New World Nature is the result of a 2019 summer history research project, New World Nature and Diversity Loss in the Modern Atlantic World, in which student researchers looked at the relationships between natural things and their environments. The goal was to reconstruct how early moderns learned from the nature in which they lived.
Under the direction of Assistant Professor of History Mackenzie Cooley, DHi CLASS fellow Kate Biedermann ’22, and Levitt fellows Thomas Anderson ’20, Elizabeth Atherton ’22, Antton De Arbeloa ’21, and Kayla Self ’21, participated in the project.
Also at the conference, Cooley presented a talk titled “Into the Corpus: Knowing Nature, Knowing Empire” in which she discussed one part of New World Nature, the section on the Relaciones Geográficas, and how it can be used for research and in the classroom.
Cooley also participated in the conference as member of a panel on “Modern Institutional Networks Visualize Early Modern Archives.” She discussed how the use of the Relaciones in her dissertation research later evolved into the idea of creating of the searchable database that is now part of New World Nature. She also touched on the value of resources such as these to digital scholarship.
