Benjamin G. Martin

A graduate of the University of Chicago (AB, 1996) and Columbia University (PhD, 2006), Benjamin G. Martin studies the political and intellectual history of international cultural relations. Based in Stockholm since 2010, Martin works at Uppsala University as researcher in the Department of History of Science and Ideas. Recent work includes The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) and articles related to his research project “The Culture of International Society,” which was funded by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Science (2017-2019).’

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This is the blog where we will post updates about our research project Inidun: INternational IDeas at UNesco. Our plan was to get started with a kick-off meeting in Umeå in May; that ended up, of course, being a series of zoom-calls instead. Nonetheless, we are now off and running, on several fronts.

First, it seemed important to make some decisions about how to run the project: how would we – me (Ben Martin), my co-researcher Fredrik Norén, and the systems developers at Humlab (chiefly Roger Mähler and Andreas Marklund) – collaborate and communicate, where would data and code be kept, and so on? Trained as a decidedly non-digital historian and with my background in the American university system, collaborating with others at all has been new, to say nothing of doing so where large data sets and bespoke digital tools are involved.

The short version of what we decided is that we will be working to a high degree in and through GitHub: that is where our data and code will live, as you can see. It is where we will define our goals and chart our progress, and it is where (or rather the tool through which) we will (largely) communicate. Working in this way is new to us; tips and suggestions are most welcome!