Category: Digital History

History vs. Geography and Sourcemap.com

First published on ActiveHistory.ca

The interactive map above, produced by Leo Bonanni, the CEO of Sourcemap.com, demonstrates the impressive power of geographical analysis in the early 21st century. The map shows the supply chains for a typical laptop computer and provides a fascinating insight into the complicated mix of natural resources and manufacturing labour needed. It raises questions about the environmental and social consequences of the computers that many of us interact with daily.

To what extent has geography emerged as a more powerful tool than history to shed light on the social and environmental consequences of today’s global economic and political systems?

West Ham 19th Century Industry Source Map

I am working on a paper for the American Society of Environmental History conference in Madison at the end of this month. The paper examines the global supply chains that fed factories in West Ham with raw materials throughout the nineteenth century. This included sugarcane for the Tate refinery, cinchona bark for making quinine, an antimalarial drug, at Howard & Sons, gutta-percha for making underwater telegraph cables in Silvertown, palm-oil and pot ash for making soap at the numerous soap works in the area. These industries also relied on local and British suppliers for coal and rendered animal fat, among other things. I’ve started playing with a web service called Source Map to map the network of trade that supplied West Ham’s factories and some of the places the manufactured goods were then exported to in the British world. I’ve not been super precise with the locations of the various factories and commodity frontiers in this early draft. [The map above continues to update as I work on this project. It is getting more accurate and more detailed than when I wrote the post below.]

I’d like to thank Devon Elliott (@devonelliott) for answering my Twitter question looking for a software or web service to map this trading network and turning me on to Source Map.

Trading Consequences: A Digging into Data Project


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.

EH Mobile App Demo

By Sean Kheraj:

After a year of fumbling our way through various efforts to produce an environmental history mobile application for iOS, Jim Clifford and I are finally ready to demo Environmental History Mobile 1.0 Beta. As we mentioned in our previous update, the goal of this project was to create an iOS mobile application that would facilitate the dissemination of online content relevant to the environmental history community, including news, blogs, and podcasts. What you can try out below is a demo of our first attempt to aggregate all of that content into a simple application.

Please keep in mind that not all of the components of the application in the web demo will function properly, as it would on an iPhone or iPod Touch. Nevertheless, you can click through most of the different sections of the application, including: