Contact details
- Name:
- Dr Justin Colson
- Position:
- Senior Lecturer in Urban & Digital History
- Institute:
- Institute of Historical Research
- Email address:
- justin.colson@sas.ac.uk
Research Summary and Profile
- Research interests:
- Digitisation, Early Modern, History, Medieval History, Metropolitan history
- Research keywords:
- Urban History, GIS, Cartography, Guilds, Trade, Social Network Analysis, Merchants
- Regions:
- England, Europe, United Kingdom
- Summary of research interests and expertise:
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Justin’s research explores urban life and communities through a range of social, economic, and cultural lenses. Having completed a PhD thesis on London neighbourhoods in the fifteenth century, he specialises on the history of London between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also explores towns and cities throughout Britain and Europe across the medieval and early modern periods, and beyond.
Spatial approaches and methods are integral to Justin’s work, and he makes extensive use of digital tools including Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA). He uses these techniques not only to explore previously invisible patterns amongst the records of pre-modern lives, but also to communicate the place of the past in new and exciting ways.
- Publication Details
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Related publications/articles:
Date Details 28-Apr-2023 Charlotte Berry, The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430–1540 (London: University of London Press, 2022) Pages xl + 244 + figures 15 + tables 13. £40 hardback, £25 paperback, free eBook. Review
01-Aug-2020 Reinterpreting space: mapping people and relationships in late medieval and early modern English cities using GIS Journal articles
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are becoming increasingly popular in historical research, especially in urban contexts. However, digitizing historical sources in a way that can be mapped using the Cartesian co-ordinate systems of a GIS is often challenging, especially so in the case of records pre-dating centralized property registers or street numbering. This article explores how the vernacular spatial descriptions used in several case-studies of documents from late medieval and early modern London can be translated and geocoded into GIS compatible co-ordinates in a sympathetic way. Translating this data from a historical spatial paradigm into a modern one unlocks a whole range of new insights into spatial patterns, networks and relationships which would not have been feasible to construct using traditional methods
31-Mar-2020 Reassessing Power and Governance in Late Medieval Cities: Institutions and the Cursus Honorum Chapters
Chapter in Simon Gunn & Tom Hulme (eds.) New Approaches to Governance and Rule in Urban Europe Since 1500, Routledge, 2020 - ISBN: 9781003028390
29-Aug-2018 Structural Change and Economic Growth in the British Economy before the Industrial Revolution, 1500–1800 Journal articles
Patrick Wallis, Justin Colson and David Chilosi, Structural Change and Economic Growth in the British Economy before the Industrial Revolution, 1500–1800, The Journal of Economic History, Volume 78 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 862 - 903