Title: Combining the Local and Global Scales: London’s Nineteenth Century ‘Ghost Acres’
Abstract: Digital history methods make it possible to explore globalization in the nineteenth century at the local and global level. Five-feet-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps of Greater London record the industry in circa 1870 and 1895, providing a means to identify the major industries in the metropolis. During the nineteenth century the soap, candle, leather, biscuit, drug and construction industries all grew well beyond the limits of the local environment to supply all their raw materials, so they turned to overseas ‘ghost acres.’ Soap and candle makers became dependent first on Russian tallow and then west African palm oil and tallow from the growing sheep herds in Australia and New Zealand. The leather industry required skins and hides from all over the world and a growing range of tannins to overcome the local scarcity of oak bark. Biscuits relied on imported flour, sugar and edible oils. The drug industry needed opium and cinchona bark. House builders required timber from Canada and northern Europe. Linking a GIS database of London’s industry with a qualitative database of British imports and a text-mined database of commodities in the British world provides a new methodologies to identify and follow these relationships during the long nineteenth century.
Bio: Dr. Jim Clifford’s many contributions to environmental history, historical GIS, and the digital humanities are only surpassed by his dedication to public engagement and Active History, particularly through the very successful Canadian History blog of the same name. His keynote lecture will encourage practitioners and policymakers to think across larger scales, just as it will encourage academics to develop projects that have the ability to speak truth to power. In 2018-2019, Dr. Clifford was Director of the Historical GIS lab at the University of Saskatchewan, and in this role he offers outstanding leadership in digital humanities project and data development.
Applied Geospatial Research in Public Policy (AGRiPP)
An academic-practitioner dialogue on tools-creation, training, and the social politics of mapping
In October 2019, the UPEI program in Applied Communication, Leadership & Culture (ACLC) will host a workshop on new tools and training in the digital humanities, with a specific focus on geospatial data, research, and regional development. Participants will come together to present new research and to ask a series of questions about the history and capacity of geospatial research in the region. These participatory sessions will explore several core questions including:
What are some of the robust datasets and digitized collections available for digital humanities in the region?
Who developed the region’s long run and geospatial data, and who is using it today?
What social, economic, and ecological indicators do the data and collections support, and what others are important to develop?
How can humanities training and geospatial research help our community tell better stories and make better policies for the region?
How can new humanities and geospatial research in Atlantic Canada help us understand and integrate multiple ways of knowing, including Traditional Ecological Knowledge?
The workshop will be held 3-5 October, 2019 in Charlottetown, and is organized by both ACLC and the new Canada Research Chair’s lab for GeoREACH: Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History. ACLC is dedicated to applied humanities training, and the GeoLab is building geospatial research capacity for the region, including a study of the indicators that support a robust environmental history in Atlantic Canada.
The two-day event will include specialized keynote presentations and smaller workshops with experts from across the Atlantic region and beyond. The organizers will collect feedback from participants on the content of the presentations and workshops to help design an online resource for public administrators to support digital literacy and digital mapping for public policy. Speakers will articulate how their research can contribute to day-to-day public administration and policy-related decision making, thereby supporting knowledge transfer between academia to public administration. The workshop’s transdisciplinary and multi-sector approach will bring practitioners and academics together to build understandings and resources aimed at building a better Atlantic Region.
This is a particularly fitting time and location for this gathering. UPEI is celebrating its 50th anniversary, but 2019 also marks the semicentennial of a major Federal-Provincial Comprehensive Development Plan that caused significant social and ecological changes in PEI. Several invited speakers have agreed to help provide context for the history of regional development and planning, as well as new digital humanities projects and the ways that government understands data in the policy innovation process today.
Confirmed speakers include:
Paul Ledwell, PEI Deputy Minister of Policy Priorities and Intergovernmental and Public Affairs
Dr. Tina Loo, Professor of History, University of British Columbia
Thursday, 3 October, 7-9pm, public keynote at Beaconsfield Museum, Charlottetown, by Dr. Ed MacDonald
Friday, 4 October, 8am-5pm, sessions on knowledge transfer, regional assets, and “doing” geospatial research. Lunch and refreshments will be provided for registered guests.
Saturday, 5 October, 9am-3pm, sessions on the state of digital humanities research and training. Lunch on-your-own at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market, will be followed by a concluding session on grant applications and next steps.
Registration Fee: $40
For more information please contact Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities at jdmacfadyen@upei.ca
The GeoREACH Lab supports Geospatial Research in Atlantic Canadian History and other projects of the Applied, Communications, Leadership & Culture (ACLC) program in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prince Edward Island.
The GeoREACH Team in Fall 2019. (L-R Amirah, Abby, Alexandra, Nolan, and Josh)
The Director of the lab is Dr. Joshua MacFadyen, Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities and faculty member in the ACLC program. In 2019 the lab members included UPEI students Choyce Chappell, Bailey Clark, Abby Craswell, Nolan Kressin, and Amirah Oyesegun, visiting student and Killam Fellow Alexandra Neumann, and former student Nick Scott.
The Lab’s current projects focus on the history of food and agriculture in Canada, and we study the ways that the modern food system has shaped our relationships with animals and the land. Prince Edward Island was a relative late adapter of modern industrial agriculture, and in many ways it is still going through this profound social-ecological transition. This presents an opportunity to interview, map, and otherwise study the causes and impacts of agro-ecosystem transformation in one place over time.
In 2020 students are working on several studies including:
The Hedgerow Project
The Back 50 Project (on how Prince Edward Islanders valued landscapes and remember how they changed in the half-century since the 1969 Comprehensive Development Plan)
The Hedgerow Project (on hedgerows, fields, and land use in the 20th century)
The “Average Beasts” Project (on mapping domestic animals and biomass in the energy transition)
Other energy transitions in Canadian history
In spring 2019, Alex MacIsaac wrote an article about the GeoREACH Lab. Check it out here
In December 2019, Zac Metcalfe featured GeoLab Director Dr Josh MacFadyen in Rural Delivery magazine. Check out the article here.
