Category: Digging into Data

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.