The Concrodia Digital History lab is part of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling in the Department of History at the University of Concordia Montreal.
The current focus of the lab is on the development of the free Zotero browser plugin that facilitates the logging and ascription of metadata- bibliographic informations and user ascribed notes to web sites. Having used Zotero a little I found the application a little lacking in utility given the massive overhead in terms of processing that it added to the browser – firefox is already a rather process laden browser. The more distributed and obviously more limited (in terms of feature set) Del.icio.us combined with Google notes appears to offer a more social, less processor laden, tool for annotating web and web based media. As an active researcher I think that one of the key places web based applications are particularly useful is in this bookmarking and annotation environment where the benefits of the collaborative and generative potential of many eye and ears feeding back in modulation of network space is obviously and immediately apparent.
The Digital History lab hopes to augment this Zotero by providing intramedia metadata ascription (adding metadata to a video or audio timeline and by providing more support for French-Canadian localization (language and bibliographic support).
The other projects of the Digital History Lab are the apparently very performative Guantanamoblie project which seeks to document and communicate the unfolding stories emerging from the US Governments Detention Centre at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. The project seeks to gather information on the knowledge of the US public of events and stories that surround the Dentention centre and its detainees and also to help actively communicate these stories and events by taking them to the public arena- hence the performative aspect.
The Oral History and Digital Storytelling Centre is engaged in a project called ‘Life Stories’ that will collect the stories of Montreal residents displaced by War, Genocide and other human rights violations. There is little to indicate that this is more than an exercise in the collection of oral histories other than the Centre’s interest in Digital Storytelling. It would be interesting to see digital media used as a more dynamic means of acessing, collaboratively annotating and re-presenting these histories and experiences. That the same Centre is working on this interesting -yet-to-be-intersecting- trio of projects is perhaps indicative of a potential not yet communicated on the public site of the Centre.