38 research outputs found
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Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis: Vision and Work Plan
Get PDFThis article conveys the vision of a world-historical dataset, constructed in order to provide data on human social affairs at the global level over the past several centuries. The construction of this dataset will allow the routine application of tools developed for analyzing “Big Data” to global, historical analysis. The work is conducted by the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA). This association of groups at universities and research institutes in the U.S. and Europe includes five groups funded by the National Science Foundation for work to construct infrastructure for collecting and archiving data on a global level. The article identifies the elements of infrastructure-building, shows how they are connected, and sets the project in the context of previous and current efforts to build large-scale historical datasets. The project is developing a crowd-sourcing application for ingesting and documenting data, a broad and flexible archive, and a “data hoover” process to locate and gather historical datasets for inclusion. In addition, the article identifies four types of data and analytical questions to be explored through this data resource, addressing development, governance, social structure, and the interaction of social and natural variables
Collaboration in Building a Global Archive: Vision, practice, methodology, and analysis
Get PDFoai:ojs.jwsr.pitt.edu:article/79
Cross-Disciplinary Theory in Construction of a World-Historical Archive
Get PDFInterdisciplinary cooperation and collaboration have proven to be desirable yet difficult goals to achieve in social science research. The nuanced differences among the domains, frameworks, assumptions, and methods of the various fields of study that comprise such research often hinder attempts to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue that is both meaningful and productive. We show that demography, economics, political science, and sociology are a few of the fields at the vanguard of the interdisciplinary frontier that emerged following the Second World War. In light of the challenges that these fields (along with the natural sciences) face in initiating and sustaining interdisciplinary dialogue, we aim to accomplish several tasks. First, we seek to describe the theoretical and epistemological linkages among the cores of these four social-science disciplines. Second, we explore systems theory as a potential foundation for interdisciplinary unity. Third, we extrapolate the implications of the systems approach to encompass the study of human populations from multiple disciplinary perspectives. In this vein, we also seek to characterize key features of human populations, parse their functions in various disciplinary contexts, and prospectively identify challenges in data interpretation and analysis that will likely emerge in practice. The ultimate goals of this study are to delineate a set of methodological standards with which to guide interdisciplinary inquiry in the social and natural sciences, and consider how we might implement these standards in the construction of a world-historical data archive.
