Active History
History Matters
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Latest posts
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Will Québec ever answer the ‘Immigrant Question’?
By Theodore Aretakis In the recent 2026 Québec elections, one topic once again captured the electorate’s attention: immigration. The Parti Québecois (PQ), which formed a minority government, presented twelve points on immigration during their campaign, notably setting permanent…
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Teaching Colonial Histories in Canada Through Relationship and Responsibility
As the teaching of history in Canadian universities seeks to incorporate decolonization, anti-racism, and truth-telling, the work of how to realize these commitments in practice remains emergent. As a Nuu-chah-nulth and a White settler co-teaching team, we delivered a 12-week…
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Choosing to Stay
This post is an introduction to the series Tomorrow’s Historians: A Reflection on the Graduate Student Experience By Katie Carson and Tiffany Chénier In a pervasive climate of anti-intellectualism and cuts to humanities programs, the decision to pursue a degree in history is an…
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On the Useless History Degree
By Sarah Kittilsen As a tour guide, I answer a lot of questions. Some are related to the tour itself, but many are not. Guests ask about my life just as much as, if not more than, they ask about the history of Montreal. I wasn’t surprised, then, when a woman turned toward me one…
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Returning to Woodside: Changing Perspectives on a Historic House
Shannon Stettner Exterior of Woodside National Historic Site. Photograph by the author, December 2025. Last December I visited Woodside National Historic Site, the boyhood home of Canada’s tenth Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King (WLMK). It was my first visit to the…
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Citation Needed: Anti-Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Rhetoric from the Standing Committee on Science and Research
The report section defending EDI measures ably illustrated how “EDI is a condition for research excellence.” Notably, the witnesses and briefs (if not the committee report itself) pointed to research that demonstrates the importance of diversity in health sciences and increased…
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Alberta, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down
By Annabelle Penney I did not expect to cry on the way home from the Calgary airport. It had been over a year since my last homecoming, and recently I’d wondered if ‘home’ still fit Alberta. I’d forged newfound allegiances to Quebec, a province embroiled in its own separatist…
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Not Just Farming: How an LLM Helped Me Study Saskatchewan’s Smallest Settlements
Each of these datasets was built to answer a narrower question, by people who never expected their work to end up joined to others. Building a settlement typology out of them is where an LLM came in. I did not use it to generate the findings, but it facilitated my work in…
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Can You Read Two Million Pages? An LLM Can Help.
In my MA thesis, I built one example of how GraphRAG can work for historians. From 20,000 early modern documents, I constructed a knowledge graph of 218,000 entities and 692,000 relationships, then tested eight retrieval systems on thirty historical questions of escalating…
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Stop Choosing Tools. Start Building Them.
Part of the reason those systems created these kinds of errors was that they were not created for historical research. However, looking at these errors from a historian’s lens allowed me to create a better solution for history. Additionally, I noticed that those systems had a…
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The AI-Enabled Boom in Document Transcription
The outputs of many OCR technologies were developed for training LLMs, but that are frequently of little use in the humanities. They can be used by people with specific data mining and data science purposes, like researchers doing Named Entity Recognition. But these are still…