CHIA
The Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA, formed 2011) links academic and research institutions in North America and Europe—with ties to institutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. CHIA’s key contributions are data linkage (for data analysis in general) and a global archive (to permit historical analysis on a global scale).
Mission
The long-term purpose of CHIA is to sustain a Human System Data Resource, linking variables to analyze many areas of human experience.
CHIA has three basic structures. Global Data Submission (GDS) incorporates data, relying on Data Hoover to “sweep up” data but also survey data holders and evaluate incoming datasets. World-Historical Dataverse (WHD) is the public archive of CHIA, a curated set of datasets, preserved and documented on the Harvard Dataverse archival platform (Level 1 documentation). The Human System Data Resource (HSDR) links datasets, relying on documentation of datasets, supported by the Col*Fusion infrastructure. (Level 2 documentation). CHIA circulates datasets through GDS, WHD, and HSDR until they contribute to multi-scale analyses.
CHIA builds and tests theory. It creates robust ontologies to facilitate data linkage, then CHIA has chosen global inequality as a key topic for building global historical analysis.
Featured Activities
Journal of World Historical Information
Data Hoover
Social Inequality
Col*Fusion
World-Historical Gazetteer
News, Events, Announcements
Patrick Manning delivers 2017 AHA presidential address on “Inequality”
American Historical Association President Patrick Manning delivered the Presidential Address at the 2017 Annual Meeting. The videotaped address, titled “Inequality: Historical and Disciplinary Approaches”, was delivered on Friday, January 6th in Denver, Colorado. An article with the full text of the address appears in the February 2017 issue of the American Historical Review.
Call for Contributions – submit data and documents
The submission process begins at the “Submit” button on the CHIA home page. CHIA invites contributors to submit historical datasets and documents to the CHIA archive. Data files may be of any size up to 100 megabytes and may be in any format: text, tables, or images. Contributors may be scholars in any field of humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and information science.
Ruth Mostern, CHIA co-PI, accepts directorship of World History Center
Ruth Mostern has accepted the position of Director of the World History Center (www.worldhistory.pitt.edu) and Associate Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh, beginning in academic year 2017-2018. Prof. Mostern, a founding member and co-PI of CHIA, is a specialist in spatial history and in history of China. She has been Associate Professor of History at the University of California – Merced.).
Drwenski – Manning chapter on African inequality
Patrick Manning and Pitt PhD candidate Matt Drwenski co-authored a chapter, “The Differences of Inequality in Africa,” in a major collective work reviewing Thomas Piketty’s analysis of capital and inequality: Pat Hudson and Keith Tribe, eds., The Contradictions of Capital in the Twenty-First Century: The Piketty Opportunity (Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing, 2016), pp. ___.