I recently participated in a discussion focusing on the benefits, nature, and drawbacks of the memoir genre. In the past decade the memoir genre has experienced a huge serge in popularity. This serge has not been entirely smooth, controversies have surrounded many memoirs in recent years. Perhaps, most famously James Frey's A Mission Little Pieces … Continue reading Memoirs and Our Perception of History
Digitization and Holistic Approaches to Data Sets
Over the past two years I have spent a lot of time working with Residential School quarterly return reports. These reports were completed four times a year by School principals and contain the names, admission date, ages and discharge information of the students who were in attendance at the school. The set of returns we … Continue reading Digitization and Holistic Approaches to Data Sets
Battle of Documentation
Documentation provides a written account of procedures, practices, successes, failures, and countless other big and small details. The benefits of documentation include preserving institutional memory, providing new employees with detailed explanations of work tasks, and avoiding personnel from reinventing the wheel. Even with all these wonderful benefits, documentation is often neglected in favour of more 'important' … Continue reading Battle of Documentation