I hope the seminar is interesting for you when you are interested in either of these two questions:
1 – How did living conditions change around the world over the course of the last decades and centuries?
2 – How can we use the technological possibilities of the 21st century to present research?
What will the seminar be about?
David Hendry and I just received a grant from the Nuffield Foundation in London that will allow us to expand the web publication OurWorldInData.org over the coming months. We just hired research assistants last week to work on both the content and the web framework of the publication.
In the seminar I would like to discuss with you the ideas for expanding the web publication. I would like to show the current state of the project and present some of the content of the online publication – I’ll present some visualisations to show how poverty, violence and war, political freedom, health, food provision, and education have changed over the last centuries.
Then I want to present the ideas for the future of this web publication and am very interested in your ideas for how to present research today. Much of the current way of presenting our research would have been possible on the day after Gutenberg invented his printing press; how should we change our way of publishing research with the possibilities that the internet offers?
What is OurWorldInData
OurWorldinData.org is a web publication that tells the social, economic, and environmental history of our world up to the present day – based on empirical data and visualized in interactive graphs and maps. The web publication shows how living standards around the world have changed and covers a wide range of topics: Trends in health, food provision, the growth and distribution of incomes, violence, rights, wars, energy use, education, environmental changes and many other aspects are empirically analysed and visualized in this freely available web publication.
For each topic the quality of the data is discussed and, by pointing the visitor to the sources, this website is also a database of databases and can serve as a starting point for your own empirical research. Covering all of these aspects in one resource makes it possible to understand how the observed long-run trends are interlinked.