Visualizing the History of Risk in America: A Digital Humanities Project Using Social and Economic Data

CLAS Seed Grant    In his review of Eric Wertheimer’s Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance (Stanford, 2006), Mark Tebeau wondered if Wertheimer’s conclusions about the nature of risk, on view in a variety of historical and cultural settings, would be born out in the historical record of everyday actuarial practice. Nearly a decade after that critical encounter, Wertheimer seeks to return to that challenge in collaboration with economic historian Christopher Jones (and with Tebeau as a project consultant.) It is as well an implicit return to the question that joins their cultural and historical research—what does it mean to “take a risk”? The collaborators propose bringing visualization and computing tools of the digital humanities to bear on the problem: what does a cultural and economic notion of risk look like historically? How can understanding this concept as it emerges in the 18th century, sharpen and maybe transform our understandings of risk in contemporary America.