Research Assistant (NYC History), Brown Brothers Collection
Position Overview
The Brown Brothers Collection is a collaborative, cross-institutional research project supported by a seed grant from the NYU Center for the Humanities and Research Technology, NYU IT, that will develop robust teaching, research, and digital / public humanities resources that leverage the digitized Brown Brothers & Company archives held by the New York Public Library, a key set of sources for New York City’s financial history.
The project is seeking a graduate, or advanced undergraduate research assistant to join the team for its use-case pilot phase. The assistant will conduct research related to the history of financial data, accounting practices, banking in 19th-century New York, and slave economies. As part of this phase, you’ll have the opportunity to work on an interdisciplinary team comprising both humanists and data / machine learning specialists.
Salary and Duration
Spring 2021: $20/hr, 10 hours a week, for 14 weeks.
Required Qualifications
- Experience with and interest in archival research, and particularly working with ledgers and bookkeeping
- Research interests in 19th-century urban history or the history of capitalism
- Prior experience working with digitized archival materials
- Strong ability to relay research and findings in accessible formats
Preferred Qualifications
- Familiarity with the history of U.S. bank records and finance-sector document genres
- Prior experience with data-driven research and interdisciplinary, collaborative projects
- Interests in project-based learning, data and information pedagogy, and digital or public humanities
Application
To apply for the position, please email a CV and statement of interest to Prof. Thomas Augst: tom.augst@nyu.edu.
Project Summary
Project Collaborators: Thomas Augst (NYU-English), Matt Knutzen (NYPL), Brent Reidy
(NYPL), Nick Wolf (NYU)
Project Manager: Grace Afsari-Mamagani (NYU-English)
In 2021, the project team will pilot a use-case for collaboration between curators and technologists at the New York Public Library and students and faculty at NYU. The pilot will focus on the design, curation, and publication of large-scale financial and social data extracted from archival sources, making this data available and deployable for project-based learning at the intersection of STEM and humanities/social science disciplines. We have identified as an initial use case the manuscript records of Brown Brothers and Company, a New York bank founded in 1825 by Irish immigrants, that remains in operation as one of the largest private financial services firms in the city, Brown Brothers Harriman. An initial phase of collection’s digitization was recently completed with support from a Hidden Archives grant. (For background see NYPL’s “An Introduction to Mass Digitization and the Brown Brothers Collection,” June 2019.) We anticipate many kinds of stories that might be told from this collection, ranging from the history of global finance capital and the New York banking sector to New York City’s financial and administrative role in the slave economy. This pilot would result in the creation of a dataset and machine-readable transcriptions encompassing the contents of the original records, as well as develop the potential uses of the data by scholars, teachers, and the general public, especially as an open-access resource for learning about the history of banking, financial data,
accounting practices, and slave economies.