History is Unreal

The ultimate success or failure of the Métis farmers never mattered. They were simply caught between a federal government executing their economy-building National Policy, and an Oblate Church committing to a French-Catholic settler parish. In Episode 8 of History Is Unreal , we advance to Step 3 of our 4-step framework: The History We Should Instead Tell .  During the colony's peak era of the...

In Episode 7 of HistoryisUnreal , we advance to Step 2: The History We've Been Told . We consider the narrative surrounding the 1896 foundation of the St. Paul des Métis agricultural experiment and its subsequent 1909 dissolution. Using Dr. John Fontaine’s 2009 Master’s thesis and further 2012 presentation as a primary case study, we consider the history told of the Métis colony's failure....

Welcome to Episode 6 of History is Unreal . Today, we officially deploy our four-step historical analysis on a critical event in Canada's history, the Métis expropriation at St. Paul, Alberta; starting with Step 1: Context . To truly understand why the Métis farming colony at St. Paul des Métis was broken apart in 1909, we must first understand what was happening at the time in Canada. Dr. Joh...

History is an argument, built on the biases of its writers and readers. In episode 5, we begin to look beyond the "why" of history to begin the process of establishing a base chronology of events—the essential starting point for any rigorous historical interpretation. This will allow us to understand better histories and to connect our intrinsic thinking to extrinsic factors (the context o...

In episode 4, this hands-on workshop (and last theory episode for a bit), Dr. John and ANI start to transition from theory to talking about actual Canadian historical events. We explore the Positionality Audit —a tool for uncovering the hidden lenses that shape our understanding of the past. Using the War of 1812 as an example, we demonstrate how personal "Positionality" and ‘bias’ can tra...

Host: Dr. John Fontaine AI Co-Host: ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) In episode 3, Dr. John and ANI tackle the "Positionality Paradox." If every historian is biased by their own surroundings, how can we ever reach a "better" history? We move away from History from Above —the grand narratives of elites and winners—and dive into History from Below . Using the analogy of E.H. Carr...

Title: The AI Mirror: Reflecting Our Bias in Telling Canadian History Host: Dr. John Fontaine Co-Host: ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) Is history a collection of facts, or just a "sophisticated mirror" of whoever is holding the pen? In episode 2, Dr. John Fontaine and his AI co-host (ANI) begin to deconstruct the "Grand Narrative" of Canadian history through the lens of histor...

"History, Canada’s history in particular, is very interesting; but it is not factual.”  Welcome to the first episode of  History is Unreal . Dr. John Fontaine and ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) introduce Canadian historiography through the lens of a famous Canadian explorer, Jacques Cartier. The exercise begins with learning how and why Cartier was portrayed the way he was in our past ve...

"History, Canada’s history in particular, is very interesting; but it is not factual.”  Welcome to the official trailer for  History is Unreal . Dr. John Fontaine and co-host ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) introduce the core mission of the show; that the history we learned is based on the biases of the writer and the context of the present (and the past). This podcast is a search for a b...

"The histories we’ve been told are based on interpretations that serve our present and our biases." Join Dr. John Fontaine and his AI co-host, ANI Buddy , for the debut teaser of History is Unreal . In this 30-second introduction, we set the stage for a deep dive into the friction between human storytelling and digital data. Using a historiographical lens , we seek to understand the contex...