José E. Igartua
History Department
Université du Québec à Montréal
Introduction
Say you want to know what is available on the Internet on Canadian history for use in your classroom. You type "Canadian history" in the Google search engine, one of the more "intelligent" search engines, and you get more than 1,100,000 pages. You may want material in French, so you try "histoire Canada." You "only" get 280,000 pages! Of course, you then try to be more specific: you type "Riel Rebellion" and you still get nearly 4,500 pages; "Confederation" produces no less than 215,000 pages, and "Louisbourg" a mere 19,000. You are also looking for something in French on New France, so you type in "Nouvelle-France" and restrict the search to French-language pages: you get a paltry 25,000 pages. You are not getting anywhere this way. You need help. "Who are you gonna call?"
The Canadian History Portal (http://www.canadianhistory.ca or http://www.histoireducanada.ca) will help you find appropriate material on the Web for use in your classroom. It offers something you cannot find anywhere else: thoughtful, thorough descriptions and assessments of Web sites in Canadian history, written by history specialists and edited by prominent professional historians. The sites are classified according to chronological period, region, type of producer, and of course by theme. So you try your queries there: out of the over 700 sites currently (early September 2001) described in the Portal database, you get only 8 "hits" when you type "Riel rebellion", but each site reference comes with a summary description and assessment, keywords under which the site is indexed, and a hyperlink to the site itself. You can then see at a glance whether the site contains the sort of material for which you are looking. Similarly, you get 11 hits on "Confederation," 2 on Louisbourg, 32 on "New France" and 9 references to French-language sites on "Nouvelle-France". You soon appreciate how much of a blessing it is to retrieve less than 50 "hits" when you do a query!
Why a Canadian History Portal?
The Canadian History Portal is a joint project of the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) and Chinook Multimedia Inc., an Edmonton-based producer of digital material in Canadian history that is owned by two professional historians. It came about out of the concern that as more and more material on Canadian history appeared on the Web, it would become increasingly difficult to find and evaluate. While useful for very specific searches, automated indexing mechanisms, such as Google and others, are useless for broad, abstract themes and fail to discard the "chaff." One such automated list, for instance, includes the electronic phone book "Canada 411" as a Web site on Canadian history! The CHA and Chinook simultaneously came to the conclusion that only a team of subject specialists could properly describe and assess Web resources on Canadian history, much as libraries have their cataloguing done by professional librarians trained in specific subject areas.
More broadly, both the CHA and Chinook Multimedia wanted to overcome the Web's main weakness - the fact that anyone can "publish" anything on the Web, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the thoughtful to the hate-mongering or the pornographic. We also wanted to take advantage of the tremendous potential digital technology offers for learning Canadian history in a concrete, visual, and interactive manner. Some of this promise was illustrated at the January 1999 McGill University conference on history teaching, "Giving the Past a Future." It was at this conference that members of the CHA Council met with the principals of Chinook Multimedia and agreed that a joint project would make best use of each group's strength: the CHA could marshal professional historians across Canada to work on the project, while Chinook Multimedia offered the scholarly, technical, and administrative expertise required to carry it out. Building a Canadian History Portal seemed an appropriate project for the coming Millennium celebrations, and in May 1999, an application was made to the Millennium Bureau of Canada for a financial contribution. A favourable response was obtained in October 1999 and the funds became available in April 2000. The Portal was officially launched at the annual meeting of the Canadian Historical Association in May 2001.
The Canadian History Portal's main component is the Web site database, accessible through the 'Search' button. The database was very carefully designed to provide a number of access points convenient both to the specialist and to the neophyte: by theme, by type of producer, by producer, by period, and by geographical area. For each of these fields, a bilingual thesaurus was constructed so that queries in French would retrieve the same material as queries in English. The thesaurus is based on the National Library of Canada's Canadian Subject Headings but is expanded to include more specific keywords than are available in the Canadian Subject Headings, such as "Compagnies franches de la Marine," or abstract analytical concepts, such as "acculturation," that do not appear in the Canadian Subject Headings.
Lists of Web sites to be described were compiled (with the best sites receiving priority) and site description and indexing was assigned to the Portal's French- and English-language assistants, all graduate students in history. Their work is reviewed by Chinook staff and by the Portal Editorial Board, made up of more than a dozen prominent Canadian history professionals (historians, archivists, education specialists). CHA members work with Chinook to translate the annotations from one language to the other. The result is a reliable, authoritative, and systematic series of Web site assessments that you can use with confidence.
Other components of the project
The Canadian History Portal also includes other sections, some of which are still in the development stage for financial reasons. To demonstrate the power of Web technology, Chinook is including in the portal the five narrative history timelines from their CD-ROM publication, Canada: Confederation to the Present. You scroll through the timeline with your mouse and click on a particular event to get a thumbnail description. Or you can select a particular decade for viewing. The women's history timeline is already available in English with others (Regional Dynamics, Politics/Economy, Society/Culture, Native history) to follow in the coming weeks. Eventually, all timelines will be translated to French.
The History Resources button leads to examples of history-making using digital resources. The Immigrant Voices section showcases a particularly efficient navigation structure, which always provides the user with context; primary sources illustrate the many themes of Canada's immigration history. The Primary Sources section will show how documents can be viewed and annotated in electronic form to lead the reader directly from the historian's account to the sources used in constructing the account. The Digital Technologies section will familiarize users with crucial issues related to digital media as well as providing tips to improve productivity in using such media. It will include sections on:
Using the Canadian History Portal in the classroom
As resources allow, the Teachers part of the Canadian History Portal will cater specifically to primary and secondary school teachers, offering them a careful selection of Web sites suitable for classroom use, as well as activities and lesson plans that draw on this material. For now, you can for example make use of the women's history timeline and have students locate the women's suffrage movement in time, then have them search the database for "Women." Using the records retrieved by the query, they should identify which sites are likely to contain material on the suffrage movement; this procedure is much more efficient than surfing the Web with search engines and, for the teacher, more reassuring: the search will not fetch extraneous, offensive, or unreliable material. Then, if you like, you can have your students try Google and Copernic (http://www.copernic.com) to compare results ... but in their spare time!
The Canadian History Portal and You
Would you like to help out with the Portal? We are especially interested in contributions to the Teachers section of the Portal. We are looking for qualified volunteers who can help us evaluate sites for age appropriateness as well as curriculum fit in particular provinces. If you have lesson plans, web quests, descriptions of successful Web activities you have used in teaching history/social studies, or other activities or ideas you want to contribute, please contact webmaster@canadianhistory.ca.