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Welcome to the research and teaching wiki of William J Turkel. In my work I draw on, integrate and try to extend a number of different disciplines: environmental and public history, the histories of science and technology, 'big history', STS, computation, and studies of place and social memory. Please e-mail me at william.j.turkel@gmail.com if you have any questions.

In my new research program, I'm exploring ways to build historical interpretations into physical devices and environments. This work is backward looking, in the sense that it engages with the histories of measurement, materials science and machine tools. It is also very present-minded, since I am approaching the project as a form of critical technical practice, building on new developments in ubiquitous / pervasive computing and desktop fabrication. To do this work, I have put together a Lab for Humanistic Fabrication with an associated Fabrication Wiki. This project is supported in part by a SSHRC grant for "The Path to the Self-Replicating Machine."

Interactive, Ambient and Tangible Devices for Knowledge Mobilization (2008-2009). A SSHRC-funded research project.

"Hacking as a Way of Knowing" (2009). I organized a workshop with Edward Jones-Imhotep on the theme of "E-waste and environmental data," held at InterAccess in Toronto in May 2009.

In research for my first monograph, I examined the ways that people reconstruct the past of a place from its material traces. These people — geologists, archaeologists, foresters, and many other specialists — are typically in search of a usable history. When their interests clash, other stakeholders are motivated to provide different accounts of the past. A preliminary article from this project appeared in the June 2006 issue of the journal Rethinking History ("Every Place Is an Archive: Environmental History and the Interpretation of Physical Evidence," Vol 10, no. 2, 259-76.) My book The Archive of Place: Unearthing the Pasts of the Chilcotin Plateau was published by UBC Press in 2007 and the University of Washington in 2008.

The Programming Historian (2007-). With Alan MacEachern and Adam Crymble I am writing a short open-access monograph on Python programming for historians and other humanists. The book is openly accessible on the NiCHE website in the form of a wiki.

Digital History Hacks: Methodology for the Infinite Archive (2005-08). For three years I wrote a research weblog at Blogger.com. My premise was that the web constitutes the largest, most easily-accessible archive that people have ever created, and also the most radically unfamiliar. Material is being added to the web at an exponential rate, but it is of low average quality; it usually has an uncertain provenance and uncertain lifespan. Much of it is created by machines and meant to be ‘understood’ by other machines. Historians and other humanists and social scientists need a new set of computational tools for dealing with the web. About half of the posts in Digital History Hacks were devoted to making the argument for a new historical discipline that is analogous to bioinformatics, and draws on machine learning, computational linguistics, information retrieval and other fields. The rest of the posts were about hacks, short programs that demonstrate the potential of digital history, and were designed to be shared, extended or modified (i.e., hacked) by others. There is an archive of source code and other files for Digital History Hacks on this wiki, although it is still under construction as of 15 June 2009.

Place-based Computing (2004-06). The convergence of handheld computing devices and GPS receivers makes it possible to augment any place with layers of digital information. Place-based computing has the potential to radically change the way that we experience places and understand the past.

The explosion of printed material after the 15th century fundamentally changed scholarship, making it much easier to compare different editions of the same text, making it possible to read extensively as well as intensively, and creating the conditions for widespread literacy. We are currently in the midst of another such transformation, one that will give us nearly instantaneous access to the contents of the world’s great libraries and archives, will radically democratize knowledge production, and will force us to think of machines as part of our audience. Historians in the 21st century will still need to be able to read closely and critically, to weigh evidence and to make nuanced arguments. They will also need some new skills. They need to be able to digitize and digitally archive existing sources; to create useful metadata; to find and interpret sources that were “born digital”; to expose repositories through APIs; to write programs that search, spider, scrape and mine; and to create bots and other computational agents that interact seamlessly with one another and with human analysts.

Digital History Graduate Courses. I teach graduate courses on digital history that emphasize the presentation of history on the web and in interactive systems, the use of computational techniques to work with digital sources, and the construction of tangible interfaces for museum exhibits. The courses draw on new work in social computing, interaction design and open-source DIY/hacking culture. As far as I know, they are unique in Canada, and play a central role in our public history MA program.

• UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009.
  

• UWO History 9832B Interactive Exhibit Design Winter 2010.
  

• UWO History 9808 2008-09. Group project on William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood.
  

• UWO History 513 2007-08. Group project on The Sky.

Undergraduate Course. Rob MacDougall and I teach a course on big / global history from the big bang to human extinction, with an emphasis on math, science, technology, medicine and environment.

• UWO History 1805E

Please see the documentation here