Friday 9 May 2014

Vienna conference presentation ESSHC

A useful and enjoyable trip to Vienna for the very big European Social Science History Conference. Our presentation Saturday 26 April 2014.
Photos from Twitter by MH Beals of Sheffield University.

Florian and I presented a paper asking what the requirements are for a timeline to be useful to historians, rather than just for simple presentation. Our objective is to make it subtle, sophisticated, capable of representing fundamental aspects of history such as uncertainty. And we want to interrogate the data, not just to show it.

Interesting and useful talks that day were:

Session One
  • Lajos Balint on the causes of Suicide in the Hungarian Kingdom at the Beginning of 20th Century
  • Sebastian Klüsener, Siegfried Gruber, Peter Ekamper, Frans van Poppel, Ian Gregory, Jordi Marti-Henneberg, Luis Silveria and Arne Solli : Spatial Variation in Infant Mortality at an Early Stage of the Longevity Revolution: a Pan-European View in 1910 - showing how national and regional health and childcare policies really made a difference.
  • Grazyna Liczbinska: Mortality Patterns and Health Status among Catholics and Lutherans from Different Ecological and Cultural Centres of 19-century Poland
  • Robert Schwartz, Thomas Thevenin: Improving the Odds: Railways, Agrarian Change, and Infant Mortality in Victorian Britain
  • Nynke van den Boomen, Peter Ekamper: Region, Religion and Infant Death. Geographical Differentiation in Water- and Food borne Infectious Disease Mortality in the Netherlands, 1875-1899
Session Two, including us
  • Stephen Boyd Davis, Florian Kräutli: Scholarly Chronographics: can a Timeline be Useful in Historiography?
  • Sherry Olson: Lifelines in Social Networks: an Irish Catholic Innkeeper in Montreal 1815-1849
  • Mihailo Popovic: Migrant Groups in an Urban and Spatial Context - The Evidence on London as Reflected in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 
  • Richard Sadler on Michigan housing and racism. 
Session Three
  • Daniel Alves, Ana Alcântara : Urban Growth, Retail Trade and Industry: Changes in Lisbon's Social Space in the Late Nineteenth Century
  • Branimir Brgles: Using GIS to Visualize and Interpret Early Modern Zagreb's Urban and Environmental History
  • Don DeBats: Constrasting Identities: The Tale of Two Nineteenth Century American Cities 
  • Diego Ramiro-Fariñas, Isabel del Bosque González, Sara García Ferrero, Lourdes Martín-Forero, Rocío Gutierrez : Cartography and Historical Demography: the Historical SDI of the City of Madrid around 1900
Session 4
  • David Bodenhamer: The Mechanics and Meaning of Deep Mapping
  • John Corrigan: Space, Place, and Data
  • Ian Gregory: Using Digital Texts in Spatial History - particularly interesting in mapping literary observations about the Lake District, especially when he announced that actually none of that interests him much at all!
  • Trevor Harris: Deep Geography-deep Mapping: Spatial Story telling and a Sense of Place