Led by UNL [University of Nebraska-Lincoln] history professor William Thomas, the team recently got a $100,000 boost for its efforts from a grant competition sponsored by four research agencies spread across the globe.
The funds will support UNL's "Railroads and the Making of Modern America" digital history project, a project Thomas started four years ago.
The project already has gathered millions of pages of digital data related to railroad history - like time schedules, newspaper accounts, payrolls and maps. Now the project will work to integrate that data into other data, such as census information.
By doing so, the project will provide scholars of American history a valuable source of future research material, Thomas said.
"It's not a matter of digitizing the content and putting it online, it's about how we can create new tools to see how these data are related," Thomas said. "This is about discovery."
The project is both a cross-disciplinary and an international effort. At UNL, researchers in computer science will help analyze the data and integrate it into other data.
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