Articles by author: mvanatte

  • Reimagining the Historic Welland Canals

    Friday, October 04, 2024 | By

    The Centre for Canadian Studies invites you to attend a guest lecture by Kimberly Monk, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Welland Canals.

    This November, the Niagara Region commemorates the start of construction on the First Welland Canal, which through its successice enlargements, has connected trade and navigation between Lakes Ontario and Erie for almost 200 years. The three historic Welland Canals opened in 1829, 1845 and 1881, transforming the region’s physical and cultural landscape, and laying the foundations for the Fourth Welland Canal, in 1931, and modern Niagara.

    Since 2018, a team of Brock academics, students, and community volunteers have been documenting the canal’s industrial legacy through historical and archaeological investigations. However, increasing urban development, the effects of flooding, and a lack of protection and governance, have placed canal heritage at risk. As we begin bicentennial celebrations, prioritizing a strategic partnership to support the Welland Canal Cultural Heritage Landscape is a crucial step towards securing time-sensitive funding for a conservation management plan and tourism strategy. A multi-level, multi-sector collaboration will ensure the historic canals and associated archaeological sites are preserved for future generations.

    Join us at Brock University (RFP 214), Thursday October 24th 
    6:30-8:30pm

    Categories: Brock University Historical Society, Faculty, Lectures/Symposiums, News, Outreach, Undergraduate

  • History Department Open House!

    Friday, October 04, 2024 | By

    The Department of History is hosting an Open House to welcome students into the department to meet Faculty, peers, learn more about program offerings and to enjoy some lunch together.

    Join us on Thursday, October 10th at 12:00 – 2:00 pm. 

    For more information, e-mail: mvanatte@brocu.ca

    Categories: Brock University Historical Society, News, Outreach, Undergraduate

  • 2022-2023 History Speaker Series

    Friday, October 21, 2022 | By

    The Department of History is hosting a Speaker Series, featuring Professor Mikko Tolonen from the University of Helsinki.

    This talk aims to envision how the use of machine learning and data-driven approaches can become an everyday practice for historians in the not-too-distant future. Drawing from the lessons learned from a decade of collaborative work at an interdisciplinary Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS), the talk will discuss the group’s research strategy and some of their recent studies of the Enlightenment. COMHIS has worked to harmonize and integrate metadata and full text sources, including the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). The talk will introduce the concept of bibliographic data science and use it to examine the representativeness and biases in ECCO. Of the many down-stream use cases, the talk will focus on eighteenth-century reception studies and networks of publishing in the Scottish Enlightenment. The talk will end with a demonstration of the possibilities of using unstructured ECCO data and large language model (BERT) for clustering eighteenth-century subject topics that feeds back to the ESTC metadata creating a virtuous circle in the research use of the available data.

    Mikko Tolonen PhD is Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. His background is in intellectual history, and he is the PI of Helsinki Computational History Group (COMHIS). His main research focus is on an integrated study of public discourse and knowledge production that combines metadata from library catalogues as well as full-text archives of books, newspapers and periodicals in early modern Europe. Tolonen works also in other areas of Enlightenment studies. Currently he is leading two Academy of Finland projects: Rise of Commercial Society and Eighteenth-Century Publishing (RiCEP); and Detection of Historical Discourses with High-Performance Computing (HPC-HD).

    All are Welcome!