Congratulations to Uta Hinrichs and Aaron Quigley on the launch of their trading consequences project. Trading Consequences charts the commercial growth of the British Empire and it details the economic and environmental impact of shipping valuable commodities such as building materials, tea, fruit and spices. This is the culmination of two years of effort in which eleven million pages of text were processed, resulting in a 150 gigabyte database. People can explore our visualisations, generated from the data, which help to make the historical findings more accessible. Sources included British and Canadian Government documents, newspapers from around the world, books and journals.
The project has been led by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with the Universities of St Andrews and Saskatchewan and York University, Canada. The EDINA national data centre at University of Edinburgh has stored information garnered in the study. The two-year project forms part of Digging into Data, a wider initiative by Jisc, the UK’s digital information body. The work is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
To find out more, please go to:  http://tradingconsequences.blogs.edina.ac.uk/