Professor Gerring Wins NSF Grant For Massive Database Project
Professor John Gerring was recently awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to support his contributions to the Center for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA) database project which is expected to provide an invaluable resource to historians and social sciences. The NSF award will allow Gerring to link his current project based at Boston University, CLIO World Tables, with the larger collaborative CHIA which is centered at the University of Pittsburgh and involves collaborators at UC Merced, Harvard University, Michigan State University, and Boston University. The CHIA aims to aggregate hundreds of years of historical data about politics, health, demographics, geography and other variables with a global scope. It is expected that the data resources will grow to several terabytes in size. This project will stimulate development of more efficient research collaborations, enabling systematic large-scale consolidation of diverse historical data sources. Once collected and integrated, the data repository and analytical system will allow scholars to address a wider set of questions testing hypotheses about long-term and short-term social change at the global scale and catalyzing an expansion of the evidence base in social sciences. The project will be funded from 2013-15 and will provide summer funding for Gerring and year-round funding for a graduate student in 2014.