Jo Guldi

Emory University, Quantitative Theory and Methods, Faculty Member

Harvard University, Harvard Society of Fellows, Post-Doc

University of Chicago, History, Post-Doc

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'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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Can Land Redistribution Scale with Population?

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 Questionable Effectiveness of Bibliography

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.

On Failing to Make a Map in Time

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.

Something Like a Global Government 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.

Manifesto per la storia. Il ruolo del passato nel mondo d'oggi

The short past: or, the retreat of the longue durée

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...

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