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【TGU Empirical Analyses of Political Economy】Special Lecture: Professor Kris James Mitchener, Santa Clara University

2016-04-15 12.47.09

On April 15, Center for Empirical Analyses of Political Economy as a Top Global University Project and Waseda Institute of Political Economy jointly hosted a seminar by Professor Kris James Mitchener of Santa Clara University. Professor Mitchener has been conducting a wide range of research in historical perspectives, from monetary economics and financial crises to international macroeconomics. He currently serves as co-editor of Explorations in Economic History, one of the major peer-reviewed academic journals for economic history. Professor Mitchener’s seminar titled “What and how we could learn from economic history” was open to any faculty and graduate student who is interested in economic history and empirical research overall.

In the first session, Professor Mitchener shared his current progress in an ongoing research paper called “Swords into Bank Shares: Finance Conflict and Political Reform in Meiji Japan.” This paper investigates how finance was used during the Meiji restoration in Japan in order to incorporate ex-samurais into the new political system and to sustain political transformation. With meticulously collected historical data, which would have been undecipherable without a scholar trained in reading classical Japanese texts, the report focuses on the network of newly established national banks. The study showed intriguing results in combination with geographic information system analysis. In the second session, Professor Mitchener gave a short lecture titled “The 4D Future of Economic History: Digitally-Driven Data Design,” followed by an open discussion. During the lecture, he offered his insights and anticipations about the course which economic history as a discipline will undergo in the next decade. 4D has already been creating indelible impact on the practice and comprehension of economic history. He emphasized that the declining costs of mass digitization of archival documents, and improved algorithms for searching records and viewing data spatially will revolutionize the way scholars conduct research. He also argued that 4D will offer new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars.

Both sessions were followed by a Q&A session and a constructive discussion, covering topics such as how to adopt the new 4D methodology into research and its potential.

 

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