"A Nice Tasty Cottage"

Horaceville. Hal Miller for the Ottawa Journal, May 31, 1941,
Taken from the Pinhey's Point Foundation website

For those who do not know, our first project for our digital history class is a digital landscape project which requires us to choose an area or a building and demonstrate how it changed over time using the digital tools of our choice. For my project, I have chosen Horaceville at Pinhey's Point in Ottawa. The site is part of the City of Ottawa Museum Network and is located at 270 Pinhey’s Point Road, Dunrobin, Ontario.

This house was built by Hamnett Kirkes Pinhey, an English immigrant who arrived in 1820. He was one of the first settlers in March Township. He designed his Georgian style stone manor to be an imposing figure on the Ottawa River riverbank, but it was only in 1849 that the house was completed.

The first part of the house was a two storey log cabin covered in clapboard.This is where the Pinhey family settled. When the Earl of Dalhousie came to visit in 1821, he referred to this house as a "nice tasty cottage with veranda".

Soon after the visit, Hamnett built a large stone attachment onto his wood house. Completed in 1822, this was primarily a ballroom/parlour on the first floor and bedrooms or servant's quarters on the second floor.

Sketch of Horaceville by Marry Anne Pinhey ca. 1830

The next two additions were not added until the 1840s. The central part of the house was added in 1841 and includes the hall, complete with grand staircase, the dining room, a second kitchen and a master bedroom. The house was finally completed in 1849 with the addition of a drawing room and a study on the first floor and bedrooms on the second floor.

Upon his death, Hamnett left the house to his children and it remained in the family until the death of the last occupant, Ruth Pinhey (Hammett's great-granddaughter), in 1971. Ruth had been living there alone for the latter part of her life and when she passed, the house went to her nephew who sold it to the Township of March.

Because of the declining fortunes of the family, the house had fallen into disrepair and eventually the original wooden section of the house was dismantled.The remainder of the house had major restoration work done during the' 80s and '90s and the property is now maintained by the City of Ottawa.

Ruins of the original kitchen

I intend to bring the former glory of this house back to life by making a 3D model of it in Sketchup. Using floorplans and pictures, I will attempt to recreate all the stages of construction and the building's interior and exterior as faithfully as possible. To showcase my work, I will make a video tour of the house which chronicles the different stages of construction and deterioration.

My first step is to familiarize myself with Sketchup. Afterwards, I will make a preliminary model based on floor plans of the house. I will continue to model each stage of the building of the house so that they can be seen separately from the whole. When the 3D modeling is complete, I will attempt to furnish the interior and add colour and texture to the house to make it more realistic and visually interesting. When this is done, I will shoot a video tour of the inside and outside of the house and of the different stages of construction and then edit it to make a short movie.

Pinhey's Point Spring 2013

The results of this project are geared towards museum visitors and anyone who is interested in the site. I intend to upload the video to YouTube so that everyone can have access to it and I hope to publish the 3D reconstruction of the modern house on Google earth for people to enjoy.








Works consulted:
Pinhey's Point Foundation website, http://www.pinheyspoint.ca/

An Interactive Digital World

This morning as I was getting ready for the day ahead, I was listening to the CBC Radio show Fresh Air with Mary Ito. One interview in particular caught my attention. Mary was talking with director Katerina Cizek who has just received an Emmy award for her documentary series "A Short History of the Highrise". I love documentaries in general, but this one was particularly intriguing because it is an interactive documentary. I had never heard of such a thing though it did not surprise me since other traditional media such as books and cards are making their way into the interactive world of digital.

In the interview, Katerina Cizek talked about how the content was presented like a children's pop-up book. This is definitely the feeling I got when I checked it out. The documentary which presents 2,500 years of history of the highrise has many features that brought me back to my childhood, but it also has elements my popup books could never do. The images are brought to life with animation and some of the extra content is presented as a game or with a tab that you have to pull to make the text appear.

The narration is in prose and often uses familiar language, a strange combination to my mind but a highly effective one. The prose gently guides you through the subject matter and the language is accessible to most, but perhaps less to an older demographic.

The extra content is the interesting feature of this documentary. In each subsection of the documentary, you have the option to investigate more content. Pictures, audio from specialists, mini games and interactives bring the subject matter to life.

The pictures are interesting because you can click to see the back of them which contains information about the image, locations, dates and history, as well as accession numbers and collection information. It is a nice way to present this information because it does not detract from the picture by being placed right next to it. You also have the option to view the information or not.

Some of the backs are also the actual reverse of the picture so you can see any information that it contains. This information would often not be digitized at all and if it were, it would not appear in a documentary film. Many of the pictures are from the Times' photography archive and they appear with all the original marks on them and the accession numbers. It gives a real sense that these are real pictures and it connects the audience with the archives and the process of research which is often lacking in other documentaries.

The choice to present this documentary as a short is also highly effective. It takes into account the short attention spans of digital users and does not overwhelm the viewer with information. It is also well structures as each topic is divided into a different part in the series which makes it is easy to understand and follow.

I was highly impressed with this documentary. It gives a good overview of the subject while providing more depth than a normal short documentary might provide. The concept of interactive documentaries is intriguing. It gives the viewer more power over what they are watching and transforms the passive experience of watching a documentary into an active and engaging process. I hope to see more in this medium in the future and I think the museum would be a great place to apply it.

Is Good Enough?

We often hear the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but this is exactly what we do (if we didn't, we wouldn't need a saying to remind us not to). And though it is great to open a book and take a look inside, if we did this for every book in the library we’d never get our essays written.

This week, there was no cover to judge as I read a couple of blog posts by Dan Cohen. “Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values” talked about how open access is important for scholarly discourse but, despite the ease of publishing openly, scholars often still prefer to publish in well-read and well-regarded journals. This is natural; they (we) seek recognition.

However, it becomes contradictory when said journal does not allow open, online access to its content. In this instance, the author is actually damning himself to obscurity. The published article may reach a number of scholars, but it will not be widely available or easy to find.

One point Dan Cohen made struck home with me. He says that “Writing is writing and good is good.” I agree entirely. Quality is intrinsic and cannot be bought. However, our ability to recognize quality is often hindered.

This reminded me of an experiment conducted by the Washington Post in 2007 (find “Pearls Before Breakfast” here). You should watch the video before you read on.


If you watched all the way to the end, you noticed the one woman standing and watching the violinist. She alone recognized Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed violinists in the world. Bell is used to playing to packed houses at respectable venues all over the world, but for this experiment, he played in a Washington subway station to about 1,000 commuters on their way to work. The goal of the experiment was to see if people would recognize the beauty of the music and stop to listen or to tip. Few did. They were all too caught up in their commute to spare the time and effort for music.[1]

This experiment demonstrates that although something might be the best in the world, we might not recognize it as such because we are lazy creatures. We have many demands on our time and attention and we often do not open our minds to content that requires too much thought. Unfortunate but true.

If we want to appeal to a wider audience, we have to make the package attractive. For scholars, it is important to publish in a recognized journal but there is no reason not to publish in one with an online version. If you only blog your research, it is less likely to get you recognition because it has not gone through the vetting process of peer-reviewed publishing. This important step gives legitimacy to an author’s work and tells the reader that the contents are worth a look. Dan Cohen examines this idea in his post “The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing.”

To summarize thus far, the content is very important but the package is what will draw people in to take a look. We can apply this concept to museums.

The museum itself lends legitimacy and authority to its content, but if that content is not presented in an appealing way, it will not resonate as deeply, or at all, with the audience. I raise this concern because I have seen many exhibits, online and offline, that present artifacts and history in a bland, unengaging, or amateurish way. If we want people to come visit our museums and heritage sites, we have to hook them with interesting and varied activities, engaging exhibits and tours, and good promotional material.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the ROM

Here is a picture of the dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto that I took a couple of years ago, shortly after they finished their renovations. When I arrived in this area, I was entirely unimpressed because it was literally bare bones. I seem to remember that this exhibit was much more interesting when I was a kid, but this may be a fabricated memory (more on that in a later post). On the other hand, the new dinosaur exhibit at the Nature Museum in Ottawa was much more striking. It had life-sized replicas of what dinosaurs might have looked like and interactive elements you could engage with, such as a parasaurolophus call station. If I had to choose, I would go back to the Nature Museum before I would go back to the ROM.

Dinosaur Exhibit at the Nature Museum sourced from tripadvisor.ca

Unfortunately, money is often lacking in heritage these days, especially for small heritage sites. This means that we have to be creative. Digital tools are one way to promote heritage and they are often free to set up and use. Twitter and Facebook are easily accessible to a wide public and websites and blogs can serve to inform and entertain. The downside to them is that they require knowledge and effort to set up and maintain.

If our heritage sites are to stay relevant, we must seek out new visitors and hook them into coming back again and again. I leave it up to current and future heritage workers to figure out how to do this.

What to do with Digital Tools?

Welcome! As part of my digital history class, I am blogging about various questions presented in class. This week's topic: How do I see digital tools and approaches affecting my current and future practice of (public) history?

Well, digital tools are becoming more and more an integral part of our daily lives. I don't know about you, but I can no longer leave the house without at least my phone and either my tablet or my laptop. And if I do leave without them, I feel completely disconnected from the world around me. Even the New York police service is getting onto Twitter!

Public history too is becoming part of this trend. It must if we want to remain relevant. But before we embark of that, we must know what we are talking about. What is Public History?

When I tell people I am doing a masters in Public History I often receive blank stares. The inevitable question soon follows: "So WHAT is public history?" Patiently I answer, "it's the study of how the public interacts with history." Knowing that this is not a clear enough for most people, I promptly add, "like through museums, archives, websites, documentaries, etc." Although I lament the fact that most people have no concept of what I'm studying, I myself was ignorant of this branch of history until a few years ago.

By chance, as I was looking for a summer job, I noticed a posting on a museum website. One of the requirements for the job was a Master’s degree in public history or similar. Since I knew that I one day wanted to work in a museum full time I thought to myself: "Aha! I shall have to get one of those!" And so began my exposure to the field of public history. Of course, public history had been a part of my life long before this rather dull epiphany. It began the same way I imagine it begins for most people, with a visit to a local museum.

So how do digital tools affect Public History? Since the digital world is fusing to every part of our lives, this includes history. New tools are being developed every day to help us interact more easily with history. Where would we be without Wikipedia? How would we procrastinate effectively if we did not have Horrible Histories or Crash Course History available on YouTube? And what of Clash of the Titans or 300? What would those movies be if their creators had not so thoroughly researched the myths and history they based them on? Probably the same as they are now. Bad examples.

As for me, I see myself using digital tools to promote the museums I work for to a wider audience. This can be done through Facebook, Twitter, or blog and, as technology evolves, I'm sure new ways we cannot even fathom now will also become available. So I’ll take this opportunity to present one of the museums in the Ottawa area to you. This is Billings Estate.



It is the ancestral home of the Billings family. The house was completed in 1829 by Braddish Billings, one of the first settlers in the Ottawa area. I could go on and on about the history of the house, the family, and the area, but I will stop here for now. The museum often promotes its events and activities on Facebook and I had the opportunity to contribute a picture to one such post about an upcoming event at the Estate.

Post by Billings Estate National Historic Site.

The city of Ottawa also has digital exhibits about its museums on its website. This is another way that we can expand the museum world into the digital world. Unfortunately, the digital world cannot offer direct human contact. I have found that the best way to engage people in history, especially in a museum setting, is to interact with them in person. Digital exhibits can be very engaging but inevitably you will not learn as much from them as you would from a museum employee.

I believe that museums must become part of the digital world but that the digital world in turn has to become a part of the museum. In this way we can ensure that human contact is still a part of the museum experience but at the same time present historical information in a more efficient and engaging way.

There are many ways to do this currently. Often the exhibits themselves have multimedia aspects to them which can be an engaging element. Sound and multimedia can be very effective ways of getting the public to interact with the exhibit on a new level. One of the most novel integrations of technology into exhibits that I have seen was at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. They integrated an Xbox Kinect into their exhibit called Creatures of Light. An image was projected onto the floor and would change to follow the people walking upon it. It was very entertaining.

I would like to go a step further by integrating personal smart devices into the museum exhibit. I am often frustrated by the lack of information available about artefacts, especially in large museums where there is no staff to answer questions. It would be nice if you could scan a code or take a picture of the item with your smart device to get more information about it. This way, you would not be overwhelmed by information and you could investigate only those artefacts that interested you. It would be possible to do now but would require a lot of labour to get it set up and the number of people who might use it is uncertain. In any event, that is how I see digital tools affecting my practice of Public History. As new technologies emerge, I hope I will be a part of integrating them into the museum experience.