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Claire Lemercier: In Defence of Dirty Data. Standardization, Source Criticism, and Digital/Quantitative History

This talk originates in discussions with Clare H. Crowston in the context of a “Social Science History” meeting on “Data,” which then became part of my long, ongoing conversation on methods with Claire Zalc. The phrase “dirty data” was then taken up by colleagues who launched a call for papers for a special issue of French History. It will be published in 2026 and I will mention some of its contents in my talk, along with research by Claire Zalc, some of my own, and other texts that made us think about sources, methods, and “data” in history.

Our defense of “dirty data” first came in reaction to abuses of the phrasing ” data cleaning.” It is related to our more general defense of “do it yourself” projects in quantitative history, i.e. those that do not require a large, interdisciplinary team and that rely on an intimate knowledge of one’s sources. More specifically, we are wary of calls for the “standardization” or “disambiguation” of data that do not take into account decades of discussions on the pitfalls of anachronistic (and, more generally, non-research-specific) categorizations (for example, of historical occupations). However, we are tireless advocates of quantitative methods in history and we spend most of our own research time building and analyzing databases. I will try to present our use of methods of quantitative/digital history to practice and improve source criticism, which we think of as the core of our profession: how the aim of building databases leads us to a closer reading of the materials, and how we embrace missingness and contradiction in data (e.g. the frequent case of one person having several different dates of birth) as a path to a better understanding of our sources, and of the past itself.

Vortrag im Rahmen des „Digital History“-Forschungskolloquiums
Zeit: Mittwoch, 17. Dezember 2025, 16-18 Uhr
Ort: Zoom-Konferenz (Zugang auf Anfrage oder via Mailingliste)


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Digital History Berlin (Redaktion) (12. Dezember 2025). Claire Lemercier: In Defence of Dirty Data. Standardization, Source Criticism, and Digital/Quantitative History. Digital History Berlin. Abgerufen am 13. März 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/15bmq


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