Our project will see a team of students digitize, curate, and host a wide-ranging historical dataset pertaining to the Egyptian cotton industry over the course of the interwar period and Great Depression. Students will apply Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools to English and Arabic statistical sources ranging from government journals to daily newspapers in order to convert their data into spreadsheet-readable formats. The team will then build a public-facing website to host this digitized data and create visualizations of key metrics, interactions and relationships attesting to the long-term development of this global commodity chain. The data this project produces provide a platform for inter-institutional collaboration among scholars interested in economics, business, environment and regional histories.
Project Lead: Abram Smith
Project Manager: Hanshika Immandi
