![\"Colin](\"http:\/\/www.yorku.ca\/yfile\/photos\/20120105\/\/colin20coates.jpg\")
<\/p>\nA ¿ì²¥ÊÓƵ research team will comb through digitized 19th-century documents to trace the environmental and economic consequences of international commodity trading during the 19th century.<\/p>\n
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Led by Professor Colin Coates (left)<\/strong>, Canada Research Chair\u00a0in Canadian Cultural Landscapes and professor of Canadian Studies at Glendon College,\u00a0the\u00a0project is expected to cast light on the impacts of an earlier period of economic \u201cglobalization\u201d as a way of better understanding the challenges of current practices.\u00a0It is one of eight projects across Canada that has been granted funding in the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge.<\/p>\n Fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States have been awarded grants to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to \u201cbig data\u201d to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists and librarians from leading universities worldwide.<\/p>\n Coates, who is also the director of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York, is one of the principal investigators on the project titled Trading Consequences,\u00a0which received $125,000 in funding. The project\u00a0will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the 19th century and\u00a0employs information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents from the 19th century. This innovative digital resource will allow historians to discover novel patterns and to explore new hypotheses through\u00a0structured query and a variety of visualization tools.<\/p>\n \"Our team of environmental historians is excited to be partners with the Universities of Edinburgh and St. Andrews in the Trading Consequences project. Canadian economic development has historically been defined by commodity flows, and it is important to understand the environmental impacts of this commerce in the past, just as it is today. The focus on Canadian data will test the techniques created through this collaborative project for mapping the scope and impact of international trade in the 19th century,\" said Coates.<\/p>\n \u201cYork is proud to receive recognition in the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge,\u201d said Robert Hach\u00e9, York\u2019s vice-president research & innovation.\u00a0\u201cThese important research projects advance knowledge as researchers work collaboratively and internationally to find new ways to analyze, search for and store data using digital and electronic technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Digging into Data Challenge is an international initiative that enables Canadian researchers to take advantage of the huge digital resources now available and to develop close partnerships with overseas universities,\u201d said Chad Gaffield, president of the Social Sciences\u00a0& Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). \u201cThese exciting projects cross both disciplines and national borders; they lead to new insights into human thought and behaviour.\u201d<\/p>\n The successful cohort of\u00a0projects received a total of nearly $5 million in funding from eight international research funding agencies. SSHRC\u2019s contribution of\u00a0$869,117 will support Canadian researchers from eight of the fourteen teams.<\/p>\n