Jim Clifford
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jimclifford.bsky.social
Jim Clifford
@jimclifford.bsky.social
Associate Professor @usask.bsky.social
Co-Editor of Historical Methods.
Environmental and digital historian of London, Canada and the British World in the 19th century. #dyslexic
Pinned
Free access to the article I published with Sam Huckerby for people without subscriptions to the Canadian Historical Review:
"Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61" utppublishing.com/stoken/autho...
Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61 | Canadian Historical Review
Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.
utppublishing.com
“His most recent interview, on Wednesday morning, was a video call with an AI bot that lasted 12 minutes.”

Governments better act before AI guts the middle class. A colleague suggested shifting incentives to spending on employment instead of capital investment.

www.thebulwark.com/p/let-them-e...
Let Them Eat AI-Generated Cake
Elon Musk and the coming twilight of the elites.
www.thebulwark.com
November 7, 2025 at 11:22 PM
What a photo
November 7, 2025 at 5:59 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
We're cutting $s to low-income 18 year-olds to access education, but we still have half a billion a year to make student loans interest-free for early-career 20-somethings "to help with the rent"

AS DUMB AS A BAG OF HAMMERS.
Here's the biggest PSE story you haven't heard yet: the Canada Student Grant for low-income students is being cut from $4200/year to $3000/year as of next August. It's implicit in the budget tables but the government is too chickenshit to actually say so directly.
November 4, 2025 at 11:47 PM
"BYD is now the top-selling car brand in Singapore, competing directly with Toyota and Hyundai."

What is the future for Canadian oil exports to Asia?

carboncredits.com/byd-surges-2...
November 1, 2025 at 7:21 PM
Going to see I Mother Earth on Monday. I think this is my first middle aged concert where I’m seeing a band I haven’t listened too much in 25 years and haven’t seen live since the 1990s. #nostalgiarock
November 1, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Rereading Between the World and Me: “the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be”.
October 31, 2025 at 1:58 PM
Bad news for investors.
We used our new capabilities index, the ECI, to measure the gap between open- and closed-weight models.

The result? This gap is smaller than previously estimated.

On average, it takes 3.5 months for an open-weight model to catch up with closed-source SOTA.
October 31, 2025 at 12:17 PM
Free access to the article I published with Sam Huckerby for people without subscriptions to the Canadian Historical Review:
"Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61" utppublishing.com/stoken/autho...
Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61 | Canadian Historical Review
Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.
utppublishing.com
October 26, 2025 at 3:48 PM
I've tested the new DeekSeek OCR on 600 images from the British Library. The results were interesting. It was very accurate when it succeeded, but it failed 9% of the time. olmOCR is slightly less accurate, but had zero failures on this data (I've had it fail on more challenging images).
October 25, 2025 at 7:34 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
The 2025-26 schedule for the Lancaster-Manchester & @n8cir.bsky.social Environmental #DH Seminar is up!

Next:
@ehameeteman.bsky.social on Nov 12 (online)

Details: www.digital-humanities.manchester.ac.uk/connect/even...

#envhist #envhum #skystorians @dsilu.bsky.social @lscholz.bsky.social
October 22, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
Thrilled to have a wonderful group of speakers coming up this year for the Lancaster-Manchester Environmental DH Seminar - @ehameeteman.bsky.social @jimclifford.bsky.social @michamahlberg.bsky.social + participants in the in-person event @lancasteruni.bsky.social!
October 22, 2025 at 7:47 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
"Climate & History," @nichecanada.bsky.social's Canadian History & Environment Summer School, 29-31 May 2026, on Prince Edward Island.🦞

Apply now to attend! The deadline is 30 Nov, but we'd much appreciate early apps.

#envhist #cdnhist #chess2026 #gojays

niche-canada.org/2025/10/20/c...
CHESS 2026: Climate & History - Call for Participants
We are pleased to invite applications to attend the 2026 Canadian History & Environment Summer School.
niche-canada.org
October 21, 2025 at 1:52 PM
October 21, 2025 at 3:09 AM
I recently saw a peer review that asked the authors to address the energy/ecological consequences of big data methods (AI adjacent but not using inefficient LLMs). This is probably fair. But I wonder if anyone has ever been asked to justify the CO2 associated with archival travel in an article?
October 13, 2025 at 4:24 PM
I would have preferred Pomeranz and Berg, but I guess I’m still happy to see a historian win the prize.

Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on How Technology Drives Growth www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/b...
Three Share Nobel in Economics for Work on How Technology Drives Growth
Joel Mokyr was awarded half of the prize, and Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt shared the other half.
www.nytimes.com
October 13, 2025 at 1:37 PM
Historiography at its very best:

NEPTUNE, H. REUBEN. “Throwin’ Scholarly Shade: Eric Williams in the New Historie of Capitalism and Slavery.” Journal of the Early Republic 39, no. 2 (2019): 299–326. www.jstor.org/stable/26905....

The ‘new’ history of capitalism wasn’t particularly new.
“Most of the people who have helped to make their livings off of telling us what's wrong with Eric Williams just wish they were as smart as he was.”
Sidney Mintz (2006 )
October 9, 2025 at 2:06 PM
“Most of the people who have helped to make their livings off of telling us what's wrong with Eric Williams just wish they were as smart as he was.”
Sidney Mintz (2006 )
October 9, 2025 at 1:38 PM
I finished listening to the Klein and Coates interview. Ta-Nehisi’s reflection on history were an important reminder that as bad as things might be, they’ve regularly been really bad in the past. The post-war golden age was defined by lynchings and McCarthy.

music.youtube.com/watch?v=pCgy...
Strange Fruit
YouTube video by Billie Holiday - Topic
music.youtube.com
October 7, 2025 at 1:36 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
Super excited to share a new publication I wrote with Sam Huckerby (YorkU):

Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61

doi.org/10.3138/chr-...
Logging and Settlement beyond the Rapids: Unmaking Algonquin Space in the Ottawa Valley, 1817–61 | Canadian Historical Review
Growing demand from the British timber market led loggers to push deep into Algonquin territory in the first half of the nineteenth century, and tens of thousands of agricultural settlers followed suit. While the Algonquin faced unrelenting pressures from the timber industry and agricultural settlement, colonial governments representing the Crown failed to negotiate the acquisition of Indigenous land as required under the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Using expanded timber ship immigration data from 1817 to 1839, as well as agricultural census manuscripts, we reappraise how timber extractivism operated in conjunction with settler colonialism to dispossess the Algonquin in the Ottawa Valley. Our case study, which focuses on Westmeath Township, demonstrates the interconnected processes that prioritized and enabled thousands of settlers to transform remote, unceded land into a neo-European landscape, effectively “un-making” Algonquin space in a short period of time. Settlers followed the timber roads up the Ottawa Valley beyond the Rocher Fendu Rapids in the 1830s and 1840s, drawn in part by the high prices paid by timber camps for oats and hay. Farmers extended the ecological transformation of the regions begun by the loggers, clearing forests to establish permanent farms above the rapids. Timber extractivism and settler colonialism fed one into the other as the logging camps provided labour opportunities and a market for animal feed, timber ships provided cheap passage, and settlers provided food and labour.
doi.org
October 6, 2025 at 11:09 PM
If you want to feel old, as an undergrad to pronounce cd-rom.
October 6, 2025 at 9:45 PM
“Some people, I suspect, feel more comfortable with the mastery that comes with staying within a particular area; others (like me) get more easily bored.” [A student quoted Roy Rosenzweig in an assignment, and I feel seen.]
October 6, 2025 at 8:59 PM
I’m a lapsed Blue Jays fan, but it might be time to jump on the bandwagon. 12-2 against the Yankees in the bottom of the 6th.
October 5, 2025 at 10:09 PM
First UCI world championship for Canada. youtu.be/m5sRC-nurxw?...
How Magdeleine Vallieres Shocked The Peloton In Kigali World Championships 2025
YouTube video by FloBikes
youtu.be
September 27, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Jim Clifford
Thinking of pitching a book about US military history the thesis of which is that when America has won wars in the past it has had less to do with ‘warrior ethos’ than with some grown ups in charge who knew what they were fucking doing.

Apparently this is an urgent thesis to restate.
September 27, 2025 at 1:06 PM