Jo Guldi | Emory University (original) (raw)
'It can be said that Jo Guldi is a traditional historian and that she is not a traditional historian at all. She is traditional because her subjects are, when she studies topics such as the history of British ideas about property rights or the history of the landscape, the land and the water. But she is anything but traditional because she is a scholar who uses machine learning and other big data methods to approach traditional humanities concerns. She is a historian of her time, someone who argues that a world awash in text requires new interpretative tools, that can reconcile the quantitative approaches of data science with the nuanced approach of traditional history, an “hybrid knowledge.”' So writes Anaclet Pons in an interview for Politika: https://www.politika.io/fr/article/historical-research-and-digital-methods-in-conversation-with-jo-guldi
I am currently acting professor in the Department of Quantitative Methods and the AI/Humanity Initiative at Emory University, although I have been a professor of History for most of the past fifteen years, during which I was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Hans Rothfels Chair at Brown University, and was tenured and promoted as a professor of History at Southern Methodist University.
In North American departments of History, I am known for starting a debate over the urgency of history as a tool for of engaging long time-scales and digital methods, an approach that I urged in the prize-winning pamphlet The History Manifesto, which was read and debated in History departments across North and South America and Europe. The book prompted a shift in the kinds of historical research pursued in universities. Before 2014, the vast majority of output from Anglo-American universities pursued ‘microhistorical’ questions over the span of months and years, since 2014, a notable shift has occurred in which even young historians are reaching towards more expansive questions, pursuing their topics over decades and centuries, and so answering deeper questions about governance, justice, and evolution of ideas.
In Europe, where there has been a wider pattern of investment in humanities data over recent decades, I am usually introduced as the founder of the field of Digital History. Seven years ago, supported by a $1 million NSF grant, I founded a lab dedicated to realizing the application of digital technology to the problem of understanding temporal experience over short-term and long-term time scales. My research and teaching has been consumed by the problem of understanding change over time through the method of text mining for historical analysis, where the scholar computationally counts words to discern patterns of change in concepts, social hierarchy, and politics over time.
I also maintain a variety of research interests in the history of political economy, the history of property rights and land use, and the use of participatory data for environmental and democratic reform.
Supervisors: James Vernon, Gregory Nagy, Adrian Johns, and John Stilgoe
Address: 36 Eagle Row, 5th Floor
Atlanta, GA 30322
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Papers by Jo Guldi
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majoriti... more This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majorities, such as the agrarian models embraced by Ireland and Mexico. Postwar social scientists influenced by Doreen Warriner frequently assumed that post-colonial nations would choose the agrarian model, emphasizing the redistribution of land. The chapter discusses appropriate technology, which featured an intellectual set of ideas about how and why small-scale technology should play a key role on small farms across the developing world. It clarifies how appropriate technology was identified with the idea of the small farmer in the post-colonial world. The farmer's relationship to land as an owner was created by mid-century redistribution programs like the ones designed in India, which worked in direct contrast with the formulae for economic development promoted by many U.S. economists that promoted technological investment.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter discusses the interpretation of the politics and utopianism of a bibliography, which... more This chapter discusses the interpretation of the politics and utopianism of a bibliography, which requires a careful reading of its pedestrian genre as it is easily overlooked as a tool of making myths and destroying memories. The chapter recounts how the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began collecting a library and issuing bibliographies, becoming a publisher of pamphlets, books, and maps of increasing number and ambition. Beginning in 1952, the organization began issuing a monthly bulletin of agricultural statistics that surveyed the agricultural production of the nations of the world. The chapter highlights how the FAO's commitments to supporting bibliography mirrored the mood of the time, but they would also help to create and drive a culture marked by the relentless production of research. FAO came to oversee the development of bibliographies that attempted to provide an overview of new research related to land redistribution and modern farming.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter describes writing, maps, and other devices of paper as instruments of power, as only... more This chapter describes writing, maps, and other devices of paper as instruments of power, as only the few could read in colonial India and most nations under British rule. During the Raj, and for many centuries before it, written laws tended to reflect the values of these literate few. The chapter talks about Indian economists and American observers that agreed on the historical role of paper under colonization: Britain's regime of paper documentation and regulation of the economy favored the colonizer. It analyzes the need for maps in developing nations, which attracted the notice of the United Nations. The administrators at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization attempted to contrive a plan that would support farmers and peasants around the world in creating an open system of land governance, capable of supporting a global redistribution of land.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture O... more This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. It considers the movement of FAO from Quebec to Rome as a symbol of its founders' desires to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. The chapter discusses how advocates of redistribution at the FAO labored through the 1950s to create an international organization largely concerned with land and invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. The FAO was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let There Be Bread,” being charged with the explicit mission of defending and feeding peasants around the world.
A history undergraduate places aside her work on an assignment for a few hours to surf the Web, a... more A history undergraduate places aside her work on an assignment for a few hours to surf the Web, and what she sees there worries her. It always troubles her, because her conscience keeps asking her how to connect her work with the world outside the university. She thinks of herself as a reformer, and corruption, pollution, and inequality rock her sense of justice. What can she do to learn about the levers of change, to talk to the public about how they work, to develop a cadre of students trained to think about such things? The answers that her teachers give can be summed up in one disappointing word: focus. Focus her questions; focus on her archival sources. University training, she will hear in many of her courses, is about developing professional expertise in analysing evidence, not answering the big questions. While sophistication with data about the past is well and good for learning to ask precise, academic questions and how to answer them, sometimes our student wonders when an...
Inside Sources, 2022
At COP27, delegates frittered away a long and expensive opportunity for states to do something. T... more At COP27, delegates frittered away a long and expensive opportunity for states to do something. Today, the most specific and efficient plans for addressing climate change require national regulation in the form of land-use planning. These plans have the power to limit emissions and avert catastrophe. But enacting them requires using conferences like COP 27 to amplify states' power over how land is used. Land-use planning is hardly a radical solution; it's part of the story of building codes and utilities planning in most modern countries over the last century. The hand of government regulation is familiar in many other parts of everyday life, including the speed limit on roads and the requirement that all new buildings have roofs and running water. There's also a deep history of international cooperation around land management where the United Nations has taken an active role in previous generations. In the middle of the 20th century, some administrators at the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) noticed that a global wave of postcolonial rebellions was bringing with it demands for reparations in land to correct the land confiscations of European empires in centuries past. This op-ed connects urgent issues around climate governance to my new book, The Long Land War (2022)
Medium, 2022
Excerpt from The Long Land War (Yale 2022)
Medium, 2022
Excerpt from The Long Land War (Yale 2022)
Medium, 2022
Keynote address to the Global Land Forum, Jordan, 2022. The Long Land War is the century-long st... more Keynote address to the Global Land Forum, Jordan, 2022. The Long Land War is the century-long struggle of poor people for control over their territory. The history of colonial violence is very long. From the sixteenth century to the twentieth, conquest the seizure of land form part of the story of every continent visited by European powers. Exploitation, genocide, and permanent apartheid followed. From 1881 to 1974, legislation after legislation, court after court, and institution after institution effectively redefined land not as private commodity to be bought and sold, but as a special kind of property: a property whose value was defined by inhabitation.
A Program for Democratic Ecology 1. Marches. Perhaps marches are the most familiar elements of cu... more A Program for Democratic Ecology 1. Marches. Perhaps marches are the most familiar elements of current movements, but many are short term and disconnected from clear, achievable policy demands in comparison with meaningful historical precursors. The March for Science, the People's Climate March, and the actions of Extinction Rebellion have dramatized in different ways a popular demand for coordinated action. Vinoba's march to collect donations of land for the poor, however, created lasting change, in part, by the duration of its span: his pilgrimage for occupancy rights lasted twenty years. 2. Rent strikes. Coordinated strikes, by organizing the mass withholding of capital, have the deserved reputation of forcing elites into action. Historically, rent strikes precipitated almost every period in which rent control became policy, from Ireland in 1881 forward. Strikes today have but one corollary in climate action: Europe's round of "school strikes" by schoolchildren protesting climate inaction on the model pioneered by Greta Thunberg in 2019. However moving, school strikes do not represent a mass diversion of capital, and are therefore less attached to immediate outcomes or changes of policy. Would rent strikes to turn apartment complexes solar be effective? Would tax strikes, on a county-or statewide basis, succeed in shifting climate policies? 3. Squatting. In 1945 and again in 1968, Britons used squatting to dramatize a housing crisis and shame the state into taking action. In India and Peru, squatting gave a voice to indigenous people and workers. Today, climate refugees are rejected at the border, hidden away in camps, and forced to risk their lives through perilous crossings. What
The Long Land War. I grew up in Texas, two generations off… | by jo gu...
This article explores the promise of institutions and infrastructures associated with democracy t... more This article explores the promise of institutions and infrastructures associated with democracy to limit the worst consequences of climate change. The article highlights the apparent conflict between expert governance on the one hand, and, on the other hand, calls for democratization that reflect the diverse perspectives of groups whose rights and labor have been exploited over historical timescales. Drawing on the history of bureaucracy and governance, this article argues that the apparent contradiction between the two poles of discourse can be reconciled by a system of information infrastructure designed to create a robust, accountable system of environmental data monitoring that also accounts for the work of inclusive community groups as stewards of landscapes. The article concludes by recommending a 6-point "Outline of an Information Infrastructure for Responsive, Accountable Governance of the Environment," which includes the following recommendations: (1) broadcast efforts to enlist communities-especially vulnerable communities on the front lines-in efforts to document environmental degradation and the effects of climate change; (2) equitable and sustainable solicitation of the voices of populations underrepresented in traditional science; (3) centralized preservation of the data in an archive where it can be found, retrieved, revisited, and implemented for action; (4) analysis of the data by both community participants and laboratory scientists; (5) the creation of accountability through the establishment of centralized, powerful organs of governance capable of holding polluters to account on the basis of data collected by both citizens and scientists; and (6) transparent mechanisms for negotiation.
KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 2021
Rethinking the work of academics in a time of pressing deadlines for climate action, this paper o... more Rethinking the work of academics in a time of pressing deadlines for climate action, this paper offers a series of new pragmatic strategies that academics can take up. It suggests a "climate pledge" where university teachers promise 5% or more of their teaching time to link the field of their traditional research to climate issues. It suggests that humanists, social scientists and data scientists need not only to "critique" the logic of extraction that propels our climate catastrophe, but also to "audit" individual institutions, writers, and politicians for their continuing engagement with climate or lack thereof.
Digital Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History
The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of his... more The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of history as practised by scholars of different methodological and political orientations and subjects of study is really more of a patchwork of different fields and sub-fields. While not every kind of digital history applies to each sub-field, some forms of digital technique has been put to use in practically every domain that historians study. Because of the relative novelty of historians’ exchanges about digital methods, it is important that those essays are pedagogical in approach and critical as to method. This conclusion hazards that the work ahead for digital historians includes theorizing the bridge between close and distant readings, theorising the difference between AI and statistical measures, transparent documentation of the choice of algorithm, text and result in the practice of critical search, and engagement with new standards of scholarship from the institutions of historical ...
KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge
This short piece reviews the causes of delays to action on climate change and suggests that acade... more This short piece reviews the causes of delays to action on climate change and suggests that academics can play a greater role in hastening global policy changes.
Research Methods for History, 2016
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majoriti... more This chapter reviews economic systems and strategies that would create wealth for racial majorities, such as the agrarian models embraced by Ireland and Mexico. Postwar social scientists influenced by Doreen Warriner frequently assumed that post-colonial nations would choose the agrarian model, emphasizing the redistribution of land. The chapter discusses appropriate technology, which featured an intellectual set of ideas about how and why small-scale technology should play a key role on small farms across the developing world. It clarifies how appropriate technology was identified with the idea of the small farmer in the post-colonial world. The farmer's relationship to land as an owner was created by mid-century redistribution programs like the ones designed in India, which worked in direct contrast with the formulae for economic development promoted by many U.S. economists that promoted technological investment.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter discusses the interpretation of the politics and utopianism of a bibliography, which... more This chapter discusses the interpretation of the politics and utopianism of a bibliography, which requires a careful reading of its pedestrian genre as it is easily overlooked as a tool of making myths and destroying memories. The chapter recounts how the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began collecting a library and issuing bibliographies, becoming a publisher of pamphlets, books, and maps of increasing number and ambition. Beginning in 1952, the organization began issuing a monthly bulletin of agricultural statistics that surveyed the agricultural production of the nations of the world. The chapter highlights how the FAO's commitments to supporting bibliography mirrored the mood of the time, but they would also help to create and drive a culture marked by the relentless production of research. FAO came to oversee the development of bibliographies that attempted to provide an overview of new research related to land redistribution and modern farming.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter describes writing, maps, and other devices of paper as instruments of power, as only... more This chapter describes writing, maps, and other devices of paper as instruments of power, as only the few could read in colonial India and most nations under British rule. During the Raj, and for many centuries before it, written laws tended to reflect the values of these literate few. The chapter talks about Indian economists and American observers that agreed on the historical role of paper under colonization: Britain's regime of paper documentation and regulation of the economy favored the colonizer. It analyzes the need for maps in developing nations, which attracted the notice of the United Nations. The administrators at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization attempted to contrive a plan that would support farmers and peasants around the world in creating an open system of land governance, capable of supporting a global redistribution of land.
The Long Land War, 2022
This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture O... more This chapter recounts the gathering of officers of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome to contemplate their role on a global scale. Their challenge was to help peasants in developing nations farm economically and thereby maintain control over their own land. It considers the movement of FAO from Quebec to Rome as a symbol of its founders' desires to serve the decolonizing nations of the world. The chapter discusses how advocates of redistribution at the FAO labored through the 1950s to create an international organization largely concerned with land and invested with an unprecedented power to advise governments around the world and with the authority to construct grand plans. The FAO was given the Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let There Be Bread,” being charged with the explicit mission of defending and feeding peasants around the world.
A history undergraduate places aside her work on an assignment for a few hours to surf the Web, a... more A history undergraduate places aside her work on an assignment for a few hours to surf the Web, and what she sees there worries her. It always troubles her, because her conscience keeps asking her how to connect her work with the world outside the university. She thinks of herself as a reformer, and corruption, pollution, and inequality rock her sense of justice. What can she do to learn about the levers of change, to talk to the public about how they work, to develop a cadre of students trained to think about such things? The answers that her teachers give can be summed up in one disappointing word: focus. Focus her questions; focus on her archival sources. University training, she will hear in many of her courses, is about developing professional expertise in analysing evidence, not answering the big questions. While sophistication with data about the past is well and good for learning to ask precise, academic questions and how to answer them, sometimes our student wonders when an...
Inside Sources, 2022
At COP27, delegates frittered away a long and expensive opportunity for states to do something. T... more At COP27, delegates frittered away a long and expensive opportunity for states to do something. Today, the most specific and efficient plans for addressing climate change require national regulation in the form of land-use planning. These plans have the power to limit emissions and avert catastrophe. But enacting them requires using conferences like COP 27 to amplify states' power over how land is used. Land-use planning is hardly a radical solution; it's part of the story of building codes and utilities planning in most modern countries over the last century. The hand of government regulation is familiar in many other parts of everyday life, including the speed limit on roads and the requirement that all new buildings have roofs and running water. There's also a deep history of international cooperation around land management where the United Nations has taken an active role in previous generations. In the middle of the 20th century, some administrators at the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) noticed that a global wave of postcolonial rebellions was bringing with it demands for reparations in land to correct the land confiscations of European empires in centuries past. This op-ed connects urgent issues around climate governance to my new book, The Long Land War (2022)
Medium, 2022
Excerpt from The Long Land War (Yale 2022)
Medium, 2022
Excerpt from The Long Land War (Yale 2022)
Medium, 2022
Keynote address to the Global Land Forum, Jordan, 2022. The Long Land War is the century-long st... more Keynote address to the Global Land Forum, Jordan, 2022. The Long Land War is the century-long struggle of poor people for control over their territory. The history of colonial violence is very long. From the sixteenth century to the twentieth, conquest the seizure of land form part of the story of every continent visited by European powers. Exploitation, genocide, and permanent apartheid followed. From 1881 to 1974, legislation after legislation, court after court, and institution after institution effectively redefined land not as private commodity to be bought and sold, but as a special kind of property: a property whose value was defined by inhabitation.
A Program for Democratic Ecology 1. Marches. Perhaps marches are the most familiar elements of cu... more A Program for Democratic Ecology 1. Marches. Perhaps marches are the most familiar elements of current movements, but many are short term and disconnected from clear, achievable policy demands in comparison with meaningful historical precursors. The March for Science, the People's Climate March, and the actions of Extinction Rebellion have dramatized in different ways a popular demand for coordinated action. Vinoba's march to collect donations of land for the poor, however, created lasting change, in part, by the duration of its span: his pilgrimage for occupancy rights lasted twenty years. 2. Rent strikes. Coordinated strikes, by organizing the mass withholding of capital, have the deserved reputation of forcing elites into action. Historically, rent strikes precipitated almost every period in which rent control became policy, from Ireland in 1881 forward. Strikes today have but one corollary in climate action: Europe's round of "school strikes" by schoolchildren protesting climate inaction on the model pioneered by Greta Thunberg in 2019. However moving, school strikes do not represent a mass diversion of capital, and are therefore less attached to immediate outcomes or changes of policy. Would rent strikes to turn apartment complexes solar be effective? Would tax strikes, on a county-or statewide basis, succeed in shifting climate policies? 3. Squatting. In 1945 and again in 1968, Britons used squatting to dramatize a housing crisis and shame the state into taking action. In India and Peru, squatting gave a voice to indigenous people and workers. Today, climate refugees are rejected at the border, hidden away in camps, and forced to risk their lives through perilous crossings. What
The Long Land War. I grew up in Texas, two generations off… | by jo gu...
This article explores the promise of institutions and infrastructures associated with democracy t... more This article explores the promise of institutions and infrastructures associated with democracy to limit the worst consequences of climate change. The article highlights the apparent conflict between expert governance on the one hand, and, on the other hand, calls for democratization that reflect the diverse perspectives of groups whose rights and labor have been exploited over historical timescales. Drawing on the history of bureaucracy and governance, this article argues that the apparent contradiction between the two poles of discourse can be reconciled by a system of information infrastructure designed to create a robust, accountable system of environmental data monitoring that also accounts for the work of inclusive community groups as stewards of landscapes. The article concludes by recommending a 6-point "Outline of an Information Infrastructure for Responsive, Accountable Governance of the Environment," which includes the following recommendations: (1) broadcast efforts to enlist communities-especially vulnerable communities on the front lines-in efforts to document environmental degradation and the effects of climate change; (2) equitable and sustainable solicitation of the voices of populations underrepresented in traditional science; (3) centralized preservation of the data in an archive where it can be found, retrieved, revisited, and implemented for action; (4) analysis of the data by both community participants and laboratory scientists; (5) the creation of accountability through the establishment of centralized, powerful organs of governance capable of holding polluters to account on the basis of data collected by both citizens and scientists; and (6) transparent mechanisms for negotiation.
KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 2021
Rethinking the work of academics in a time of pressing deadlines for climate action, this paper o... more Rethinking the work of academics in a time of pressing deadlines for climate action, this paper offers a series of new pragmatic strategies that academics can take up. It suggests a "climate pledge" where university teachers promise 5% or more of their teaching time to link the field of their traditional research to climate issues. It suggests that humanists, social scientists and data scientists need not only to "critique" the logic of extraction that propels our climate catastrophe, but also to "audit" individual institutions, writers, and politicians for their continuing engagement with climate or lack thereof.
Digital Histories: Emergent Approaches within the New Digital History
The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of his... more The chapter takes as its staring point that ‘field’ though it might be in name, the domain of history as practised by scholars of different methodological and political orientations and subjects of study is really more of a patchwork of different fields and sub-fields. While not every kind of digital history applies to each sub-field, some forms of digital technique has been put to use in practically every domain that historians study. Because of the relative novelty of historians’ exchanges about digital methods, it is important that those essays are pedagogical in approach and critical as to method. This conclusion hazards that the work ahead for digital historians includes theorizing the bridge between close and distant readings, theorising the difference between AI and statistical measures, transparent documentation of the choice of algorithm, text and result in the practice of critical search, and engagement with new standards of scholarship from the institutions of historical ...
KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge
This short piece reviews the causes of delays to action on climate change and suggests that acade... more This short piece reviews the causes of delays to action on climate change and suggests that academics can play a greater role in hastening global policy changes.
Research Methods for History, 2016
How should historians speak truth to power -- and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years b... more How should historians speak truth to power -- and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history -- especially long-term history -- so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which give rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society.
In early-eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but stretches of dirt track ran between most towns. ... more In early-eighteenth-century Britain, nothing but stretches of dirt track ran between most towns. Rain-soaked ruts and eroding banks rendered them impassible much of the year. By 1848 Britain's primitive roads were transformed into a network of forty-foot-wide highways connecting every village and island in the nation-and also dividing them in unforeseen ways. In Roads to Power, Jo Guldi refutes the traditional tale of how better roads made better neighbors and how the transport revolution unified the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish into a common and commercial people. In fact, few issues divided Britain as much as transport and trade.
The spatial turn represents the impulse to position new tools against old questions. In the pages... more The spatial turn represents the impulse to position new tools against old questions. In the pages of contemporary journals, sociologists turn back to Simmel, historians of technology to Mumford, and literary historians to Benjamin. We remember that every discipline in the humanities and social sciences has been stamped with the imprint of spatial questions about nations and their boundaries, states and surveillance, private property, and the perception of landscape, all of which fell into contestation during the nineteenth century. Reviewing the period of spatial emergence from 1880 to 1960 can help us understand the imprint of these questions and the direction that interdisciplinary collaboration may take in the spatial era of GIS.