ScholarlyCommons

The Magazine of Early American Datasets (MEAD) is an online repository of datasets compiled by historians of early North America. MEAD preserves and makes available these datasets in their original format and as comma-separated-value files (.csv). Each body of data is also accompanied by a codebook.  MEAD provides sweet, intoxicating data for your investigations of early North America and the Atlantic World.

MEAD is sponsored by the McNeil Center of Early American Studies and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Please click on the titles of the datasets below for full bibliographic information, files in original and .csv format, codebook, and more.

If you would like to submit data, please click the "Submit Research" button to the left for specific instructions related to MEAD.

Please submit your data! Although clean data is nice, better to submit messy data than no data at all. Messy files can be replaced with cleaner ones in the future. Messy data mounted on MEAD is preserved; messy data waiting forever to be cleaned will be lost. OpenRefine is a free, easy tool to use to clean data (tutorial here).

We welcome coordinated submissions to MEAD and to the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation (JSDP), in which data articles are published in the JSDP and the dataset is ingested into Enslaved.org’s linked open data hub, while the dataset is preserved with MEAD. Simply indicate in your submission if you would like to pursue this option if your dataset is relevant to both platforms. 

For more about this project, read the feature on it on Common-Place.org.

Questions? please contact Billy G. Smith (bgs at montana dot edu) or Andrew M. Schocket (aschock at bgsu dot edu).

The MEAD-iators who brought you this resource:
Mitch Fraas, Digital Research Services, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Nicholas Okrent, Research and Instructional Services, University of Pennsylvania Libraries
Andrew M. Schocket, Department of History and American Culture Studies Program, Bowling Green State University
Billy W. Smith, Department of History, Philosophy, and Literary Studies, Montana State University
Sarah Wipperman, Repository Services, University of Pennsylvania Libraries