Giovanni Pala

Research Topic: "Form and Precision in European Maritime Cartography, 1650-1850. A Novel Approach to the Use of Digital Collections Series in Economic History "

Supervisor: Professor Eric Chaney

About

Giovanni is an economic historian with an interest in Modern European History, the History of Technology, and the role of information and cultural ideas in shaping the long term trajectory of societies. His DPhil project explores cartography in its “technological” dimension, with attention to the important years of the late 17th and the 18th century, and will resort to modern image-analysis techniques to study precision in a non-ambiguous way on a large dataset of digitised maps. To this end, he is applying a mix of methodologies borrowed from Computer Science and Geometry, something that places his research in the exciting area of the Digital Humanities.

Bio

Giovanni studied for a BA and MSc in Economics in Pisa, where for six years he was an “Allievo Ordinario” of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa, a national honours college for the social and applied sciences. In Oxford (Nuffield College), Giovanni completed with distinction an MPhil in Economic and Social History with the support of a grant from the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi and the Compagnia di San Paolo di Torino. He is currently pursuing a DPhil in History (History of Science and Medicine & Economic and Social History) at Magdalen College. During the entire academic year 2019-2020, Giovanni was abroad as a William Alexander Fleet fellow at Princeton University to perfect his research approach. 

Affiliations
OXR-Hub

Note

To the disappointment of many Dan Brown aficionados, Giovanni is not the Giovanni Pala who has studied "Leonardo's hidden music".