If you take a walk along Wellington Street in Ottawa, you might have seen this charming-looking old building.
Photo by Lori Oshefski (2012) via British Home Children in Canada.
The plaque outside the building shares a short history of the broader Home Children program in Canada, but little about this home in particular.
Photo by Lori Oshefski (2012) via British Home Children in Canada.
Similar to the plaque, there are few sources that provide information specific to the Home Children in Ottawa. Even though there is little information on the Home Children in Ottawa, and only a few names on the gravestone in Notre-Dame cemetery, hundreds of children were placed at the home.
Accessible local history is an important starting point for people to understand the larger systems at play.
This project presents a printable zine that guides the reader through a walking tour of locations across Ottawa significant to the Home Children program of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Download a printable PDF of the zine to take the tour or share with friends.
Let’s talk sustainability!
An issue we encountered while doing research for this project was the availability and the archival methods of sources. Institutional databases suffered from source scarcity and poor search engines, and public history sources suffered from overabundance and poor archival methods like dead links and unclear attributions.
The logistic issues that arise with archiving digital materials are discussed in “Lost in the Infinite Archive: The Promise and Pitfalls of Web Archives” and “Negotiating sustainability: Building digital humanities projects that last.” Those issues apply to our project too:
- our project relies on two different web platforms to maintain its existence: Issuu and WordPress
- our project relies on all the linked pages (to sources and suggested readings) to remain active
Not only does this complicate the long-term preservation of the project, but it also shows how wide of an environmental impact such a small project can have.
In “Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence,” Kate Crawford addresses the environmental and social dimensions of AI and digital technology. She reminds us that even in artistic or humanist endeavors (like our zine), there are still inseparable social and environmental aspects.
Learn more about what we discovered during the research process for this zine, or check out our sources subpage in the menu bar for suggested reading.