"Measuring the Expansion of Anglo-American Mining Engineers into the World, 1874-1929"

The paper presents the result of an analysis of a database of tens of thousands of records of graduates of U.S. mining schools, their membership in the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME), their career trajectories, including the mining and metallurgical companies for whom they worked, their job categories, their global locations of employment, and their interactions through professional journals. We built the database by mining data with OCR software: lists of members of the AIME, directories of mining corporations in the U.S., Great Britain and Mexico, alumni lists from eight mining schools, and the index for the volumes of the Engineering and Mining Journal. The mining, cleaning, analysis and visualization of the data use Digital Humanities techniques and the full database accounts for over half a million entries of information of over 22 thousand individuals and organizations.
This data allows us to produce a richly detailed, descriptive, and dynamic portrait of the production and global diffusion of mining expertise during this critical era, quantifying the scale of production of engineering expertise, mapping the scope and direction of its global diffusion, and identifying patterns in the development of nodes, connections, and networks which bound together this globalized community of knowledge and expertise. The results suggest that the professionalization of engineering expertise was decidedly not bounded by national characteristics but was fundamentally shaped by its global reach. Moreover, engineers played a far more central role in shaping the organizational structure and management strategy of the modern corporation than it is conventionally argued. Finally, the expansion of Anglo-American mining expertise had profound consequences for the role of locally trained engineers in their countries and the subsequent development of domestic engineering capacity around the world.