Expanding Horizons: History, the City and the Web
Professor
Erik Olssen is a recognised expert in the labour and social history
of New Zealand. His main research foci are the relationships between
politics, society, ideas, culture, and economics; the ways in which these
produce the lives of individuals and their societies are a particular
interest. Since the late 1970s his investigations have covered principally
labour history and social history more generally.
Professor Olssen is well known in urban history circles for his leadership,
since 1995, of the multi-disciplinary 'Caversham Project' which began in
1970 as a micro-history investigation of the borough of Caversham in
southern Dunedin, New Zealand.The project has brought together labour and
social history perspectives, in two distinct phases, the first focusing on
'Urban Society and the Opportunity Structure', and the second on
gender rather than class but still investigating structures and the ways in
which they have changed.
http://caversham.otago.ac.nz/about/project.php
The Caversham project was an early exemplar of an historical research
program using web technology to disseminate its findings. It has produced a
database unparalleled in scope and depth in Australasian urban historical
studies. Data has been harvested for a website, and used to underpin
scholarly papers and books including E. Olssen and M. Hickey, Class and
Occupation: The New Zealand Reality (University of Otago Press, 2005)
and B. Brookes, A. Cooper and R. Law (eds) Sites of Gender
(Auckland University Press, 2003), and E. Olssen and C. Griffen (eds), with
log-linear statistical analyses by Frank Jones, An Accidental Utopia?
Social Mobility and Equality in the Making of a New World Urban Social
Pattern (forthcoming, University of Otago Press).
Once Accidental Utopia? is published Professor Olssen intends to
return to his broader research on New Zealand history.