News of Modernity
| Dates: | 17 April 2015 |
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| Times: | 09:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Workshop |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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| Speaker: | John McCusker, Siobhan Talbott, Philipp Roessner, Colin Imber, Chiara Palazzo, Sean Bechhofer, Sherylynne Haggerty |
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This workshop proposes to investigate the role of news in mercantile networks in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Eastern Atlantic World.
The importance of news for business is uncontroversial and news in the early modern commercial world has been the focus of a great wealth of studies. Mercantile news networks – i.e. the exchange of news between mercantile agents: merchants, factors, skippers and consumers – have also been studied, although less. News as raw material for chronicles and hence the relation between news and historiography as well as the use of scientific computing to enhance the study of news by contrast seem underexplored.
This workshop thus seeks to investigate the history of early modern mercantile news and news management from a multi-disciplinary angle with a special interest in news as an agent of history and historiography. This first event will focus on Venice as a centre of information and communication in the early modern period, including the chronicle (diarii) of M. Sanuto (the Younger) but also invite more general and conceptual contributions as well as case studies from other places. Thus in addition to contextualising the Venetian findings, we will begin discussions of mercantile news networks more broadly.
Interrelated lines of investigation:
a) How did news inform and trigger political, economic decisions, i.e. to put it bluntly, how did news make history?
b) What is the source analytical potential of news beyond veracity, i.e. beyond their ‘factual accuracy’ or: how do we deal with ‘false’ news?
c) How did news collections, including diaries, serve as raw material for writing history, i.e. how did news shape historiography?
d) How can digital knowledge management/scientific computing improve our analysis of history/historiography by providing the historian with a database integrating primary and secondary data while identifying discrete news items thus enhancing the traceability/reproducibility of the process of history writing?
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Christie Room
John Rylands Research Institute and Library
150 Deansgate
Manchester
Gtr Manchester
