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Projects Memo Towards
a world wide infrastructure for economic-historical research?
Economic-historical research is to a large extent based on databases constructed by economic historians (in fact, one of our qualities is that we know how to produce 'new' data). Data on historical national accounts, wages and prices, historical-demography, monetary phenomena (interest rates, money supply, exchange rates), heights (from ancient skeletons to 20th century recruits), governments expenditures and taxation, international trade and capital flows, and so on and so forth, form the backbone of our kind of research. The creation of a database often is the most labour intensive part of a project, and its quality to a large extent determines the quality of its outcomes. Yet, after the publication of the results of a research project, most datasets tend to be neglected, and remain the sole property of is author. Some scholars tend to monopolise access to their data - or even worse, prefer to throw the data away or store them in such a way that they are inaccessible for other researchers. This state of affairs makes it often very difficult to do international-comparative research, or more in general to build upon the work that often have done before. Historical national accounting offers an example of how it can be organized differently. Angus Maddison has for more than one generation been the focal point of this branch of research. He knew everyone working in this field, stimulated it enormously (he always might ask you: what did you do for GDP this week?), and above all collected the results of the work of all these scholars himself, compared them internationally, and published the results of this endeavour once every ten years or so. This gave an enormous impulse to this kind of research, and created a framework for international comparative work that is one of the strongest sub-disciplines in our field. Given the possibilities of the internet, one may nowadays think of more efficient (and transparent) ways to bring these data together and publish international-comparative results. Given the internet, we can perhaps try to realize the same objectives in the following way: we need central hubs in the networks of economic-historical research that concentrate - as Angus Maddison did - on the collection, storage and publication of relevant data bases from a certain sub-discipline. This means, to begin with, that the rule has to be introduced that researchers make their databases accessible to others, at least once the most important publications based on these data have appeared. They either do this on a site at their own research institute (with a hyperlink to the relevant 'hub'), or send the data, and a description of the way in which they are collected and constructed, to the 'hub', which then makes it accessible to all. This 'hub' may be a group of scholars who specialize in this field - for example the 'pupils' of Maddison at Groningen University - who organize workshops and conferences on the topic, and publish once every ten years a review of the state of the art of the discipline. On the one hand this means a large investment in maintaining and extending the databases, and publishing the results of their comparative work. On the other hand, the benefits of being such a hub are also substantial, especially when their publications are going to be considered the standard of this sub-discipline (again, think of the influence of the work of Maddison). For individual scholars this would mean that via the internet they would get access to the data bases in a particular field, which would enhance the prospects of international-comparative research enormously. This idea has been discussed at a round table at the XIIIth World Economic History Congress that was held in Buenos Aires in 2002. It found a lot of support, although there was also some doubt whether the idea would work in practice (see the summary of discussion). Four colleagues are now prepared to work out the idea in practice and set up a hub: Jan-Pieter Smits and his colleagues from the Groningen Growth and Development Center are already developing a hub in the field of historical national accounting: www.eco.rug.nl/ggdc/index-dseries.html, and also the personal webpage of Angus Maddison: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/ Jörg
Baten from the University of Tuebingen is designing two different
hubs, one on the anthropometric history, the other on the econometric
history of firms and capital markets (see his personal webpage at David Mitch (University of Maryland) is working on a hub about education and human capital formation (see www.umbc.edu/economics/faculty_cv/mitch.html Jan Luiten van Zanden (Utrecht University/International Institute of Social History) has developed a hub on the history of prices and wages; see www.iisg.nl/hpw/ The purpose of this memo is to formulate some of the 'rules of the game', and to consider next steps. In the introduction a few rules have been formulated already: a hub is a website with databases from a certain sub-discipline of economic-historical research (and with links to websites on which similar data are being published), managed by a scholar who is actively involved in the collection and analysis of those data. Other scholars working in this field are asked to put their data on this website, or to publish them in another form on the internet and create a link to the hub. Ideally the hub is embedded in a larger network of specialists working in this field, organizing regular academic meetings. It is not feasible to develop very detailed rules; they may vary, and change over time when experience with their organization increases. But an important rule is that hubs should also create the possibility to store certain databases under embargo. Scholars who are still working on a particular project might want to postpone final publication of their data on internet. The rule we would like to introduce here is that data can be stored under embargo: they are included on a list of available datasets, indicating when they will become part of the public domain. A crucial part of the strategy is to convince editorial boards of leading journals to make the publication of data underlying papers published by them obligatory. I would like to start this discussion with the editors of the most important journals: the Journal of Economic History, the Economic History Review, the European Review of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History. Depending on the outcome of these exchanges the following steps could be taken:
I ask the Executive Committee to endorse these steps. Moreover, I would like to ask the EC to co-finance the second option, i.e. the organization of a meeting with editors of the four most important journals (and the 'managers' of the four hubs). I can probably raise half the funds necessary for the meeting (about 5.000 euros) myself; the other half might then be financed by the IEHA. For further information, please send an email to: Jan Luiten van Zanden |
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