Entries by Jaan Pill

Built form and storytelling

Below is an outline of topics for a brief talk at Centennial College, July 27, 2012 for Professor Patrick Michalak’s class. The title for the talk is from an essay with the same title from What we see: Advancing the observations of Jane Jacobs (2010), available on loan from the Toronto Public Library. I much […]

Myth, ritual and the oral (2010)

Update: A Feb. 21, 2014 New Yorker article is entitled: “Why is academic writing so academic?” [End of update]   In Myth, ritual and the oral (2010), Jack Goody discusses fiction and non-fiction, the role of narrative in oral and lecto-oral societies, and the history of novels and the theatre. In lecto-oral cultures, one finds […]

Building Stories is an online system designed to inventory historic buildings, structures, and sites across Canada

Building Stories is a system is designed to inventory historic buildings, structures, and sites across Canada. Related resources include the Heritage Resources Centre at the University of Waterloo. A blog at the Heritage Resources Centre features regular updates. News release highlights smartphone applications A news release provides an overview of the project. University of Waterloo website highlights […]

The evidence doesn’t back up the Military Revolution thesis: Jeremy Black (2011)

Museums have a relationship to history, a relationship that’s been explored in some depth. In Theorizing Museums (1996), there’s a reference to Timothy Mitchell’s observation that in nineteenth-century Europe, the museum exhibit was constructed as a simulation of external reality, with a clear sense of separation between the reality and the representation. A European museum-goer […]

Natalie Zemon Davis is acclaimed for her pioneering approach to previously unexamined aspects of social history

Natalie Zemon Davis has recently been named a Companion of the Order of Canada in recognition of her “distinguished contributions to the field of history, notably her pioneering approach to previously unexamined aspects of social history.” Among her books are Trickster travels: a sixteenth-century Muslim between worlds, Women on the margins: Three seventeenth-century lives, and […]