Financing and acknowledgements

Funding

The PORTIC (“PORTs & Information and Communication Sciences and Technology.
Querying and visualizing eighteenth-century shipping and trade dynamics in the digital era”) is a program financed by the French National Research Agency within the WP “The digital revolution: relationships to knowledge and to culture” (ANR-18-CE38-0010). Two previous research programs served as an incubator to design PORTIC:

  • The Navi-GO program (2017-2020) funded by the Académie 5 of the UCA-JEDI Future Investments at the University of the Côte d’Azur (funded by the French government, and managed by the National Research Agency,  ANR-15-IDEX-01);
  • DYPOMAR program (Port Dynamics, Urban and Maritime Environments), funded by a CPER / FEDER program of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region (2014-2020).

PORTIC is also based on two databases produced within the framework of two previous ANR programs:

  • Navigocorpus (ANR-07-CORP-028) coordinated by Silvia Marzagalli;
  • Toflit18 (ANR-13-BSH1-0005) coordinated by Guillaume Daudin and Loïc Charles.

Expert Committee

Portic benefits from the help and advice of a committee of experts made up of:

  • Steve Behrends (Victoria University of Wellington, member of the executive committee of the Slavevoyages database, and coordinator of the Liverpool Maritime Project);
  • Jean-Pierre Dedieu (CNRS, IAO-Institut d’Asie Orientale / ENS Lyon), designer of the Navigocorpus database
  • César Ducruet (CNRS, Géographie-cités, Paris), coordinator of the ERC World Seastems program;
  • Laurent Etienne (BdTln, Database research team, University of Tours); specialist in the visualization of space-time big data, notably maritime data;
  • Claire Lemercier (CNRS, SciencesPo, Center for the Sociology of Organizations); specialist in economic institutions and promoter for over 10 years of the use of databases, quantification and visualization of historical data;
  • Werner Scheltjens (Universität Bamberg, former post-doc in the Navigocorpus program, thereafter in charge of measurements in the Sound Toll Register Online program).

Acknowledgements

  • Thierry Allain and Jan Willem Veluwenkamp for their assistance in locating Dutch ports
  • Michael-W. Serruys for his help in determining the borders of the Breton admiralty
  • Mathieu Grenet  for his assistance in locating ports in the Levant
  • Laurent Burrus for his assistance in locating ports in the Mediterranean and elsewhere
  • Jacques Boucard for his assistance in locating ports on the French Atlantic coast and the local agents’ akward spelling of foreign ports.
  • Lovni Kaushik, 11th grader en Ontario, Canada, who volunteered to input data on British smugglers for our second case study.