Evidence of meeting #14 for Canadian Heritage in the 40th Parliament, 3rd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was content.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Dr. Steven High Canada Research Chair in Public History, Department of History, Concondia University, As an Individual
Thank you very much for the invitation to be here today.
I'll open with an apology. My glasses broke in half about five minutes ago, so I will have to read fairly closely to my paper in order to actually see it.
My presentation builds on two of the points raised in your terms of reference....
No, those glasses don't help. If anyone else has glasses....
Canada Research Chair in Public History, Department of History, Concondia University, As an Individual
I had those glasses for ten years anyways.
I want to address two of the points raised in your terms of reference--namely, skills development and access. More specifically, I want to provide you with my perspective on how the digital revolution is transforming how we understand, represent, and interpret the past.
New media allows us to explore places in new ways. Digital technologies are even reshaping, I think, the ways in which people remember and share their own life stories. A sense of place or collective identity, be it Canadian, regional, or what have you, would be impossible without memory.
I base my comments on how the digital revolution is changing oral history practice at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, a state-of-the-art research centre that is second to none in the world. The oral history centre has been the source of a great deal of digital innovation since its creation in 2006, including the development of new software tools, such as “Stories Matter”, an open-source database software that is the first viable alternative to the transcription of oral history interviews.
I also want to share with you our experience with new media in a project called “Histoires de Vie Montréal”, or “Montreal Life Stories”, a five-year research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
The community-university research alliance program is a special one in that communities are supposed to become partners in research and not just objects of study. Community participation in the research process must therefore be real and sustained.
Our project is recording the life stories of 500 Montréalais who fled war, genocide, or other human rights violations mainly in Rwanda, Cambodia, Haiti, Hitler's Europe, and, sadly, elsewhere. As you can imagine, these are very difficult stories to tell, and they are very hard stories to hear.
From our vantage point in Canada, it is easy to assume that Rwanda in 1994 has nothing to do with us. It was another time, another place. Yet there are thousands of survivors living here today. Their stories have become part of our collective story now.
Oral history has the power to close distance, I think, to make history personal, and, in making it personal, to make people care. It also has the power to complicate taken-for-granted notions such as “us” or “them”, “here” or “there”. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Quebec's Bouchard-Taylor commission into reasonable accommodation recommended life stories as a way to bridge some of the social divides that exist not only in Quebec but elsewhere in Canada.
At this point, you may be asking yourselves the “So what?” question. What does any of this have to do with your deliberations on emerging and digital media?
In response, I would say that we have an incredible opportunity to deploy new digital technologies and new media practices to reconnect Canadians with their past. Oral and public history, or histoire appliquée, as it's known in Quebec, emerged in the 1970s in response to growing public interest in heritage and memory. It represents a shift not only in the intended audience but also in the research process itself. We often work in partnership with communities. We communicate our findings in a variety of ways, both textual and non-textual.
Today there are tens of thousands of oral history interviews sitting in boxes on archival shelves across Canada. Thousands more are being added by large projects that are recording the life stories of World War II veterans, Holocaust survivors, immigrant communities, and, of course, aboriginal residential school survivors. The truth and reconciliation commission is thinking of doing 60,000 impact statements.
With the death of Canada's last World War I veteran, it has become impossible for younger Canadians to hear first-hand Canadian stories of courage and sacrifice from that war. Very soon, we will no longer be able to hear first-hand stories about the Great Depression or World War II, either.
For decades, Canadian veterans have been going into schools, around Remembrance Day especially, telling their stories to young people. Survivors have likewise been at the core of Holocaust education in Canada for at least 30 years. Week after week they have gone into classrooms, telling their horrific stories to young people, to educate them, to make the world a better place.
Oral history is very good at making this kind of emotional connection. History is about far more than dates and statistics. It's about real people. Ordinary people live extraordinary lives.
But what happens when the last veteran or survivor is no longer able to do this important work? Who will keep these connections alive? Recorded interviews provide part of the answer, yet collection is not enough. Again, there are tens of thousands of recorded interviews sitting in archival drawers, computer hard-drives, or on library book shelves that have never been listened to. Their emotional power has been largely untapped. Worse still, most of these stories were recorded using now obsolete technologies.
A first step would be to digitize existing interviews to make certain that future generations will be able to listen to those who experienced Canada's twentieth century first-hand. This is a huge job, but one that needs to be done soon or the history will be lost forever. A few of these interviews have been transcribed, but these do a poor job as well in communicating, again, the emotional impact of these stories. This is where emergent and digital technologies are opening up new opportunities to access Canadian memories and to transmit them to young people in schools and outside of them.
To explain what I mean about the potential of oral history and new media, I would like to turn once again to the Montreal Life Stories project. We are spending a great deal of time working with the interview recordings of survivors of mass violence. Survivor testimony is being incorporated into radio programming, documentary film, theatre performances, art installations, exhibitions, and online platforms. We are mapping the Quebec secondary school curriculum and developing teaching modules to get these stories into classrooms. We believe that oral history can be a catalyst for public dialogue.
Not surprisingly, new media has been central to the work that we do. I would like to give you three examples. To access thousands of hours of audio or video recordings directly and easily, we have developed Stories Matter software. This open-source software, paid for by the Canadian taxpayer, enables interviews to be searched, sorted, browsed, accessed and the meanings mapped in large collections or in single interviews. We can now follow threads across interviews, making connections. The next phase in our Stories Matter development will enable researchers and larger publics to map these stories across space using a Google Map-type technology.
Our second strategy is digital storytelling. Digital storytelling has recently been described as the emerging “signature pedagogy” for the humanities and social sciences. A digital story is a three- to five-minute multi-media presentation online, using a combination of audio, video, and still images. These are often highly emotive stories.
From the outset, the Montreal Life Stories project has enjoyed a formal relationship with the National Film Board's online participatory websites called “CitizenShift” and “Parole citoyenne”. Here, the process of creating the digital story is critically important.
There's a lot of talk today, and I listened to a couple of the podcasts, about content. I think process is really crucial, in terms of whose content this is. We could simply take stories out of the interviews unilaterally, for example, and produce digital stories that speak to us. But I think it is far more interesting to work with interviewees in the selection of the clips themselves. After the interview--we have interviewed survivors for five, ten, fifteen, twenty hours of recorded interview--we ask them, “What story would you like to tell the world? You have five or ten minutes. What are you going to say?” This question forms the starting point of the digital story-making process.
I'd like to encourage you again to consider how this content is generated. I always come back to these questions: from whom, by whom, for whom? The question of who is driving the process is vitally important. Is the public's role that of a consumer only, or can we envision a more substantial role where communities are more integrally involved in future directions in emergent and digital media?
Having targeted programs for digital projects that include community participation is something I strongly believe in. Projects that build community capacity to undertake digital projects--in disadvantaged areas, for example--would go a long way in pushing forward digital literacy skills. In the paper today there was an article about a study on the digital divide.
Our third strategy relates to “memoryscapes” and audio tours. Once confined to museums, audio tours have left the building and taken to the streets with the emergence of MP3 players, iPods, and smart phones. These mobile technologies have opened up new opportunities for researchers and communities to tell stories. Places are not simply points on a map, but exist in time as well.
A project that exemplifies the enormous potential of mobile technologies and new media is the Centre d'histoire de Montréal, the city museum of Montreal. They are planning a 2011 exhibition called “Quartiers disparus”, which will examine four working-class districts demolished in the 1960s to make way for Montreal's Ville Marie and Bonaventure expressways, as well as the Radio-Canada complex and the Habitations Jeanne-Mance housing project. Using its innovative “memory clinic” methodology, the Centre d'histoire de Montréal has organized group interviews with former residents, using old insurance maps and expropriation photos to prompt memories. This will be followed by walking interviews, where people walk through the present day, what's there now, alongside the expressway or what have you, again to generate stories.
In addition to the exhibition itself, a series of self-guided audio tours are planned. We are using Mscape software and GPS technology to immerse visitors in these former neighbourhoods. So you can imagine, you're walking through a space and audio files are being triggered by where you are walking and time-coded files are also triggered. Again, this tension between past and present is politically quite interesting.
One could imagine connecting interview recordings like this with war memorials, for example, where a class would visit a war memorial wearing Walkmans and hear stories of World War I or World War II veterans--the power, again, to remember.
In conclusion, I would encourage you to break down the universalized public and think about the role communities might play in the development of emergent and digital media. Humanities and social science researchers once had a monopoly over the research process. Communities were treated as little more than new data. A growing emphasis on community-university partnerships, however, has widened the circle considerably, enriching the conversation, and producing what I think is more innovative and humanistic scholarship. New media has contributed enormously to this shift, as it encourages collaboration and citizen engagement.
I want to leave you with a story of the 16th commemoration of the Rwandan genocide. Every April, Montreal's Rwandan community holds its annual walk to the St. Lawrence River when the children in the community throw flowers into the river. There are reasons for that in terms of Rwandan culture and the importance of rivers. They also organize a day of reflection. For nine hours, nearly 100 Rwandan Montrealers watch digital stories produced from, by, and for their own community. After each segment, there is a panel of elders or youth, depending, and then everyone in the audience writes down a memory and pins it onto a timeline. You can imagine a wall with a timeline with dozens and dozens of people's stories pinned onto the wall.
So here's an example of how new media becomes a catalyst for community dialogue, confronting major issues such as the role of the church in the genocide, for example, and the breaking of silence within communities. Cultural industries are far removed from these kinds of grassroots memory projects, so I think it is important that you also consider what is going on at a more local or community level.
The digital revolution enables us to rethink past practice, I think, in important ways. But again, issues of power—from whom, by whom, for whom—are fundamental to any discussion of emergent and digital media.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Thank you.
We do have to finish this part by twenty minutes to one.
Mr. Proulx, go ahead, please, with your presentation.
Pierre Proulx Chief Executive officer, Alliance numérique - Réseau de l'industrie numérique du Québec
Thank you very much.
I would also like to thank you for giving us the privilege of offering our point of view on emerging and digital media, opportunities and challenges.
First of all, the Alliance numérique is the business network for companies developing interactive digital content in Quebec. We have four sections, four alliances, as we call them. They are video games, Internet application services, mobility and e-learning. So we represent a lot of people in all sectors of activity in the digital world. We are perhaps best known for video games because of the fact that Montreal is Canada's video game capital. Of the 14,000 jobs in the area in Canada, Montreal alone has 7,000. This makes us the undisputed centre of the video game industry in Canada. We have also hosted the Montreal International Game Summit for six years. Recently, the Summit has averaged 1,500 people, 40% of whom come from around the world to our two days of meetings.
We are of course involved in commercialization, so we invite companies to join us in various trade missions to places like the United States, Europe and Japan. We literally go to the ends of the earth to help our companies grow.
I will move directly to our recommendations on the three areas that appear to us to be most critical: training, financing and commercialization. You understand that, in the world of digital convergence, borders no longer exist; the market is highly competitive and very global. We always need highly qualified human resources; in recent years, we have seen that they too are highly mobile.
So we feel that three critical elements must be considered in Canada's digital policy: we must ensure the excellence of our workforce; we must secure financing so that original content can be created and so that the excellence of companies already established in Canada can be supported; we must also try to push our leaders to go even further.
Specifically on the workforce, we must, of course, support provincial authorities and invest in programs that are already in place. We must above all make sure that training programs match industry needs. I confess that we are a little behind in this area, which, to a degree, is normal. Let me give you an example: ten years ago, we did not use Flash, it did not even exist. Today, we have Flash in digital content, so education programs have to be able to accommodate it. Often, in education, a lot of time is needed for a program to see the light of day. So we must try to become more involved in the technological issues so that we can respond more quickly.
As well, institutions of higher learning must clearly be provided with cutting edge infrastructures, again so that people in the industry can be better trained.
I would like to talk to you about one obstacle. When we want to bring foreign experts into our Canadian companies, the process must be speeded up. This has been a little difficult in recent years; in some cases, it can lead to projects being abandoned because getting people here takes too long.
We also invite you to consider establishing specific funding for the creation of original content. This fund would be mostly used to support the development of concepts and original productions. This is very important for Canadian companies. We are also suggesting that an investment fund be established for projects of that kind.
We have already indicated that we must continue to support the excellence of our companies. We must also encourage them to diversify and to expand abroad. In recent years, some aspects of commercialization have been removed and problems have resulted. It prevents us from appearing on the international stage more frequently. As we have told you, in our area of activity, the whole world is our market, so we really do have to look internationally. It is important for us to bring all participants together, either nationally, provincially or by establishing “clusters”, centres that already exist in Canada. Everyone's contribution is needed if we really want the industry to make best use of a new digital environment.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gary Schellenberger
Thank you.
Mr. Simms, you have the first question, please.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank both of our witnesses.
Mr. High, I want to start with you. You made some interesting points about the evolution of the technology that we're seeing, especially in regard to mobile technologies.
As an example, we have a group...and I'm from a rural riding. To tell its story beyond its own borders becomes a very challenging thing to do. I come from Newfoundland and Labrador, which in and of itself is a study in cultural differences.
So that particular area has a story to tell to the rest of the country, but it also has a story to tell to itself. A lot of the customs, ways, and traditions that are talked about in other identifiable groups are also lost because everybody is connecting with each other. My son is far more in tune with the social goings-on of Newfoundland than I am, and he lives in Kingston, Ontario. But that's because of Facebook and other things.
What I'm getting at is this. Where should the government stand on promoting this to its own people...or how far do we go with the level of support? Is it through a subsidy by which we engage the private sector to get involved in producing local videos to be uploaded, downloaded, and so on? Or do they do it through their own mechanisms in the department? Should we renew funds where they transfer technology from analog to digital?
I'm being very general, but I just want to gauge how involved the government should be, given the points that you make about the technology.
Canada Research Chair in Public History, Department of History, Concondia University, As an Individual
I guess from my angle, what I'm seeing at my university is an explosion of creativity with old boxes of knowledge. History is a very traditional discipline, very archival, and we were very slow in adapting to new technology and new media.
What we're seeing now is this tremendous creativity, where community history, oral history, new media, and the arts collide. Great things are happening. Of course, this kind of work needs funding. It needs to grow, and sometimes these good ideas become commercial ideas.
In my mind, if you're talking about building capacity or training people on these new technologies and how to access these new technologies, you have to realize that content should not be an afterthought. It's what often drives people to the technology.
I think we need targeted programs that fund grassroots or local projects, but also national ones. I think a multi-approach is needed, as there's no one way. Even with things like server space, if you start talking about video files and so on, you need real server space. Having that kind of infrastructure for Canadians to speak to one another, I think, would be huge.
Liberal
Scott Simms Liberal Bonavista—Gander—Grand Falls—Windsor, NL
There seem to be other countries out there who are far more giving in terms of enabling these new technologies and their culture. We see on TV things produced by the National Film Board and so on and so forth, but are we behind? In other words, are we concentrating too much on the content and not on the platforms as a government to get our message out?
Canada Research Chair in Public History, Department of History, Concondia University, As an Individual
I certainly think that government making a contribution in terms of platforms would be huge, but also in terms of seed money for good ideas. Thinking of it as seed money, I think, would be really important too.
Whether Canada is behind or not, I'm not sure. Certainly in terms of universities' community partnerships in Canada, we're way ahead of other places. Having this space in the academy for community partnership is not always possible in Europe or the United States, but that's a small part of the funding envelope.
Again, I think academics, for example, often get caught up in the production side of things, where we write a book and send it off to the publisher, and we write another book and send it off to the publisher, but we don't spend time thinking about how we can make these books, these outcomes, websites, digital stories, or whatever we're doing, create a conversation. I think we can learn a lot, for example, from socially engaged documentary filmmakers, who have been doing this for a long time.
Conservative
Bloc
Carole Lavallée Bloc Saint-Bruno—Saint-Hubert, QC
Before you proceed, I would like to explain the alarm. The fire alarm went off and people had to leave the House. They are just being called back in. I cannot tell you if it was a real alarm or just a test.
Bloc
Roger Pomerleau Bloc Drummond, QC
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thanks to you both for coming to meet with us today and for providing us with your comments.
My first question is for Mr. High. You deal with young people and I liked what you told us very much. You are suggesting taking traditional history and making it into something totally new. I can understand how interesting that could be. You have given us some examples, like producing historical clips that can be accessed via the Internet or by other means. Daniel Bertolino produced something similar for television. They were clips two, three or four minutes long that were used to fill up time between programs. You also mentioned audio tours. You see something like that when you visit some museums and you could easily conceive of touring around a city with a similar system and a GPS providing specific information. There is a whole extraordinary world to discover. My question is this. Do the young people you are teaching and who are looking to their own futures see the commercial potential in what you are teaching them?
Canada Research Chair in Public History, Department of History, Concondia University, As an Individual
I think so. Part of it is necessity, in the sense of young people finding their niche in the economy and their work lives. But certainly in our community of practice, our community of oral historians, there are people who are producing and going in that direction, in the sense of forming their own companies and so on.
We certainly see the linkage with tourism. There are dangers there, too, of homogenizing people's stories. But absolutely, I think that when people have good ideas, they run with them. When people get excited and motivated, great things happen, whether in terms of entrepreneurship and forming their own companies or their own digital tools. I think it's all an aspect of creativity. It's part of that explosion of creativity that's bursting these old structures that contain us so much still.
Bloc
Roger Pomerleau Bloc Drummond, QC
Yes, we need it. Mr. Proulx, you said that there is a day or a week dedicated to video games in Montreal each year.
Chief Executive officer, Alliance numérique - Réseau de l'industrie numérique du Québec
It is two days, actually.
Bloc
Roger Pomerleau Bloc Drummond, QC
Two days. And, of 1,500 participants, 40% come from overseas. How come I have never heard of it?
Chief Executive officer, Alliance numérique - Réseau de l'industrie numérique du Québec
You are probably not into video games.
Chief Executive officer, Alliance numérique - Réseau de l'industrie numérique du Québec
On the east coast, it is the biggest North American event of its kind. The other is the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. That attracts about 12,000 people annually.
Bloc
Roger Pomerleau Bloc Drummond, QC
Not quite the same level, then. You are the third person to tell us about your difficulties with immigration when you need qualified people that you cannot recruit here. Could you be more explicit? I have been very involved in immigration and I am aware of the problem, but I would like you to tell us more about it.