents, collections, and disciplines, in effect, make humanities research open source.
