News on World-Historical Data
CHIA News
U.S. National Science Foundation award to CHIA. In September 2012 CHIA was awarded $600,000 for a three-year project to lay the groundwork for a world-historical data resource. Project work, during the calendar years 2013, 2014, and 2015, is distributed among five participating institutions: University of Pittsburgh, University of California – Merced, Harvard University, Boston University, and Michigan State University
ABSTRACT -- Collaborative Research: Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA)
This project will strengthen the organizational and technical infrastructure of the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (http://chia.pitt.edu), a multi-institutional collaborative of scholars in social, natural, and information sciences structured as a Research Collaborative and a Headquarters. The Research Collaborative links participating institutions that are collecting data on population, climate, and other topics with a crowdsourcing tool to demonstrate the feasibility of building a continuously growing collection of diverse historical data and metadata. The Headquarters assembles and develops knowledge on repository design to develop a repository sufficient to house the incoming data and permit global and interactive analysis. The Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis’s future plans include expanding its collection and processing of historical data, broadening its community of social and natural science researchers, analyzing historical patterns of global change, and sharing its resources with researchers, policy-makers, teachers and students. CHIA is headquartered at the University of Pittsburgh with participating research groups at Boston University, Harvard University, Michigan State University, and University of California-Merced.
To understand global social patterns as they exist today, it is increasingly clear that we need to understand how they have evolved over recent centuries. The Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis responds to this need and takes historical analysis into the realm of Big Data. It is expected that the data resources will grow to several terabytes in size. This project will stimulate development of more efficient research collaborations, enabling systematic large-scale consolidation of diverse historical data sources. Once collected and integrated, the data repository and analytical system will allow scholars to address a wider set of questions testing hypotheses about long-term and short-term social change at the global scale and catalyzing an expansion of the evidence base in social sciences. For example, our understanding of important societal issues can advance by linking health to demography and by incorporating climate and health factors into economic studies. Disciplinary theory will advance through interaction among the various scientific fields, so that a global network of social-science researchers will emerge.
Discussions of CHIA and CLIO-INFRA. In meetings in Glasgow (April 2012) and Amsterdam (May 2012) the directors of two major data-collection projects met to compare notes and share information. Patrick Manning of CHIA and Jan Luiten van Zanden of CLIO-INFRA (Professor of Economic History at Utrecht University) made tentative plans to schedule a joint conference in 2013 to exchange data on global population, migration, and mortality rates.
Activities of CHIA Affiliates
World-Historical Dataverse, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Kai Cao has accepted an appointment as Postdoctoral Associate at the World History Center, and will be the principal staff researcher for a two-year term. Dr. Cao, with a doctorate in Geography from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has completed previous postdoctoral stints at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard and the Department of Geography, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
University of California Group for Historical Information and Analysis. This group, based initially at the University of California-Merced, has now extended to a second campus through the involvement of University of California-Irvine.
International Institute of Social History. The IISH collaborative on Labour Relations has made presentations of its results at the European Social Science History Conference in Glasgow in April 2012, with papers focusing on the medieval Islamic world, early modern Italy, and China after 1500.
Historical Data and Repositories
7th GIScience 2012 Conference took place in Columbus, OH, from September 18 – 21, 2012.
