Development of an Interoperable Taxonomy: the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500-2000

by Prof. Karin Hofmeester ( International Institute of Social History)

Tuesday 20 Jun 2023, 10:00 → 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Lecture Hall (Z01) (Hybrid Format: online and in Frankfurt)

In 2007, the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amster­dam set up the “Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations” (hereafter Global Collaboratory) to better understand the diverse forms of labour relations worldwide. The first phase of this project involved data gathering. A large group of international scholars met during workshops, worked together online, and developed a large number of datasets contain­ing data on the occurrence of all types of labour relations in several parts of the world during five cross sections in time: 1500, 1650, 1800, 1900, and 2000, thereby also developing a new “Taxonomy of Labour Relations” based on a shared set of definitions.[1] 

In this talk Prof. Dr. Karin Hofmeester will discuss how the project's team defined ‘work’ and ‘labour relations’ and how they created this Taxonomy of Labour Relations, elaborating on the origin of some of its basic concepts.

Karin Hofmeester is a historian and Research Director at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam  and part-time professor of Jewish Culture at Antwerp University. She is project leader of the 'Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations in the period 1500-2000' and she is working on a World History of Diamonds.

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[1] For more information see: Karin Hofmeester et al., The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, 1500-2000: Background, Set-Up, Taxonomy, and Applications (2015), at http://hdl.handle.net/10622/4OGRAD; and Karin Hofmeester, ‘Labour Relations, Introductory Remarks,’ in Karin Hofmeester and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Handbook Global History of Work (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2018), 317-327. For the Collaboratory datasets and publications, see: https://datasets.iisg.amsterdam/dataverse/labourrelations.

Collaboratory Background Text 26 October 2015.pdf