From Clio Infrastructure

Collaboratories of the IISG

The History of Work Information System offers standardized codes for historical occupations in various languages – thus enabling comparative research into occupational mobility –, as well as images and descriptions of work and recoding jobs in SPSS. It builds on and aims to expand the coding manual HISCO (Van Leeuwen, Maas and Miles 2002). On a separate collaboratory site discussion on the proper classification of occupational titles is organized.

The Global Collaboratory on the History of Labor Relations aims to construct a worldwide census of labor relations in specific years (1500, 1650, 1800, 1900 and 2000). In the collaboratory, about 60 researchers from across the world use a taxonomy to fill in a central database with (estimations of) numbers of self-employed, wage workers, slaves etcetera in each country. This project is closely associated with the ambition of the International Institute of Social History to contribute to a new Global Labor History.

The collaboratory Historical Life Courses consists of the managers of large databases with longitudinal microdata (life courses of individuals based on parish records, census, civil and population records), who have agreed to create an ‘intermediate structure’ allowing for direct comparison of, e.g. fertility rates, across datasets (Alter, Mandemakers, Gutmann 2009). Currently, their virtual research environment consists of stored papers an database templates and the discussions around them, but it may develop into a portal giving access to many participating databases.

The collaboratory on Labor Conflicts aims to collect and to harmonize into a single data structure information on strikes and lockouts from all over the world. It is hoped that a truly global dataset will reveal patterns in strike activity that remain undetected in local studies. At the moment, this venture (started in 2008) has yielded an online repository of datasets.

The collaboratory on Migrant Organizations aims to construct an online, public database with information on migrant organizations in all European countries. It works incrementally, and start with organizations in the Low Countries (containing already 6000 organizations). The ambition is to discover variation in integration experiences by comparing across countries.