Are you ready to explore the cutting-edge world of generative AI and its transformative impact on research? Are you curious? Confused? Join us for an exciting public lecture titled “Beyond Chatbots: Deploying Generative AI to Conduct Research at Scale” by historian, Professor Mark Humphries from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Imagine a world where large-scale research projects in the social sciences and humanities are not only possible but also efficient and affordable. Historian Mark Humphries will take you on a journey beyond the familiar chatbots like ChatGPT, showcasing custom-built AI tools that can transcribe handwriting, generate finding aids, extract and collate data, and analyze hundreds of pages of documents in mere seconds. While acknowledging the technology’s limitations, Humphries will highlight the incredible opportunities it presents for researchers.

Mark Humphries, a Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, has an impressive track record of publications on military history and the fur trade in Canada. A programming enthusiast since childhood, Mark has been leveraging machine learning and digital methods for nearly two decades. Recently, he has been at the forefront of developing open-source software tools that are revolutionizing research in major American and European archives. To delve deeper into the intersection of AI and historical research, check out his free Substack, Generative History, at generativehistory.substack.com.

Event Details:

Date: Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Time: 1:30pm to 3:00pm

Location: JOR-1410

We look forward to seeing you there!

Earlier this year, I spoke at a Walrus Talks event in Toronto about the history of opposition to oil pipeline development in Canada. It was part of an event focused on ideas of nature and conservation in Canada. Each speaker had seven minutes so I decided to pick three stories about how different groups of people in Canada across different times and geographies expressed their opposition or concerns about oil pipeline construction.

The main point of my brief presentation was to show that different groups of Canadians have opposed oil pipelines since the mid-twentieth century, but the environmental politics was different in the past and shaped by the identities of those involved, the spaces in which they lived, and how they made use of land and resources.

The full presentation is available in the video above. Enjoy!

Feature Image: Transcanada Pipeline Completion, 1958. R169-1120-8-E, Volume number: 626. Library and Archives Canada.

This was an excellent opportunity to learn more about OER projects at TMU and to explore some of the challenges that universities face with the development of their own OERs. We had a lengthy discussion about the motivations for developing open publications, the technologies used, and the ways that universities can promote this work.

The panel included:

• Cynthia Holmes, Associate Dean, Faculty and Academic, Ted Rogers School of Management
• Megan Omstead, Graduate Program Coordinator, School of Nutrition
• Nadia Prendergast, Assistant Professor, Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing

Links to OERs discussed on the panel:

• Omstead, Megan. Preparation for Dietetic Practice: Clinical Nutrition Modules
• Kheraj, Sean and Thomas Peace. Open History Seminar: Canadian History
• Prendergast, Nadia. An Introduction to Anti-Racism for the Nursing Professional: A Focus on Anti-Black Racism

This presentation was given at Concordia University in the Department of History on April 1, 2022. This is part of my ongoing research on the environmental and social consequences of the construction and operation of long-distance oil pipelines in Canada from the mid-twentieth century to the 1990s. To learn more about this research project, visit https://niche-canada.org/silentrivers/.

Featured Image: Construction of the Trans Mountain pipeline through Jasper National Park, 1952–3. Source: IP-2e-2-8, Glenbow Archives.

The Attorney General of Alberta’s train was late for the hearing being held at the Union Station Building in Ottawa on a mild spring day in early June 1949. “Do you know when that train is likely to be here?” asked Justice Maynard B. Archibald, Chief Commissioner of the Board of Transport Commissioners for Canada.[1] The commission took a short ten-minute recess to await the arrival of Alberta’s 42-year old Attorney General, Joseph Lucien Paul Maynard. Less than one month earlier, the recently chartered Interprovincial Pipe Line Company filed an application to build an oil pipeline from Edmonton to Regina. Maynard was on his way to Ottawa to represent the province in a regulatory hearing that would approve the construction of Canada’s first post-war long-distance oil pipeline.[2] This was the first hearing for a long-distance oil pipeline following the passage of the Pipelines Act (1949), Canada’s new federal statute governing the regulation of oil pipelines that cross interprovincial and international borders.

Part of my research project on the history of oil pipeline development in Canada is concerned with how governments regulated pipelines, interacted with corporations, and considered citizen participation. Pipeline hearings are useful moments for studying these interactions because they are a forum for a nexus of interests where regulators, corporations, and private citizens present evidence and arguments in an effort to shape the development of energy infrastructure. They can be sites of conflict as differing interests clash over questions of economic development, safety, environmental protection, property rights, Indigenous rights, and more. But, was this always the case? What issues did early pipeline hearings address? In what ways did environmental concerns influence early pipeline hearings? Who was represented?

The image above is a photograph that I took at Library and Archives Canada of the cover of a volume of hearing transcripts. It is a large, heavy document that contains thousands of pages of questions and answers from commissioners and witnesses at hearings before the Board of Transport Commissioners for Canada, a quasi judicial body that was once responsible for the regulation of interprovincial and international oil pipelines. They are an imperfect account of some of the interests involved in debates over energy infrastructure in mid-twentieth-century Canada. Not many researchers appear to have looked at these records. This particular volume seems never to have been called from storage in the archives.

As I have been reviewing the transcripts for the earliest federal regulatory hearings concerning oil pipelines, it’s clear that these hearings were not always forums for citizen participation and the issues that did emerge did not necessarily include the same type of concerns about safety, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights that we might expect to hear today. But while the pipeline politics of today might not be recognizable in these mid-century hearings, they had their own politics nonetheless. The parties represented included familiar faces: corporate executives, corporate lawyers, government representatives, government lawyers, engineers. But they did not initially include private citizens or groups. In fact, these were the only people who appeared before the Board of Transport Commissioners at the first regulatory hearing for a long-distance oil pipeline:

• H.E.B. Coyne, counsel for Government of Canada
• R. Kerr, assistant counsel for Government of Canada
• D.G. Kilburn, director of engineering, Board of Transport Commissioners
• J.W. Hamilton, counsel for Interprovincial Pipe Line Company
• R.B. Burgess, counsel for Interprovincial Pipe Line Company
• Oliver B. Hopkins, Vice President and Director, Interprovincial Pipe Line Company
• James Armstrong, project engineer, Interprovincial Pipe Line Company
• Hon. Lucien Maynard, Government of Alberta
• D.K. MacTavish, Government of Alberta
• Cuthbert Scott, Canadian Pacific Railway and Northern Alberta Railways
• C.H.B. Hands, McColl-Frontenac Oil Company
• Fred G. Smith, Department of Public Works

The entire hearing lasted just one day with a session in the morning and a second session in the afternoon. The questioning of witnesses focused on a handful of key issues. Commissioners were primarily concerned with questions about the financing of the pipeline and its economic viability, but other issues did emerge, including broader discussion of the economics of oil production and future plans for growth and expansion.

“The fundamental objective of the pipe line is to obtain a wider market for the crude production of Alberta,” Oliver B. Hopkins, first vice president of the Interprovincial Pipe Line Company, told the Board of Transport Commissioners at the hearing. [3] This was the central matter at hand and the driving force behind the initial development of what would become one of the largest oil pipeline systems in the world. To realize the full value of Imperial Oil’s discoveries in Alberta, a pipeline would first need to be built to bring that oil to prospective markets.

The only discussion of potential environmental impacts associated with the pipeline came from Fred G. Smith from the Department of Public Works who attended the hearing as an observer to determine whether the Navigable Waters Protection Act would have any bearing on the matter of the Interprovincial pipeline project. He noted that the pipeline would cross a great number of streams and rivers along the proposed route and that “in wishing to put pipe lines underneath any of those streams must of course make application to the Department [of Public Works] for permission so to do.” [4] The commissioners left the question of navigable waters to the Department of Public Works and considered no further matters pertaining to environmental protection or public safety.

The limited extent to which the planning of the pipeline route took into consideration local interests was emphasized by James Armstrong, project engineer, who told the Board that the method of choosing the route of the line was as follows:

We eventually ended up with a route shown on this map through aerial studies and also actual expeditions by car. We drew this route out on a fairly large scale map, and had aerial photographs taken from which we got our aerial survey. From these mosaics that are produced by these aerial photographs we laid out the line missing everything that we could, that would interfere with the installation of the pipe line. From there, from the mosaics, we make the tracings that are given to the land survey parties, and they in turn follow the route shown on these tracings, and make any deviations and record any deviations from the line shown on the tracings for such things as ditches, houses that we could not see from our aerial survey maps. From there, after the ground survey has been completed, our maps are then revised to show and record what the survey party, what route the survey party chose. And then these maps are registered with the Lands and Titles offices of both the provinces we are considering here. [5]

His testimony was a vivid description of what we might call the synoptic view of high modernist projects. The route was literally determined by a view from the sky above.

What stands out about the pipeline politics found in these records from 1949 is the complete absence of opposition. Commissioners had critical questions about the financial viability of the line, the role it would play in the development of the oil sector in Western Canada, and the relationship between Interprovincial and its parent corporation, Imperial Oil. But at no point did any commissioner or third-party witness express opposition to the construction of the pipeline. No person or group gave testimony or evidence against the proposal to build an oil pipeline from Edmonton to Regina. Opposition or resistance to oil pipeline development certainly existed at the time. It just didn’t find expression in formal regulatory hearings… yet.

Featured Image: Union Station Building, Ottawa, 1932. Source: Library and Archives Canada, a056590-v8.

[1] Board of Transport Commissioners, Transcripts, 7 June 1949, p. 5504, RG 46, Vol. 416, part 821. Library and Archives Canada.

[2] “Interprovincial Pipe Line Company” Edmonton Journal, 12 May 1949, 29.

[3] Board of Transport Commissioners, Transcripts, 7 June 1949, p. 5508.

[4] Ibid, 5555.

[5] Ibid, 5545-5546.

For the last five months or so I’ve been working from home. And like many of us, that work involves a lot of Zoom video meetings. Some days, I’m in Zoom meetings from 8:30am to 5:30pm.

Recently, I started to polish my appearance in Zoom by adding some graphics. I created an animated lower third banner with my name, title, and Twitter handle. It works well for giving presentations on Zoom and makes my video look a little more professional.

A few people asked me about how I made this so I decided to make a quick video guide:

Good luck with making your own animated lower third. I hope this helps add some polish to your own Zoom meetings.

Resources

Canva: https://www.canva.com/

OBS Studio: https://obsproject.com/

OBS Virtual Cam: https://obsproject.com/forum/resource…

Music: Modern Ukulele Background (2019) MEMORYMUSIC http://jamen.do/t/1713269

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust many university and college course instructors into the world of online teaching in relatively short order. Thousands of courses have had to make a rapid switch to online teaching and this coming summer the entire curriculum at my university will be offered online. Many course directors are looking for ways to deliver course lectures to students.

There is a lot of advice out there about online teaching and lecturing. Take some time to consider that advice and think about whether full 1-hour or 2-hour lectures make sense in an online format. Many online instructors find that short 10-15-minute videos work better than longer videos. Students are more likely to watch a handful of short videos than lengthy videos.

The first challenge, however, is sorting out the technical side of how to record lectures for online teaching. There are a lot of great tools out there for capturing lectures for online teaching. This article outlines three free tools for recording lectures.

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS)

Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is one of the most popular screencasting applications used by many game streamers on Twitch and YouTube. In addition to being an excellent tool for screencasting, it’s also open source and free. You can also use it to record a local copy of a PowerPoint presentation with a smaller picture-in-picture box of the presenter, if you want.

This video below shows me giving a presentation about screencasting software and teaching using OBS and demonstrating how it works:

Google Slides with Audio

Google Slides is a free tool for creating presentations. It includes a feature to insert audio into a slide. Users can record mp3 files using a free service like Online Voice Recorder and add those audio files to a Google Slides presentation. The presentation can then be shared with students and even directly embedded into a Learning Management System, just like a video:

Zoom

With a free Zoom account, course instructors can easily record lectures with a shared presentation. Zoom can be used as a screencasting tool.

To do this, an instructor simply needs to host a meeting alone with no participants, share their screen with a presentation, and select “Record.” This will save a local copy that can be uploaded to any video sharing service for students to watch. I was even able to do this from a Chromebook using the Zoom Android app:

There are many more options for capturing lectures for online teaching out there. Share in the comments what tools you are using.

The hazards of this work were plenty. The small Cesna-180 planes violently bounced like a bucking bronco in the turbulent air. One pilot took to wearing a crash helmet to protect his head from hitting the roof of the cockpit. Migratory birds could crash through the windshield. Adverse weather could easily bring down such small planes.

In the mid-twentieth century, Interprovincial Pipe Line Company (now Enbridge, Inc.) hired dozens of veteran bush pilots to fly small planes along the right-of-way for its enormous oil pipeline system. By 1959, the Interprovincial pipeline spanned thousands of kilometres from Edmonton to Toronto crossing fields, forests, muskeg, and rivers. It even crossed the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac in Michigan. And since the pipeline opened in 1950, it suffered leaks and spills. The first known spill was reported in November 1950 in Minnesota. [2] Aerial patrols were a key component of the company’s monitoring practices to find and remedy oil spills.

Pilots described oil pipeline spills as “the blackest of black” or a “living black” they could see from the skies. Occasionally, they would land for closer inspection. When they spotted large spills, they radioed the nearest pump station to alert operators to close the line and begin the recovery and clean-up process.

For nearly 70 years, pipeline companies have had to confront the persistent hazard of onshore oil spills. To begin to understand this complicated history, I’ve published a new open-access article in Canadian Historical Review that offers the first quantitative analysis of historical oil spills on Canada’s system of long-distance pipelines. Using incident reports that cover a period from 1961 to 1996, the article makes the following arguments:

1. Oil spills have always been a frequent hazard associated with the development and operation of oil pipelines in Canada.
2. Oil pipeline spills are an endemic characteristic of complex enviro-technical systems built primarily for economic efficiency rather than environmental protection.
3. Though frequent, oil pipeline spills have been a proportionally small fraction of the total oil delivered on Canada’s long-distance pipelines, but, in absolute terms, this has meant the uncontrolled release of many millions of litres of oil into the environment.

Between 1961 and 1996, pipeline companies reported 560 oil spill incidents to federal regulators.

Download and Read a Free Copy Here

This new research, I hope, will provide necessary context for understanding the legacies of oil pipeline development and some of the environmental consequences of Canada’s transition to a high-energy hydrocarbon economy in the second half of the twentieth century. For more information on this research project, visit “Silent Rivers of Oil: A History of Oil Pipelines in Canada Since 1947.”

[1] “Canada’s Pipeline Pilots Face Hazardous Conditions” Calgary Herald Magazine, 10 October 1959, 1.

[2] “New Oil Pipe Line Has Small Break” Edmonton Journal, 29 November 1950, 6, section 2.

You’re sitting uncomfortably in the audience at a conference waiting for the presenter to begin. They’ve finally loaded up their PowerPoint file from an old USB flash drive and all that’s left is to set it into presentation mode. They click around aimlessly on the screen trying button after button to no avail. Inside your head you’re shouting, “F5! F5! For the love of god, F5!”

This blog post is for you.*

10. CTRL+shift+e: Toggle Track Changes in Microsoft Word

Whether you’re editing the work of students, colleagues, or your own writing, Microsoft Word’s Track Changes feature is a long-time function used by many historians. Did you know you can easily turn it on and off with this simple keyboard shortcut?

9. CTRL+f: Find on page

Handy for nearly any application with text, this keyboard shortcut can help you find that passage you were looking for and even assist in catching plagiarism!

8. CTRL+tab/CTRL+shift+tab: Cycle back and forth among tabs in a browser

Are you the kind of person with dozens of tabs open in your web browser at any given time? Use this nifty combo of keys to dance back and forth through your tabs with ease. Impress your friends with your tabbing dexterity as you quickly switch from writing an email to checking the New York Times to ordering a new book on Amazon.

7. CTRL+t: Open new tab

Again, you tab maniacs will love this shortcut. Pop out new tabs faster than ever with this one. And if you accidentally close a favourite tab, just hit CTRL+shift+t to re-open it right away.

6. CTRL+b/i/u: bold/italics/underline

If you’re the type of person who needs to get your point across with emphasis, try these shortcuts out. They are the holy trinity of text formatting!

5. CTRL+z: Undo

Oopsie! We all make mistakes, but with some deft keystrokes we can magically undo it all. Nothing lasts forever.

4. CTRL+a: Select all

All together now! Whether it’s text, a list of files, or than jumble on junk scattered across your desktop, this keyboard shortcut is an oldie but a goodie. Scoop up everything in one quick command and do as you please.

3. CTRL+c/v: Copy and paste

The dynamic duo of copy and paste are friends to every historian. Whether we are rearranging some paragraphs in a manuscript or pulling a quote into a lecture, these two trusty pals have had our collective backs for decades.

2. Alt+tab: Switch to previous application

Alt+tab is mana from heaven for the multi-tasker. Have you ever wanted to show a YouTube video during a class while you’re in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation? Swap back and forth with one-handed ease and grace.

1. F5: PowerPoint presentation mode

If you take nothing else from this cheeky post, please take this. Launch your presentations calmly without breaking a sweat as god intended. Dazzle your colleagues and nail that next conference presentation with this one simple shortcut. Using Adobe Reader instead? No worries. It’s CTRL+L.

The truth is, however you use your computer to get your work done is just fine, whether you use keyboard shortcuts or not. Given how much of our work happens with keyboards and screens, I hope you find one or two new tricks with this list.

There are dozens and dozens of keyboard shortcuts that historians use everyday. Some are specific to certain operating systems. Some are specific to certain applications. I’d love to read about your favourite keyboard shortcuts and learn a trick or two. Post them in the comments below.

*For MacOS users, you can substitute CTRL for CMD in most cases.

Canada is home to what was once the largest oil pipeline system in the world, the Interprovincial. Built by a subsidiary of Imperial Oil called the Interprovincial Pipe Line Company (now known as Enbridge Inc.), this pipeline system has been part of the backbone of Canada’s oil infrastructure since the mid-twentieth century.

Today the system consists of multiple lines that span thousands of kilometres across parts of Canada and the United States from Edmonton in the west to Montreal in the east, passing through the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, and the US states of North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York. How did this come to be?

Next week at the World Congress for Environmental History, I’ll attempt to answer this question and explain how this private company came to construct and operate such an enormous and critical piece of energy infrastructure. The history of the Interprovincial pipeline system is an important to understanding Canada’s so-called, “Great Acceleration,” a period after the Second World War when humanity’s influence of Earth ecosystems intensified, particularly via the mass consumption of high-energy fossil fuels. It was the prologue to the Anthropocene.

To help understand the growth and development of this oil pipeline system, I’ve started to create some GIS visualizations in ArcGIS Story Maps.

The use of mapping and data visualization helps capture some of the scale of this growth and situate it historically. The development of this energy infrastructure correlates with the massive scaling up of energy consumption in Canada as the country moved toward dependence on high-energy fossil fuels (oil and natural gas).

Several historical factors explain how the Interprovincial became the world’s largest oil pipeline system:

1. Economic nationalism and the advent of Canada’s second oil boom.
2. Incrementalism or “step-wise construction.”
3. A nascent environmental movement.
4. Under-developed environmental regulations.

I’ll obviously go into more detail on these four points in my presentation on Monday, July 22 at 2pm. The key takeaways from this kind of historical study are what it might tell us about how large-scale energy systems are developed and how this past development may inform contemporary energy infrastructure debates.

This work is part of “Silent Rivers of Oil: A History of Oil Pipelines in Canada since 1947,” my new research project. Over the past few years, I worked on a couple of smaller case study projects related to the history of oil pipeline spills in Canada and I’m now starting a larger project that will examine the broader history of the social and environmental consequences of the development, operation, and regulation of long-distance oil pipelines in Canada since 1947.

Readers can learn more and follow this project on my new research project page at:

http://niche-canada.org/silentrivers/

This website will collect all of the publications, research data, and other aspects of this project. It includes a working bibliography of relevant secondary scholarship, data visualizations from some of the statistical research, and blog updates about different aspects of the project. I hope readers will continue to follow this work as it proceeds.