I’m an old school archival historian flirting with the digital side like a drunk in a bar – ie. without any skill set to speak of. So here goes with my pick up line …

I’m interested in academic networks in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As we know, academic careers are highly mobile, but traditional archives tend to lock such individuals in national frames of reference.

I’ll bring with me a pretty messy set of excel files that detail the career trajectories of professors at the universities of Cape Town, Manchester, Sydney, and Toronto in the period 1850-1939.  They include information about the place of birth, study, and work of about 400 individuals. I had a pretty amateur stab at qualitative analysis here Pietsch – ‘Wandering Scholars’ JHG (2010)

I’d like to learn more about ways that some of the data I’ve gathered could be visualised. It’s probably not detailed enough to do much with networks, but does tell us about movement between different institutions.

It could all end badly, but whaddyasay?