Humanity and technology: In conversation with Jo Guldi
Friday 08 Jul 2022
Time: 15:30 - 19:30
Bio
Emma Griffin is a Professor of Modern British History at the UEA. She is the author of several books, the editor of the Historical Journal, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Emma was educated at London and Cambridge and is now based at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of four books, most recently Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the British Industrial Revolution, published by Yale UP in 2013, as well as many articles, essays and reviews in both academic and non-academic publications. Her current project is focused on women and work in Victorian Britain and explores the emotions of family life and the origins and consequences of low female pay.
Research interests
Emma is a Co-I on the Living with Machines project. Her particular interest in the project is exploring how data science can help scholars to make sense of the vast amount of historical data available for Victorian Britain. The inaugural census of 1801 took a head count of Britain’s population, and subsequent censuses held at ten-yearly intervals, gathered increasingly intricate information about where individuals lived, where they had been born, the people they lived with, and the jobs they performed.
Along with the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, this provides us with billions of data points – an unparalleled trove of information about the lives of people during the world’s first industrial revolution. Most of the sources that the project will work with are well known to historians, but historians don’t by training have the skills to work with very large datasets. Much of Emma's contribution to the project involves collaborating with data-scientists to develop effective ways of probing this vast collection of records.
