spatial

Intoxicants and Early Modernity

Economic and Social History, History | alcohol, court cases, drugs, Early Modern, eighteenth century, England, seventeenth century, sixteenth century

This research project explores the insight that the period between the introduction of tobacco in the 1570s and the ‘Gin Craze’ of the early eighteenth century was a formative phase in the production, traffic, consumption, and representation of intoxicants. By intoxicants – a less ideologically loaded term than ‘drugs’, and a more historical descriptor for non-medicinal commodities – we mean substances understood at the time to be ‘poisoning, or envenoming’ and ‘tuddling or making drunk’, and which today are recognized as having an often detrimental impact on the body’s physiological and mental processes, especially if consumed to excess.” “The resulting research tool will be an interactive website, providing free access to the datasets generated by the project, and allowing the research team and a wider community of users to explore the relationships between the economic, social, political, material, and cultural realms of early modern intoxication. “These include people, places, objects (such as drinking vessels, printed images), organisations, language (context-specific terminology), and events (such as legislation or transactions). Each of these entities will have its own set of characteristics as well as relationships with one or more other entities. The resulting ‘ontology’ will enable the PI, Co-Is, and RAs to interrogate the entire range of data and visualise the results in ways which reveal trends and relationships that are not evident when consulting the documents individually. For example, changing volumes of tobacco or numbers of licence holders or uses of the word ‘drunkenness’ can be traced and contextualised diachronically whilst relationships between entities – for example tobacco, licences, and ‘drunkenness’ – are revealed synchronically.

Data type: spatial, text

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Human Mobility Index dataset

Economic and Social History, History | geography

“The Human Mobility Index (HMI)” that estimates the potential minimum travel time across the globe (measured in hours) accounting for human biological constraints, as well as geographical and technological factors that determined travel time before the widespread use of steam power. In particular, the HMI indices provide a distinct measure of human mobility potential in different eras: Human Mobility Index (HMI): Mobility on land without seafaring technology. Shows mobility potential on land before the widespread use of steam power. Human Mobility Index with Seafaring: HMI expanded to allow mobility on a select set of seas for which historical data was available. Shows potential mobility on land and seas before the introduction of ocean-faring ships. Human Mobility Index with Ocean: HMI expanded to allow mobility on all seas based on CLIWOC (interpolated). Shows potential mobility on land and seas after the introduction of ocean-faring ships, but before the widespread use of steamships. Based on these cost surfaces, researchers can find the minimum travel times between locations or construct more sophisticated statistics based on these. For example, Ashraf, Galor and Özak (2010) construct measures of pre-historic geographical isolation to study the effect of isolation on development. Similarly, Özak (2010), Depetris-Chauvin and Özak (2016, 2020) and Michalopoulus and Özak (2019) construct potential trade and information flow networks among countries, ethnic groups, cities, and artificial geographical units, to study the origins of the division of labor, and the effect of technological change on isolation and development. Likewise, Depetris-Chauvin and Özak (2019) use these measures to construct artificial states based on Voronoi partitions. This strategy overcomes the potential mismeasurement of distances generated by using geodesic distances (Özak 2010), for a period when travel time was the most important determinant of transportation costs. Additionally, it removes the potential concern that travel time to the frontier reflects a country’s stage of development, mitigating further possible endogeneity concerns. The research validates these measures by (i) analyzing their association with actual historical travel time; (ii) examining their explanatory power for the location of historical trade routes in the Old World; and (iii) analyzing their association with genetic and cultural distances.

Data type: spatial

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Fife Place-Name Data

Language Variation and Change, Linguistics | Gaelic, geography, medieval, place names, Scotland

This was a pilot project to retroactively create an online database from the (purposefully laid-out) volumes of The Place-Names of Fife. It was successful, and allowed the researcher, Simon Taylor, and the systems developer, Brian Aitken, to work together on a prototype of what will become the full Scottish Place-Name database for the future (based on older models, which underlie the survey volumes).

Data type: spatial, text

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Extreme weather in the UK: past, present and future – event details from the TEMPEST database

Historical Geography, Human Geography | 14th century, 15th century, 16th-century, 17th-century, 18th-century, 19th-century, climate change, historical-records, United Kingdom

TEMPEST was designed as a freely accessible and user-friendly database resource on the UK’s weather and climate history. TEMPEST is comprised of narrative accounts of extreme weather events of all types, extracted from documentary materials located in a range of archival repositories in the UK (consequentially, please see the quality statement note below concerning data issues). The information has been extracted from a wide range of documents, including letters, diaries, church records, school log-books and many others. The entries span more than 400 years - some as early as 1346 - of weather history and relate to places across the UK, though the data search was focused in five case-study regions: Central England, Southwest England, East Anglia, Wales, and Northwest Scotland.

Data type: spatial, text

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Early cinema in Scotland, 1896-1927

Economic and Social History, History | 19th-century, 20th-century, cinema, Film and cinema arts studies, film-history, Scotland

The project website is a major output of the project. It is a MySQL database containing tables on venues, people, companies, films, newspaper and trade press articles. The venues and film locations (mainly for non-fiction Scottish films) are georeferenced. This is used to generate map markers to display on the public page, allowing users to click through from the map to otherinformation in the database. We have used the underlying data in other ways - classifying and comparing layers in response to specific research questions - so we intend to make the raw data available for other film historians. However the 'front end' of the web site will present a simpler interface for public access, with just venues and film locations.

Data type: spatial, text

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Crisis DB – US Political Violence Database

Economic and Social History, History | eighteenth century, nineteenth century, twentieth century, twenty-first century, United States, war and conflict

Collection of historical records of violent incidents in the United States, spanning from 1782 to the present day. The dataset is categorized by date, incident type, subtypes, casualties, geographical location of the violence, documented fatalities, and the authoritative sources from which this data is derived. Additionally, each entry includes a detailed narrative describing the specific circumstances surrounding the violent incident.

Data type: spatial, temporal

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Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches

Architecture History, Theory and Practice, Design | architecture, Christianity, medieval-archaeology, medieval-history, Scotland

This database provides narrative accounts of the salient historical information on the history and architecture of the individual buildings and sites, accompanied by a full apparatus of references and by images of those buildings and sites.

Data type: images, spatial, text

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Concert Programmes Project

History of Music, Music | music, program

The sheer number of individual programmes means that creating a union catalogue at item level is not a viable option in the short or medium term. Instead, the Concert Programmes Project aims to create an online database of concert programme holdings in the UK and Ireland at collection level to enable scholars and music lovers to locate material that may be relevant to their research and and interests, and library professionals to identify priorities for collection development and preservation.

Data type: spatial, text

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Caloric Suitability Index dataset

Economic and Social History, History | agriculture, geography

“The Caloric Suitability Indices” (CSI) capture the variation in potential crop yield across the globe, as measured in calories per hectare per year. Moreover, in light of the expansion in the set of crops that are available for cultivation in the course of the Columbian Exchange, the CSI indices provide a distinct measure for caloric suitability for the pre-1500 and the post-1500 era. The CSI indices provide four estimates of caloric suitability for each cell of size 5′× 5 in the world: The maximum potential caloric yield attainable given the set of crops that are suitable for cultivation in the pre-1500 period. The maximum potential caloric yield attainable, given the set of crops that are suitable for cultivation in the post-1500 period. The average potential yields within each cell, attainable given the set of crops that are suitable for cultivation in the pre-1500 period. The average potential yields within each cell, attainable given the set of crops that are suitable for cultivation in the post-1500 period. The Caloric Suitability Indices (Galor and Özak, 2016) captures the potential agricultural output (measured in calories) based on crops that were available for cultivation in the Pre-1500CE and Post-1500CE eras. It is available for 5’ by 5’ grid cells and at the country level. The data can be used to assess or account for the exogenous effect of agricultural potential on various economic and social outcomes. The data can be used to assess or account for the exogenous effect of agricultural potential on various economic and social outcomes. An IPython notebook is included to show how it can be used and also compares it with another measure of agricultural suitability. The data is provided as a service to the academic research community (see license for permitted uses).

Data type: spatial

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