NiCHE: Network in Canadian History and Environment (website). http://niche-canada.org.
NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment / Nouvelle initiative canadienne en histoire de l’environnement is a Canadian-based network of researchers and educators who work at the intersection of nature and history. We explore the historical context of environmental matters and communicate our findings to researchers, policymakers, and the public.
Our members are from Canada and around the world: most are students or scholars in environmental history, historical geography, or related fields, but others are government employees, environmental activists, and members of the general public. Membership is free. If you are interested in joining, please contact us via our user account request page. You can also choose to subscribe to our monthly newsletter.
NiCHE was founded in fall 2004 by a small team of scholars led by Alan MacEachern (a former RCC visiting fellow!), and from 2007-205 was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Strategic Knowledge Clusters grant.
Today, most of our conversation happens via our very active blog The Otter/La Loutre, which features posts about research and teaching in environmental history, as well as news and calls for upcoming events.
But we also host thematic projects and exhibits as well as multimedia podcasts and videos such as the long-running Nature’s Past and the very popular #EnvHist Worth Reading. Our website also includes digital NiCHE-sponsored projects for research such as The Geospatial Historian and the Programming Historian 2, and other advanced digital tools and databases. Since 2018, we also publish Papers in Canadian History & Environment (PiCHE).
Contact us at: nichecanadawebsite@gmail.com
NiCHE hosts the blog The Otter/La Loutre, which allows users to contribute news and blog posts pertaining to environmental history and historical geography. The Projects page features thematic projects as well as related networks and annual member initiatives. The site also has information on past and future events, media such as podcasts and “#EnvHist Worth Reading videos,” resources and publications. An exciting initiative is the Digital Tools page, which brings together NiCHE projects such as The Geospatial Historian and Programming Historian 2, and other advanced digital tools, from databases and geographic information systems, to text mining and web scraping.