Steven High

‘When I was your age’: Bearing Witness in Holocaust Education in Montreal

If Holocaust survivor testimony has been the subject of enormous public attention, the educational activism of these survivors has been largely overlooked. Recorded interviews, like public testimonies, have tended to focus on their wartime experiences and specifically the violence they endured. Consequently, little time has been spent exploring their postwar lives and the central role that many have played in Holocaust education. Taking survivors’ work seriously allows us to view testimony from a different angle. The reasons they bear witness and how their stories touch and inform those who listen to them become just as significant as what is said. Les témoignages des survivants de l’Holocauste ont reçu une énorme attention publique, mais on a largement ignoré leur l’activismeéducationnel. Les entretiens enregistrés avec eux, comme leurs témoignages publics, ont eu tendance à porter sur leurs expériences des années de guerre et, plus précisément, sur la violence qu’ils ont subie. Par conséquent, on s’est peu soucié de leur vie après la guerre et du rôle central que plusieurs d’entre eux ont joué pour nous éduquer au sujet de l’Holocauste. Prendre le travail des survivants au sérieux, nous permet de voir les témoignages sous un autre angle. Les raisons pour lesquelles ces gens témoignent et les manières dont leurs récits touchent et informent ceux qui les écoutent deviennent tout aussi importantes que ce qu’ils disent.

Beyond Aesthetics: Visibility and Invisibility in the Aftermath of Deindustrialization

This special issue on “Crumbling Cultures,” the first to appear on deindustrialization in a labor history journal, confirms the historiographical trend away from displaced industrial workers themselves and the cultural meaning of job loss, to a wider reflection on the cultural consequences and representations of deindustrialization. The subject, here, is the cultural agency or resilience of working-class communities broadly defined. This shifting focus reflects the evolving baseline, as the political heat of the 1980s and 1990s cools and rates of unionization plummet. For the most part, the sense of cultural continuity, or working class persistence, so evident in this issue, is found in places where not much has filled the economic and cultural vacuum. As a result, nobody in this issue speaks to the deindustrialization of large metropolitan cities. There, the actions of the state, and middle-class gentrifiers, are weighed and measured as old mills and factories are demolished or converted into condominiums or art spaces. In effect, deindustrialization and the subsequent postindustrial transformation deliver a one-two punch against working-class neighbourhoods and the old culture of industrialism. The resulting break with the industrial past may therefore be greatest where the outward signs of industrial ruination are least visible. The rise of middle-class ruin-gazing within popular culture and the academy, and the global circulation and commodification of these images and experiences, nonetheless raises important questions about its underlying politics. As historian Jackie Clarke has noted elsewhere, what is rendered visible and invisible in a post-industrial era is highly significant.

CKM: A shared visual analytical tool for large-scale analysis of audio-video interviews

Our access to human rights violation data has increased with the growing number and size of data collections. We have been combining text-mining and visualization techniques to facilitate big data analysis in human rights research. Taking a user-centered approach, we first surveyed the human rights research literature to understand reported data analysis practices in the field, and then taking a participatory design approach working with oral history researchers to develop a visual analytical tool that facilitates the analysis of collections of audio-video interviews oral history research projects. In this paper we present our current prototype - Clock-based Keyphrase Map (CKM). CKM utilizes Keyphrase technique to identify important topics in the collection and a clock-based visualization to present them in a temporal order. CKM also enables the users to further analyze the collections and share their analysis process with other researchers. We discuss the tool in details including its architecture, the computational and visualization techniques, and the interaction features. Our future plan on evaluation and further development are also discussed in the paper.

The Deindustrialisation of Our Senses: Residual and Dominant Soundscapes in Montreal’s Point Saint-Charles District

The sounds that we hear, or remember, contribute to the construction of a sense of place and of self. Historians dealing with the auditory world of the past have already established the historicity of sounds by exploring their meanings in the everyday lives of the people. This chapter explores the changing soundscape and the resulting sound politics in a largely deindustrialised and now gentrifying Montreal neighbourhood. In many ways, Point Saint-Charles is ground-zero in Canadian debates around urban poverty, renewal, job loss, community activism and gentrification. For our interviewees, the sounds of the still passing trains are a treasured vestige of the industrial past that once enveloped the neighbourhood. For others, the trains make unwanted and unhealthy noise that detract from the quality of life of residents today.

Partners in Conversation: Ethics and the Emergent Practice of Oral History Performance

From Wiki Leaks, whistleblowers, documentary exposes, and personal testimonies, to reality television, consumer databases, and social media, we are all increasingly caught up in a ‘confessional mode’ where going public is the rule more than the exception. The confessional mode appears in academic writing across the humanities, social sciences, and fine arts, marking a shift towards self-reflexivity, personal scholarship, and auto-ethnography. For growing numbers of us, Facebook, Linked-in, and FaceTime encourage us to connect, network, post, blog, text, and tweet even the most intimate details of our personal lives. Meanwhile, this information — about our ‘likes,’ personal consumption habits, and moment-to-moment movement — is ‘mined’ and sold from databases linked to our social media, our cell phones, and our bank cards.

Labour Landmarks in New Brunswick / Lieux historiques ouvriers au Nouveau Brunswick (review)

protest over time is reasonable, especially if one places his conclusion in the context of the older literature on bc’s labour history, which ably examined the origins and evolution of the region’s ‘rebels, reformers, and revolutionaries.’ Yet in its specifics, his position is less compelling. In this history of ‘left formations,’ Isitt is not interested in evaluating the choices made among the ‘other lefts’ but with detailing the concepts and tactics through which they understood the world. Sharp sectarian pronouncements are thus muted, an approach with some obvious merits, but so too is causality: all expression of left dissent is afforded equal treatment, leaving often vague the relative contribution of each club, faction, grouping, or ‘party with no members’ to the rise of the New Left and election of the ndp (188). No one group seems more influential than another. The book’s vast research base, resolutely institutional focus, and penchant for metaphorical language – the ‘militant minority’ ‘sustained,’ ‘kindled,’ and ‘nurtured’ an ‘oppositional’ ‘culture,’ ‘flame,’ ‘seed,’ or ‘current’ – only reinforces this ambiguity. My sense is that this busy and passionately argued ‘horizontal’ history might have benefitted from some patient, descriptive, vertical analysis; indeed, had the author included a chapter or two on a specific strike, union, or person, the weighting of each group’s role and thus the causal links between generations of dissidents would have been much clearer – links that are vital to the author’s overall argument about the continuity of left protest during the postwar era and the success of the ndp in 1972. andrew parnaby, Cape Breton University