This course is designed as a practicum — we quickly will move out of the seminar room and into the archives where students will apply a number of techniques and methods used by research historians writing about the nineteenth and twentieth century city. Although the spatial and temporal focus will be on Toronto in the "long" twentieth century, the methods taught will be applicable to other geographic and national contexts. The aim is to prepare students for the research that will underlie their master's papers or PhD dissertations. There will be a strong emphasis on the design of research projects and how they can be structured from start to finish in collaborative fashion using a range of digital humanities tools such as Slack, Zotero, Omeka, and Neatline.

The course will begin with readings that cover exemplary recent works in community history and then move on to a section on theory and method. Visits to the City of Toronto Archives, Metropolitan Reference Library, Ryerson Image Centre, and the Thomas Fisher Library will orient students to available source materials, finding aids, and staff support. They then will be divided in small teams that will model projects, conduct sample research, and develop digital presentation tools.

Each student will be assessed upon 1) a review of a monograph on local/community history; 2) a methodological essay that reflects on both the practice of local history and working collaboratively; and 3) a final digital research project. In addition there will be regular "hands on" assignment using archival and documentary materials that will be submitted but not formally assessed, but will be considered part of participation.