{"id":9416,"date":"2014-02-11T16:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T21:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carleton.ca\/history\/?p=9416"},"modified":"2024-07-03T19:54:31","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T23:54:31","slug":"history-students-create-living-archive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/2014\/history-students-create-living-archive\/","title":{"rendered":"History Students Create a Living Archive"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n History Students Create a Living Archive\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\"Kathryn
Kathryn Boschmann is a first year master’s student in history participating in the project. (Chris Roussakis Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A group of 17 杏吧原创 history students are gearing up to document the memories of local residents who grew up in neighbourhoods near the university.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Led by history professor John Walsh, students will be conducting \u201clife course interviews\u201d focusing on the childhood, youth and early adulthood of the participants, ideally people who grew up in the Glebe or Old Ottawa South, between 1945 and 1990.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with the interviews, the students will be collecting visual culture such as photographs and asking the subjects to draw maps of their neighbourhood from memory, including places they remember being important to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things that\u2019s been interesting to us already in talking to people during the pre-interviews, is where they think their neighbourhoods are. It\u2019s not as simple as what\u2019s on a map,\u201d says Walsh. \u201cThose senses of place have their own sense of boundaries and edges.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the research is collected, the students will use it for a variety of projects, with one student already planning to collaborate with songwriters on a musical endeavor. The research will then be organized into a digital database that will be archived, curated and built upon by future public history students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to conduct interviews for papers that will just sit around and collect dust,\u201d explains Walsh. \u201cWe want these things to have a real life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kathryn Boschmann, a graduate student working on the project, says that oral history is important because it gives a voice to people who may not always be represented in traditional approaches to research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOral history has introduced all sorts of really interesting challenges to history, in terms of memory and how memory plays a role,\u201d she says. \u201cI love it because it gets to everyday people\u2019s stories. There\u2019s something so fascinating about how people think about the past and how they tell their stories, and how those stories are so important to people and relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the ideas Boschmann might explore during her research is how children go from place to place in their neighbourhoods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re talking a lot about mobility as a child \u2013 how you get from one place to another, whether you can run down a street and knock on your friend\u2019s door to go and play, where you go without your parents, biking, and that sort of thing,\u201d says Boschmann. \u201cThat\u2019s getting to be really interesting to me and will also play into when we\u2019re doing the maps with them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Walsh hopes the experience will open up new ways of approaching research and thinking about the past to his students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne of the things I\u2019m hoping students will take away is the possibility for historical work that doesn\u2019t just involve sitting and looking at text or even looking at images,\u201d he says. \u201cIt also involves talking to people and working with what we call \u2018living archives,\u2019 that is, with people very much in our own present.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou hope a course like this shows them the possibilities for their own storytelling, for their own senses of place and where they\u2019re from, and to tell how important those stories and memories are,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students will begin work on their projects in March, and they will become available online at the end of the school year in April.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Story by Kayla Wemp, for 杏吧原创 Now, 杏吧原创’s monthly community newsletter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A group of 17 杏吧原创 history students are gearing up to document the memories of local residents who grew up in neighbourhoods near the university. Led by history professor John Walsh, students will be conducting \u201clife course interviews\u201d focusing on the childhood, youth and early adulthood of the participants, ideally people who grew up in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9420,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9416","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9416"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12656,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9416\/revisions\/12656"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}