Today I visited Springbank Park. The weather was unseasonably warm and I thought it would be a great opportunity to take some photographs of the historic Springbank Park pumphouse. The building is located in the eastern end of the park about halfway between Storybook Gardens and the parking lot off of Springbank Drive.

Designed by William Robinson in 1878, the building held the pumping equipment to carry water to Reservoir Hill, where it was then distributed to the City. The pumphouse was used until 1967, when London began to receive its water supply from Lake Huron.

Two heritage plaques are located on the eastern wall of the building, detailing the important role of the waterworks system in London.Last September, the pumphouse was one of the 49 heritage sites featured in Doors Open London.

The Ontario cottage style building is an attractive feature to the park and is a great piece of London history!

What is Twitter? It is an online social messaging tool that allows users to communicate through answers to the question “what are you doing?” Twitter users can set up their own pages that follow their stream of conversation with friends, family, and co-workers throughout the day. A twittercounter allows Twitter users to record how many people follow their updates. In general, Twitter users can post anything (keeping within 140 characters) about their daily lives. The bottom line is that through Twitter, users can become more connected with each other and build into an online community.

Twitter has proven to be quite a resourceful tool – President-Elect Barack Obama utilized Twitter throughout his campaign, while graduate student James Karl Buck made headlines in April for tweeting about his arrest in Egypt after covering an anti-government protest. News outlets such as CNN and Fox News have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and have started to utilize the social network to update followers on developing stories throughout the day.

Can we use Twitter as a research tool? When looking at sources that are deemed ‘primary’ for research, we always turn to the general explanation of ‘newspaper, journal, diary, speech, etc.’ created during or around an event. When researching methods fall in the world of new media, the definition of what is considered a primary source seems to expand. Could we consider tweets as primary source documents? If we look at the status updates as representative of the thoughts / feelings of a group of people during a certain time in history, then I think we could see tweets as a form of primary source for research. For example, I think that it would be quite interesting to explore the response of the American public during the 2008 election through researching tweets. One could examine the different twitter updates during a certain period during the campaign to see how the public responded to the different presidential candidates.

I’m not suggesting that one should base research entirely on a social medium like Twitter, but consider it alongside blogs and other social networking tools as the diaries / journals of the 21st century.