Robert C. H. Sweeny is a socio-economic historian living in St John’s, Newfoundland. The chronicle of his forty-year search for an answer to “Why Did We Choose to Industrialize?” won the Governor General’s Award for Scholarly Research in 2016. His current research explores gender, property, and national identity in turn-of- the-century Montreal. In the 1990s, his experiments in digitizing historical sources of pre-industrial Montreal led to a sustained collaboration with Sherry Olson in building a historical GIS research infrastructure: Montréal, l’avenir du passé.