New PhD student in chronographics

A new PhD student has started this week with me at the Royal College of Art, working on timewise visualisation and building on the pioneering work of Florian Kräutli. He is Sam Cottrell.  Before coming to the RCA he was Application Engineer at InfoAsset, and then Product Manager at Interica, managing software development, initiating new products and championing the needs of the user.

Sam at the top of High Wheeldon (a conical hill in the UK Peak District)

Sam's previous education was in geology at Royal Holloway University of London, where he took both his bachelor's and master's degrees. The research at the RCA is a collaboration with The National Archives, where Sam's supervisor is Dr Sonia Ranade. His research complements the AHRC-funded Big Data project Traces through Time led by The National Archives in partnership with the Institute of Historical Research, King's College London, Brighton University and the University of Leiden, which aims to identify and link individuals across large historical datasets spanning a wide timeframe. A key output of that project will be the identification of relationships between individuals in different datasets across time, including the "fuzziness" and varying levels of confidence that are a feature of historical data.