The World-historical Dataverse project addresses the need for comprehensive historical data on the human experience at the global level. This project is intended to the contribute to creation of a comprehensive set of data on social-scientific, health, and environmental data for the world as a whole and for its constituent regions and localities, for the past four or five centuries. Such data, once collected, created, and standardized, will make it possible to test hypotheses about long-term and short-term social change at the global level. This type of analysis will add greatly to the validity of efforts to plan for the future.
The Dataverse project addresses this massive task from three directions, relying on an open-source philosophy. First, we list all the online information on world-historical data that we can locate. Second, our archive of world-historical datasets is intended to provide a dependable home for valuable data and to grant ready access to users. Third, we are designing and creating the world-historical Dataverse itself, partly by developing techniques for linking existing datasets and partly by developing the criteria for a large-scale, multilevel, world-historical data structure.
The Dataverse project is based in the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh. It is co-directed by Siddarth Chandra and Patrick Manning.