Sustainable data technologies have much potential for contemporary research, as attested by Michael Schiltz’s experience. A lecturer in International History at the Graduate Institute until September 2018, Professor Schiltz is now working for the Modern Japanese Studies Program at Hokkaido University, Japan. At the Institute, he was also the digital preservationist and curator of “Capital Markets of the World”. This extensive database of a large financial history archive – originally compiled by the study service of Crédit Lyonnais – has also proved useful for his forthcoming book.
Professor Schiltz has used online digital tools, in this case, GitHub, in order to catalogue this immense archive, so that it may be used by current and future researchers. His motivation for doing so comes from the concern about being able to create sustainable data management technologies due to the particular vulnerability of digital information to data loss, especially in situations of crisis or simply of change. Moreover, there are advantages afforded by this particular platform in terms of continuity of the cataloguing process, guaranteed long-term storage of the information, and access to it globally. The archive is extensive; it contains over 6,500 bound volumes and an indefinite number of unbound volumes and papers, estimated at over 15,000 at present. With the use of this digital platform, Professor Schiltz has organised the database by each market, including relevant metadata and, quite uniquely, a list of secondary sources about each market in order to facilitate the work of future researchers.
Professor Schiltz opines that the archive will be very relevant for research that seeks to investigate the truly international dimension of financial markets and the interconnectedness of global financial centres. From his familiarity with the archive, he identifies the potential to investigate further the role of financial institutions at the vanguard of imperialism, and the inner workings of how banks used financial information about trading, resources and stock markets. The archive may also be relevant to the studies of financial crises, because the database allows easy comparison between various markets and reveals the networked nature of these institutions and their influence in such situations.
The database has been useful for Professor Schiltz’s own research for his forthcoming monograph, “On an Even Keel”: Silver Risk, Trade Finance, and Hedging Strategies around the Turn of the Twentieth Century. In this project, he argues against a predominant idea among some economic historians who fail to recognise that hedging strategies existed in the late 19th century and present them as a recent phenomenon. His book empirically shows how such practices did exist through a study of trade between Europe and Asia after the 1870s, particularly Japan, China, India and Mongolia. The North China Herald’s list of exchange quotes available in the database was for example of particular interest for this research.
Commenting the future of research and the place of digital technologies, Professor Schiltz believes that since there is an increasing impulse toward open-source, research-sharing platforms, it is important to work with ethical and well-developed digital tools that facilitate this process. New platforms are being developed that allow the sharing of datasets, works in progress and even archival data with citable references and DOIs. They thus underscore the relevance of such sources as well as the work that has gone into examining and locating them, and hence recognise the contribution of the scholar. Perhaps this will create a basis for a new kind of research, adapted to the realities of a post-Gutenberg world: a world in which data- and code-sharing is self-evident, if only because of mounting demands for reproducibility and integrity. Of course, this will not be an easy feat. It will, among others, redefine existing notions of authorship and intellectual property. Ultimately, it will address questions that have been at the core of scientific inquiry since its very beginnings: the notion of falsification, the relationship between authorship and authority, and the nature of truth itself.
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Read also this article by Professor Schiltz on wartime and post-war economies in Japan
By Aditya Kiran Kakati, PhD candidate in International History and Anthropology and Sociology.