July 2nd meeting

July 2nd meeting

 

Attending: Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin, Béatrice Dedinger, Paul Girard, Guillaume Plique, and Pierre Hollegien.

1-Team Management

Guillaume Plique will be on vacation for 20 days in August and will remain with us until the end of January.

2-Budget

All the budgets are in; Guillaume Daudin must finalize it and prepare the documents for the ANR

3-Ricardo

On Monday 6th and Tuesday 7th, an IT team will work with Paul, Béatrice, Guillaume P. and Guillaume D. on remaining issues on Ricardo visualization platform. This meeting will tackle slight changes (add new options such as “order per name”, “filter”, changing some titles) and the creation of new variables such as the different flows views (estimated, reported, “sum of partners”, world unknown, best guess).

Discussion on persistent issues (sources standardization, view prioritized, etc…) will also take place there.

 

Moreover Béatrice D. will participate to a meeting in October gathering schoolteachers in order to collect opinions and advices for the visualization platform. Yves Poncelet, academic inspector, will assist to this meeting.

 

Finally, Ricardo’s budget is set to 15,000€ for the next three years. Accordingly an intern will be recruited for 4 months (4,500€) to develop and design the website. Paul G. has already found a suitable candidate. The internship should take place from September to December.

4-Retranscription

Two new interns will join the team for two weeks each. Anthony Rebours will join us on July 15th and Elisa Maria Tirindelli should join us later as well.

Guillaume D. might also enroll another intern but some issues remain.

 

Transcription from Bayonne, Rennes, Rouen, Caen and the Colonies must be reviewed by Loïc but are completed.

Thasectra is implementing data from Marseille. Next they should deal with La Rochelle 1789.

 

Besancon and a part of Lyon will be inputted by Anthony Rebours.  Currently Cyril Mouton is working on colonial flows and Elisa Maria Tirindelli should work on data available for 1792.

5-A new tool for visualization: Neo4J

Neo4J is a graph database that must enable us to visualize flows according to their characteristics (import/exports, direction, commodity, etc…). Guillaume P. and Paul G. have been working only for a short while but they manage to make a demonstration with 10,000 flows. In our case we cannot use a relational database since the type of flow (location where it was recorded, year, etc…) can change the characteristics we attribute to one commodity. We thus need to use a network structure.

Remaining problems:

  • Products from Belgium customs and the Sund are mixed in our database è we must integrate metadata for each commodity that enable us to know the source.
  • How to enable the user to add corrections:
    • Integrate a filter combine with an orthographic search
    • The system works only with 3 columns : the distribution key that must remain unchanged, the selected column on which we are applying corrections, and finally the column following the selected one (to match with classifications)

Neo4J will be tested for the next week in order to come up with solutions to the remaining issues. We will then draft a final version.

 

 

To help with unit standardization, Loïc C. has found an interesting book giving information on measures used in south-west of France.

 

Next meeting is scheduled at 2 pm, at the Médialab on July 20th. It will be a small-committee one where we will discuss of the various tools required. Another meeting is scheduled on September 10th at 2pm at the médialab.

Publication special issue on early trade statistics

At last the special issue is out ! It is available here: http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/publications/revue140.php

 

Thank you to all contributors !

 

Trade statistics are a unique source to broaden our understanding of
early-modern economies and their evolution. Still, they have been
under-utilized by researchers.
This volume features a detailed panorama of early-modern trade statistics’
sources and discusses some of the ways they can be used to study the
transformation of European commerce and economies in the late-eighteenth
and early nineteenth century. It is of special interest for both economists
and historians interested in the period of the first Industrial Revolution.
In this special issue, Loïc Charles and Guillaume Daudin have gathered an
wide-ranging list of scholars, experts in the economic history of
early-modern trade from several countries.
This volume include twenty-three short essays discussing the various
available sources on trade data, as well as seven additional research
papers. In total, it provides information on thirty five coun tries or
areas. As to the research articles, three of them discuss methodological
issues regarding the use of early trade statistics, and the remaining four
others actually use some of these trade statistics to produce new insights.

The contributors to this volume are: Loïc Charles, Daniela Ciccolella, Ann
Coenen, Javier Cuenca-Esteban, Guillaume Daudin, Béatrice Dedinger,
Jean-Pierre Dedieu, Jari Eloranta, Hubert Escaith, Mathieu Grenet, Ragnhild
Hutchinson, Alejandra Irigoin, David Jacks, Aidan Kane, Klemens Kaps,
Szymon Kazusek, Lauri Karvonen, Jan Kochanowski, Cristian Luca, Silvia
Marzagalli, Maria Cristina Moreira, Jari Ojala, Ulrich Pfister, Luisa
Piccinno, Philipp Robinson Rössner, Werner Scheltjens, Donatella Strangio,
Eoin Tennisman, Giovanna Tonelli, Jeroen van der Vliet, Patrick Walsh,
Klaus Weber, and Andrea Zanini.

Edited by Loic Charles and Guillaume Daudin
<http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/pages-chercheurs/daudin.htm>

Publisher: Les Editions du net
<http://www.leseditionsdunet.com/3429-n-140-eighteenth-century-international-trade-statistics-sources-and-methods–9782312033785.html>

En savoir plus <http://www.ofce.sciences-po.fr/publications/revue140.php>