unique documents

Time-Traveller-diary

maps

Spanning
years of history, across Africa.

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INTRODUCTION

Time Traveller

Time Traveller is a digital humanities project that collects, analyses, and disseminates data about travellers’ observations of pre-colonial Africa using the latest techniques in computer science.

Very few written primary accounts of pre-colonial Africa exist. This lack of documented history hinders our understanding of Africa’s past and long-term trajectory.

We collect over 1000 years of African economic history using handwritten accounts from travellers and their maps.

Analysing such a corpus of text is an insurmountable task for traditional historians and would probably take a lifetimes work. By combining modern day computational linguistic techniques in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we build a corpus of pre-colonial African history across space and time. This large body of written accounts can be used to systemically shed new light on Africa’s past.

“Shedding new light on Africa’s past.”

PEOPLE

MEET THE TEAM

Alexander Moradi

Principal Researcher

Edward Kerby

Principal Researcher

Hanjo Odendaal

Data Economist

Lauren Coetzee

Research Manager

Alejandro Lopez Aldana

Research Assistant
Research

Research output

African Time Travellers: What can we learn from 500 years of written accounts?

We study 500 years of African economic history using traveller accounts. We systematically collected 2,464 unique documents, of which 855 pass language and rigorous data quality requirements. Our final corpus of texts contains more than 230,000 pages. Analysing such a corpus is an insurmountable task for traditional historians and would probably take a lifetime’s work. Applying modern day computational linguistic techniques such as a structural topic model approach (STM) in combination with domain knowledge of African economic history, we analyse how first-hand accounts (topics) evolve across space and time. Apart from obvious accounts of climate, geography and zoology, we find topics around imperialism, diplomacy, conflict, trade/commerce, health/medicine, evangelization and many more topics of interest to scholarship. We illustrate how this novel database and text analysis can be employed in three applications: (1) What views are introduced by travellers as a result of their occupational background? (2) Did the adoption of quinine as treatment and prophylaxis against malaria facilitate European expansion into Africa? (3) When and how did the diffusion of New World crops alter the African economic landscape?

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MISSING ANY TRAVELLERS?

DATA

Search missing travellers?
Do you know if we are missing any travellers and have access to the documents?
Want to help bring history to life by reading?
Help us transcribe handwritten explorer accounts.
Search explorers with a missing Wikipedia page?
Can you help searching for travellers, or contribute to Wikipedia?
Please send us a message

    FUNDING

    An endeavour such as this is expensive

    We have only just started, and would be very grateful for project funding; large and small.