I am a third year graduate student in the history department where I focus on African history. I am currently pursuing research on animal skins and leatherwork in twentieth-century West Africa. Most of my research is focused in Ghana, though I have taken brief research trips to Burkina Faso and Togo.
I am participating in CHI because I am broadly interested in the digital humanities, especially in its applications for historical research. Last year, as part of the CHI fellowship, I completed a project called Africa’s Imperial Commodities, a digital history project that explores export data from Africa to Europe. I consider this project my foray into trade data and its possible applications in teaching world history and conducting historical research.
This year, I am excited to be back in the fellowship. I have a couple ideas for extending what I learned last year. The first is mapping the flow of commodities from Africa to enable spatial analysis. Additionally, it would be great to construct a map that incorporates time increments. The second is publishing a dataset that I created with internal African trade statistics from the colonial period. I compiled the dataset from customs records produced along the Volta River in the Gold Coast colony during the early twentieth century. This dataset could facilitate research into the history of internal trade, a topic not as thoroughly explored as external trade.
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