Tuesday, November 27, 2018

A Few Notes on Museum School, Heritage Fair, and the Origins of “K-K-K-Katy”


As the semester is winding to a close, and final projects are consuming almost every waking moment, I thought this was the perfect time to take a step back and write about my work with the London Heritage Council.

It is hard to believe it has been already three months, time has flown by, but it has been a privilege being part of the Heritage Council. I have had the opportunity to be involved in numerous projects, starting with Doors Open in September, which I initially blogged about, and doing preliminary work for Heritage Fair coming up in February.

My main focus, however, has been helping to develop additional resources for the Museum School London program, which is coordinated by the London Heritage Council and facilitated at 10 different museum sites between London and Woodstock. As a teacher and museum educator, I was thrilled with this assignment.  


Museum School has so far taken me to Eldon House, Fanshawe Pioneer Village, the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, and the London Children’s Museum. Next week, I’m heading to observe another lucky group of students at Museum London.

I have been part of hundreds of school programs in my career between Waterloo Region Museum, Joseph Schneider Haus, Wellington County Museum, and the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery. There are some that are so ingrained, I am sure I still do them in my sleep. A typical school program usually lasts for two hours or a full day, morning and afternoon. The school kids fly in and out of the museum so fast that I have always wondered how much they retain from the visit.  With Museum School London, however, the students get a full week in the museum.  The museum becomes their classroom.

From my observations this fall, this unique experience is incredibly enriching for the students. Instructors at the museum can take their time working with the students, who often journal about their daily experiences. Topics can be reflected on and returned to throughout the week, and the learning experience is hands-on and engaging. For many of these students, visiting a museum is something they may not otherwise be able to do. I have had teachers tell me that students who normally do not enjoy class seem to come alive in this program. I can’t wait to continue working with this program in the New Year!

The other work I am doing with the London Heritage Council is preparation for Heritage Fair. This year, Heritage Fair is celebrating the Junos coming to London in March by focusing on London’s musical heritage and stories.  

During my preparatory work for Heritage Fair, I discovered something I think only another Katie would truly appreciate… the origins of the song, “K-K-K-Katy”. If you have the name Katie, you have probably heard this song or had an older relative in your family sing it to you. That is inevitable.

A man named Geoffrey O’Hara from Chatham Ontario wrote the song in 1917 and published it in 1918. He wrote hundreds of songs and patriotic hymns but K-K-K-Katy was his most popular, and it became a hit during the First World War era. His connection to London is that he originally trained to be a soldier with the local 1st Hussars Regiment. He had planned a military career but had to abandon this after the death of his father. The 1st Hussars Museum is located in downtown London at 1 Dundas Street. This will be one of many stories featured at Heritage Fair on February 16th, 2019, downtown at the Central Library.

Original cover by Leo Feist for "K-K-K-Katy" in 1918, with the tagline "The Sensational Stammering Song Success Sung by the Soldiers and Sailors." https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/K-K-K-Katy
My favourite version of the song is without a doubt the hilarious Mel Blanc adaptation from 1949 in the voice of stuttering Porky Pig. With all the stress of final projects, a laugh is necessary. The link is below, enjoy!:




To Blend or to Slide continued….

If you have been wandering around South Street the last couple weeks and seen a lone person taking photographs with her phone, that was probably me.  As I wrote in my blog from November 13th, I have been attempting to create “before and after” contrasts of built heritage in London's SoHo community, using modern photographs compared to their vintage counterparts. I have been focusing entirely on the Victoria Hospital, my focus for the Hear, Here Public History project, as there are truly endless numbers of archival photos and stories surrounding this space in the SoHo community.

An important part of this before and after project is to try, as closely as possible, to take photos similar to the original vintage photographs. This is not an easy task. This project reminds me of my undergraduate studio art courses, attempting but not quite succeeding to create two-point perspective drawings of buildings.

It was also a somewhat disheartening experience wandering the marshy lands where the hospital once stood and looking at the state of the boarded-up buildings still there. A man waiting at the bus stop saw me walking and taking photos, and oddly enough this inspired him to start taking photos of the old buildings as well. It was incredibly disappointing to see a group of children trying to break into the old Nurse's Residence, even though security regularly comes onto the property. The sunlight for photography was perfect, however, and I took many photos of the buildings that (I believed at the time) were in line with archival images.

The Colborne Street building from ca. 1899 is the last standing building from the original Victoria Hospital.
The next step was uploading these images into the software. The past few weeks, I have been learning about and experimenting with comparison slider programs and Processing 3, with mixed success. As I discussed previously, WordPress does have applications such as Image Comparison Slider, which is a Plugin that can be installed directly into your WordPress website or blog. HOWEVER, WordPress requires upgrading your account to ‘Business’  in order to install Plugins… which I discovered costs over $300 for the year, up front… and as a graduate student, this is not financially feasible.

Thankfully I had researched other options as backup! The website I have been experimenting with is called Juxtapose, and it does not require purchasing a Plugin to embed into a blog or website.
You can use Dropbox to insert your photos into Juxtapose. I opened my old Dropbox account, and from there was introduced to a photo editing program called PIXLR.  This program was fantastic, as I was able to edit the two before and after photographs prior to putting them into Juxtapose so they were able to line up successfully.  The “transparency” feature allowed me to layer one photo on top of the other so I could review how closely the two images matched.

Screenshot of Juxtapose, https://juxtapose.knightlab.com/#preview-embed
Screenshot of my edits for the War Memorial Children's Hospital on PIXLR, https://pixlr.com/x/
Unfortunately, as much as you edit the photos, if your camera angle was off from the beginning, the two images simply will not line up correctly. In the below before and after Juxtapose of the old Medical School building located at the corner of South and Waterloo Streets, I was initially thrilled when the photo I took was perfectly timed so that the van driving by matched up with the old car in the 1921 photograph. However, when I placed the photos into Juxtapose, even with editing in PIXLR, the perspective is off. I found it interesting that both photos show the building in a state of construction, but for very different reasons.


The before and after for the War Memorial Children’s Hospital was more successful. While the two images do not line up exactly, they are very close, and the contrast shows the building thriving in 1922 as it was first opening, versus how it appears today, empty with broken and boarded windows:


The bad news is that the majority of the photographs I have taken do not line up with the vintage photographs as well as I would like, which means I will have to go back to the hospital lands and try again. I have a superior camera to use this time compared to my terrible Motorola cellphone, thanks to a classmate (thanks Sean!). I will reattempt to get the perspective angles lined up as closely as possible.
   
Through all of this, I have also been experimenting with Processing 3 which has provided its own set of challenges. The blend feature has so much potential for this project. While Juxtapose works well comparing the buildings that are still intact, blend works better with the built heritage that is now demolished. The ghostly image of the Victoria Hospital appearing and disappearing within the now empty space I think is more effective than a the before and after contrast. I also think the blend feature would work well with photographs of people working and residing in these in these spaces to show the change in use and purpose of the buildings.
The North Wing of the Victoria Hospital on South Street ca. 1941
The empty grass lands where the Victoria Hospital on South Street once stood
Of course, there have been a few hurdles with Processing 3. I was able to use the coding from the "blend example" provided in the program, import my own images, and then insert the coding for these images into the Processing 3 Sketch. This was the first result:
Screenshot of my first attempt at "Blending" in Processing 3 Sketch of the War Memorial Children's Hospital
The image was far too large, and I could not figure out why this was the case. With the help of a classmate (thanks Hetty!), I reduced the size of the initial images, embedded them into the coding a second time, and the result was more successful: 

Screenshot of my resized second attempt at "Blending" in Processing 3 Sketch for the War Memorial Children's Hospital
Unfortunately, while I’ve managed to embed the html for the Juxtapose comparisons successfully into this blog post (although there were some sizing and picture quality issues), I do not know how to do this for a Processing Sketch, which is why these images are uploaded in this blog as screenshots. My end goal is to tell the before and after story of the hospital buildings with both Juxtapose and blending in Processing 3 on my own website. I have one more week to make this work!! 

From my research for the Hear, Here project, I have noticed that for many people, the loss of the hospital is reminiscent of losing a part of their own story. It makes sense that many people have a deep connection to the hospital through major life events, whether births, deaths, illnesses, or work. Interestingly, I discovered my own family connection with the Victoria Hospital on the weekend. As it turns out, my mother was born there, and she still has her unofficial, and very crumpled, birth certificate that was given to my grandmother at the hospital. Although I knew my mother was born in London, it never occurred to me that it was at the old Victoria Hospital in SoHo. London is becoming an increasingly smaller world.

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

To Blend or to Slide? Creating a Digital Comparison of London’s Built Heritage Past and Present


Our final project for Digital Public History is upon us, and I’m torn between two directions, whether to blend or to slide?  

My goal for this project is to create a digital “before and after” comparison of London’s built heritage that is no longer in existence.  The current research I am doing on the old Victoria Hospital in London, as well as the walking tour “Paved Paradise” I discussed in my first blog post, have been the inspiration for this project.

Initially, I wondered about the possibility of an augmented reality experience. “Paved Paradise” was a fantastic tour, led by costumed actors who brought the stories of buildings long torn down and forgotten to life. But what if it was possible via an app on your phone to see what the building would have looked like in its original state, at its original location?  While I would still like to see this happen in London, especially in the locations where parking lots prevail, this will not be doable within my allotted time and means.

I am currently conducting research on the SOHO area of London for our Public History project Hear, Here. The old Victoria Hospital was a major part of this community since 1875. In 2013, demolition of the hospital buildings began. The following photo is an aerial view that shows the hospital in its entirety in January 2013, prior to the demolition: 

Aerial view of the Victoria Hospital. Photograph by Mike Henson, the London Free Press, January 23, 2018
An excellent source I have consulted during this process is the book So Long South Street by Ryan Craven with photographs by Matthew Trueman. The book features historical text and Trueman's photos of the hospital during the demolition process, and is a tribute to the essential role the hospital played within the SOHO community.

Photograph by Matthew Trueman. http://www.matthewtrueman.com/#/pier-1/
With the work of Craven and Trueman as inspiration, I am aiming to document stories of London's lost heritage in the SOHO area, like the Victoria Hospital, through an online digital, visually striking comparison of the before and after images. One possibility to do this is using Wordpress. You can install plugins such as ‘Image Comparison Slider’ in Wordpress to upload two before and after photographs. This feature allows you to take the two images, juxtapose them beside each other, and then using your mouse slide and compare them side by side.  The GIF below is an example of an effective before an after from Image Comparison Slider:

GIF from https://wordatom.com/add-image-comparison-wordpress-post/ 
Wordpress is not the only way to approach this, and below is a link to other before and after comparison sliders I've been exploring:

https://ourcodeworld.com/articles/read/263/top-5-best-before-and-after-image-comparison-slider-jquery-and-javascript-plugin

Recently, however, our Digital Public History class received training on the programming software Processing 3. This program was simultaneously complex and fascinating, with potentially limitless possibilities. Experimenting with the "Examples" feature, I noticed a “Blending” mode which allows you insert two different images, scroll over the image with your mouse, where they then ‘blend’ seamlessly from one to the other. This could be another possible method of comparison, as well as an interesting way to weave the before and after images together. The illusion and effect could be powerful, with the past image appearing and disappearing like a ghostly mirage. 
    
Screenshot of "Blending" feature from Processing 3
However, the stark juxtaposition and contrast created with 'Image Comparison Slider' may be the right direction for the purpose of this project. Regardless of blending or sliding, the key to success will be how well the two images line up with each other, in order to get the clearest representation of how the building appeared in its original state versus its modern reality. This stage in the process may prove very challenging, but I will be posting again about all the successes, difficulties, and (lets hope not...) failures of the process. To be continued!