Sub-Project An Integrated Web-Based Information And Analysis System For Historic Geodata: The Case of Lloyd’s Lists (MC 12.2)

Project Leader: Alexander Zipf

Since the late seventeenth century, the shipping newspaper Lloyd’s List and its direct predecessors contain weekly and later daily information on global shipping. The core of the Lists’ mostly tabular contents is formed by the categories “Shipping Intelligence”, “Speakings”, “Foreign Mail”, “Casualities”, and “War”. Especially, the first two categories are essential in our case. “Shipping Intelligence” consists of exhaustive lists of the arrivals, departures and other nautical activities of civilian ships in practically all important ports of the world. The “Speakings” list sightings of ships at the high seas and give both the sighted and the reporting ship with name and geographical coordinates. Geoprocessing the spatiotemporal Lloyd’s Lists data on the movement of people, goods and information onboard of nineteenth-century ships vividly brings to life the migrational, commercial and, thus, cultural circuits and networks that powered contemporary processes of globalization. This project provided a much-needed spatiotemporal background about (to name but a few) the transformation of global communication and transport spaces or the oceans as distinct zones of social interaction. To this end, the project implemented two specific measures: first, an innovative spatiotemporal Historical Geographical Information Systems (HGIS) architecture – initially geared to the analysis of Lloyd's Lists – was developed. The information contained in the Lists was prepared for digitalization and fed into a database; second, specific geographic analysis methods and spatiotemporal cluster detection tools were developed. These used the “Speakings” and “Shipping Intelligence” data as case studies to build an interactive system that allows the user to explore manifold historical data sources (beyond the test- and showcase of Lloyd’s Lists) within a spatiotemporal context.