Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Folgert Karsdorp & Mike Kestemont: The application of unseen species models in history: correcting registration bias in nineteenth-century police reports from Brussels

Researchers of the past – whether historians, literary scholars or archaeologists – depend on the sources that have stood the test of time. That sample of history is usually far from complete, however. There are numerous reasons for this, such as natural causes (e.g., fires or floods), decisions at the level of archival policy (what do we preserve and what do we not?), and biases in the formation of the archives themselves. Data representing lower classes were long considered less relevant, for example, and thus socioeconomic factors likewise play a role in the survival of sources. In a series of recent experiments, we have explored how statistical methods from ecology can help us identify such gaps and biases in our knowledge. Those methods all find their basis in “Unseen Species Models,” which were originally developed to estimate the number of unique species in an environment. Just as ecologists try to estimate biodiversity from an incomplete sample, we apply the models to incomplete historical archives to measure the actual cultural diversity.

In this talk, we apply unseen species models to three cases. First, we show how these methods can tell us something about the forgotten medieval chivalric literature in Western Europe. We then apply an extension of the method to the historical archives of the Dutch East India Company, to map out the size of its workforce. Finally, we explore a generalization of the unseen species model with which co-variates of loss or absence can be mapped. We apply this extension to a dataset from historical criminology: the police registers of the Amigo prison (1879-1880) in Brussels, and show how the models can give us an estimate of the “dark number” of unapprehended perpetrators as well as the demographic composition of this group.

Lecture within the Open Research Colloquium Digital History

Time:
Wednesday, 29 January 2025, 4:15-5:45 pm CET

Place:

Room 2070 A, Main Building of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin (a brief registration via e-mail is recommended)
– via Zoom (Request access via email (digitalhistory@hu-berlin.de) or Mailinglist)

Image Credits

The “Snow Whites” of Leuven, Belgium: some of the books which survived the library fires in WWI are now kept in glass boxes. © KU Leuven. Digitaal Labo. Via https://forgotten-books.netlify.app/


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Digital History Berlin (Redaktion) (20. Januar 2025). Folgert Karsdorp & Mike Kestemont: The application of unseen species models in history: correcting registration bias in nineteenth-century police reports from Brussels. Digital History Berlin. Abgerufen am 12. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/1340w


Schreibe einen Kommentar

Deine E-Mail-Adresse wird nicht veröffentlicht. Erforderliche Felder sind mit * markiert

Diese Website verwendet Akismet, um Spam zu reduzieren. Erfahre mehr darüber, wie deine Kommentardaten verarbeitet werden.