Engaging people in Yukon history – my 30 years of experimenting
I’m writing this post on February 22, 2023, but as it’s a presentation I gave on October 24, 2018, I’m back-dating to look like it was posted then.
Sometimes I find files in places they shouldn’t be. I stumbled across this Powerpoint presentation a couple of days ago, and just had a look at it. It’s a 20-slide show from the Yukon Heritage Symposium on October 24, 2018 (I don’t remember anything about it, even where it was held). There’s no text (at least I haven’t come across one yet), as my usual manner was to have a basic idea of how things would progress and then use each slide to prompt a talk about it. I decided I needed to do something with this ppt, and a blog post seemed best.
The presentation is mostly about my Yukon History and Abandoned Places group on Facebook, with 5 slides leading up to its founding.
The captions will be quite short, unlike what it would have been at the symposium when I had a lot to say. In 1990, I came to the Yukon Territory to take a job as driver/guide for lengthy (most were 10 days) tours around the Yukon and Alaska. I immediately became both a teacher and a student of Yukon history. We had pretty much complete flexibility on our tours days – while we had scheduled coffee and lunch stops as well as the overnight accommodation, we could do anything we wanted along the way. In this first photo, we were at Silver City, on the shore of Kluane Lake.
In February 1997 I had a very basic Web site built to promote my first book, Fractured Veins Broken Dreams. I soon started adding articles about Yukon and Alaska history, as there was almost nothing online then. In March 1998, I got an email from a new company looking for “Guides” to help people find information on various topics. In April I merged my Web site into The Mining Company’s system, becoming their Yukon/Alaska History Guide. in July 1998, my mandate was greatly expanded to cover the entire circumpolar North, and the site name was changed to Arctic/Northern Culture. Then in September 1999 I joined the new Canadian division of what had become About.com, opening a second site, Canada Far North, focussing on the three territories – Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory.
In the days before Facebook, Twitter, et al, mailing lists were the way to talk to like-minded people about any of a vast array of topics, and I was very active in a few groups. The screenshot below is from ARCHPUB, which was for discussions about archaeological publications.
By early 2001, online forums were replacing mailing lists, with Delphi Forums being the big player. I joined a few, and created some of my own, including the one seen the in the next screenshot, “The Whalers’ Heritage Project.”
The Canada Far North site at About.com only lasted a year – running two sites was too demanding, and I consolidated the material I had gathered into the Arctic/Northern Culture site. Visitors to the Arctic/Northern Culture site were primarily interested in one of two things – research material for school projects or travel information. In the spring of 2001, changing attitudes at About.com led to hundreds of Guides leaving over the next few month (over 300 in September 2001 alone), but for many, the dream of sharing their passion with people remained, and they started their own sites. I created ExploreNorth.com and moved all of my material onto my own server in order to serve my readers’ needs better.
On September 26, 2006, a social networking service originally launched 3 years before as FaceMash opened to the public as Facebook, and the online world began a major change. On November 18, 2014, I started a Facebook Group simply called “Yukon History,” then on September 18, 2016, changed the name to “Yukon History and Abandoned Places” – generally called YHAP.
At YHAP is a page of “Resources for Researching Yukon History,” with other related Facebook groups, online resources, and physical resources.
We see often in the History group the value of collective memory in getting facts straightened out. While the headline below may be correct that collective memory is also fallible (because we often remember and believe what we want to remember/believe), a discussion among people can often come to a consensus, particularly if indisputable facts (documents or photos) are included.
After toddling along at a few hundred members, Yukon History and Abandoned Places all of a sudden got noticed in a big way, and in the first 2 weeks of February 2018, we added over 7,000 members! I never have figured out what happened.
Posters like this one posted on February 8 were created to celebrate the success as it kept going.
One of the things about the YHAP community that is notable is the very high level of participation by members. The next screenshot shows some of the stats group admins can see to help guide the discussions.
Two of the biggest challenges with electronic meetings of many kinds is the nastiness that can appear, and spammers. I have always had zero tolerance for both – here are a couple of screenshots about it from April.
It’s often interesting to look at what posts have captured people’s attention, and to what degree. A query about the Taku Hotel had gotten 5,000 views and 162 comments by the time I took this screenshot.
Hotels are always a particularly popular subject.
The Pioneer Cemetery in Whitehorse has garnered a lot of interest, aided by a major renovation of the long-neglected cemetery, and a couple of radio interviews.
The variety of topics that get covered is quite remarkable – the plastic bag generated hundreds of comments about that much-loved store, and plane crashes are also perennial favourites.
The next screenshot shows a couple of discussions that brought out wonderful details about people and places.
So, that was brief look at my 30 years of experimenting, 1998-2018. It’s hard to imagine what might appear in the years ahead to further engage people…
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