Lecture with subject "The Shipping News. Exploring the Making of a Global Maritime World Through Digital Humanities"
This presentation introduces the PortADa (Port Arrivals Data) project and reflects on how digital humanities methodologies can reshape our understanding of the making of a global maritime world. PortADa builds a large-scale, open-access database of ship arrivals across multiple international ports, integrating port records, shipping news, and historical press sources to reconstruct patterns of mobility, trade, and professional trajectories in the long nineteenth century. We will explain the project’s conceptual framework and methodological approach, which combines traditional archival research with automated data extraction, text mining, and database construction. Particular attention will be given to the originality of our workflow, which links digital harvesting tools, structured data modeling, and collaborative validation processes across institutions. The presentation will also review the activities carried out during the successive Summer Schools organized within the project, highlighting their role in training early-career researchers and fostering international collaboration in maritime history and digital methods.
Jordi Ibarz is a professor of Modern History at the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Barcelona and member of the research group “Work, Institutions and Gender”. His main research interests are on labour history, especially that referring to dock workers and glass workers.
His dissertation topic was about labour relations in the port of Barcelona during Francoism, but his current research looks towards a more distant past. He works with the aim that our research of maritime labour in the Nineteenth Century can help us to understand the emergence and reproduction of the capitalist system. He is the formal Research Head of SeaLiT Barcelona team, responsible for technical aspects of the research, supervisor of the PhD student Eduard Page, while in the project his research will focus on dock workers in the port of Barcelona, 1850s-1920s.