Environmental and Digital Historian
Reposted from the Trading Consequences Blog.
Since our last post the Trading Consequences team have been working with our identified and potential data providers to begin gathering digital data for the project.
As the various data providers were sending us millions of pages of text from digitized historical documents, I flew over to London to spend some time in the archives.
By Jim Clifford and Colin Coates
This is a post Colin Coates and I published on the NiCHE website about our new research project. In the months ahead, I will add more posts on this website about both my research into global commodity flows and the experience of working on an international and interdisciplinary team research project.
We are embarking on a new research project, supported by a Digging into Data grant, to investigate the environmental and economic histories of the rapid expansion of commodity frontiers and trade in the British Empire and Canada during the nineteenth century. This is a unique opportunity to work with leading computational linguists and visualization specialists in Scotland and to experiment with new digital methods of historical research. In the process we hope both to assess the value of data mining for asking new questions from the growing digital archive and advance our knowledge of the growing importance of commodities in the British Empire and Canada during a period of rapid economic and environmental transformation.