Projects

2018-19 Projects

YU College History

Have you ever wanted to journey through York University and discover the history behind some of its colleges? This project immerses users in the history of Founders, Vanier, McLaughlin, Winters, and Stong Colleges through the use of virtual reality and in-depth research. YU College History allows users to travel through time and discover the origins and histories of these colleges.

York Unknown: A Digital History Haunted Tour

Did you know that York University’s Keele campus is home to several nineteenth-century heritage buildings? This project takes users on a spooky tour to explore the history of these structures on the edges of campus. Using an augmented reality game and complementary website, York Unknown unearths some of the frightening mysteries that can be found at York University.

2016-17 Projects

The University City

The University City is a virtual-reality based tour of York University’s Keele Campus. Throughout the tour, The University City presents how population and growth converge, affecting how people traveled to, and around, York University. The tour can be experienced through an embedded browser-based version, or through any VR headset by downloading the YouVisit Showcase app available on iTunes and Google Play.

YU Missed the Bus

This is a six-part audio podcast series that follows the experiences of two fictional York University students over the decades of their time on campus from the 1960s to the present. Using archival and secondary source materials, this podcast pieces together different aspects of the experience of getting to and from York University’s Keele campus over the decades.

Other Projects

Development of Toronto: Urban Histories of Toronto and Its Region

This is an ongoing collective group project of HIST 4530 “Development of Toronto,” a course on the local history of Toronto offered by the Department of History at York University. Each year, students conduct original research and develop Web essays. This site collects some of the best essays from that course.

Stories of the Development of Toronto

Listen to original audio tours of historic sites in the Greater Toronto Area. This is also a collaborative group project by students in HIST 4530 “Development of Toronto” at York University. Using IZI.Travel, a Web tool for developing audio tours and guides, students explore different stories about Toronto and its region. These tours can also be found in the IZI.Travel mobile phone app.

Toronto, 1914

Toronto 1914 was a project undertaken by the students in HIST 4570, Canada in War and Peace, 1911-1952 at York University. Historians generally agree that this period was one of transformation in Canadian History, and this assignment was to seek out what the City of Toronto was like before the changes the First and Second World War brought to it, and the nation as a whole.

Examining city life from a multitude of perspectives, Toronto 1914 provides a comprehensive analysis of urban life in Canada prior to the world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. In 1904, Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier announced that “the 20th century will be the century of Canada.” In Toronto 1914, the students of History 4570 examine the city at a time when this lofty statement seemed not only possible, but certain.

Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast

A regular audio podcast about environmental history research in Canada. It is produced at York University with support from the Network in Canadian History and Environment.

Portuguese Toronto: Early Decades

An audio walking tour focused on the history of the Portuguese community in Toronto since the first immigrants started settling in and around Kensington Market in the 1950s, and follows their westward movement along Dundas Street West into “Portugal Village” and “Little Portugal” in the 1970s-80s.

Interracial Intimacies

Interracial Intimacies is a website based on a research project that studied intimate relationships between men of Chinese heritage and women of non-Asian heritage in Toronto between 1910 and 1950.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.

Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America

Mapping Inequality introduces viewer to the records of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation on a scale that is unprecedented. Here you can browse more than 150 interactive maps and thousands of “area descriptions.” These materials afford an extraordinary view of the contours of wealth and racial inequality in Depression-era American cities and insights into discriminatory policies and practices that so profoundly shaped cities that we feel their legacy to this day.

Musical Passage: A Voyage to 1688 Jamaica

Musical Passage tells the story of an important, but little known record of early African diasporic music.

Pembroke Soundscapes

An open-source interactive story of Pembroke’s industrial history.

Deadplay: A Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games

Deadplay is a not only a way to experience dead videogames; it is also a podcast. Throughout the first two episodes, the podcast explores the issues of videogame preservation and proposes possible solutions. This website houses not only the podcast in audio format, but also its script.

NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project

The first initiative to document historic and cultural sites associated with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community in the five boroughs. Sites illustrate the richness of the city’s LGBT history and the community’s influence on America.

Illustrated Vancouver

An online project to document 1,000 works of art depicting Vancouver, British Columbia ~ past, present, and future.

Native Land

A mapping project to explore the geographies and territories of Indigenous peoples.

Vancouver As It Was: A Photo-Historical Journey

A blog of local Vancouver histories.

Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

This 15,000 page reference center is dedicated to providing information to the general public on African American history and on the history of the more than one billion people of African ancestry around the world.

Densho Digital Repository

Hear the story of the Japanese American incarceration experience from those who lived it, and find thousands of historic photographs, documents, newspapers, letters and other primary source materials from immigration to the WWII incarceration and its aftermath.

Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History

The “Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History” project provides engaging, high-quality materials to schools and universities for the teaching of historical methods and Canadian History.

The Living New Deal

The mission of the Living New Deal is three-fold: research, presentation and education. It begins with the historical work of uncovering the immense riches of New Deal public works. That research is then made available to all through digital mapping and a website that serves as a clearinghouse for information on the New Deal.

The Tipping Points Project

The Tippling Points Project aims to help people understand how long-term, global climate changes influence local communities, and in turn their lives, and the lives of their ancestors or descendants. It turns climate change from an abstraction to a tangible force in people’s lives.

The Boys on the Ice

This site tells the harrowing story of seven young Scottish stowaways on a ship bound for Canada.

DiLiLAH: Digital Library of Landscape Architecture History

The Digital Library of Landscape Architecture History (DiLiLAH) is the brainchild of Benjamin George, an assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at Utah State University. DiLiLAH emerged out of a trip to Europe to create virtual tours of important historical sites related to the field of landscape architecture. These virtual tours were used as an important backbone in the on-line offering of the History of Landscape Architecture at Utah State University.

Manitoba Food History Project

The Manitoba Food History Project is a SSHRC-funded oral history project based out of the University of Winnipeg. The goal of the project is to produce a comprehensive history of food manufacturing, production, retailing, and consumption in the province of Manitoba from 1870 to the present day.

Digital History

New Ways to Explore the Past