Please join us via Zoom at 5pm on February 24, 2021 for our next presentation in the Digital Humanities Series, a partnership of Meriam Library and the Humanities Center.
https://csuchico.zoom.us/j/
The growth of trade and increasingly complex financial practices in early modern Europe called for the development and spread of sophisticated accounting tools such as the use of double-entry bookkeeping. Account books not only show larger economic trends, they provided a medium in which relations between individuals and even family members were negotiated. However, the use of multiple non-decimal currencies severely complicates the use of ready-made digital tools for analysis and visualization of these sources. This talk will discuss my path to creating an R package that makes it possible to integrate non-decimal currencies into digital humanities methodologies. The use of a programming language such as R provides the flexibility necessary to solve the often very niche problems encountered by historians, while also increasing the visibility of such issues by using the methods of reproducible research.
Jesse Sadler is currently a visiting professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. He received a Ph.D. in European History from UCLA in 2015 and has taught at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. His research combines archival sources and Digital Humanities to investigate the familial basis of the early modern capitalism. He is currently working on a manuscript that argues for the significance of sibling relationships and inheritance in the development of early modern trade.