Not everything can or should be quantified, of course. But quite a lot can, even in the humanities. I can imagine a lot of mistakes being made but also a lot of insights gained that would otherwise have been difficult to perceive from trawling through manuscripts.
History comes in two flavours. There’s what I call micro history, and then there’s long-durée historical reconstruction. The first is characterised by detailed but temporally and spatially limited case studies; the second is rather a second-order reflection oriented by a historical hypothesis. This sort embraces a long spatial and temporal span but is informed by a limited number of selected case studies.
This has long restricted the kind of history that can be studied. But by mathematically analysing large historical data sets, it becomes possible to integrate the two approaches, conducting deep source analysis systematically while covering long spatial and temporal distances. In the field of history of science, which I work in, this is allowing us to investigate how the scientific knowledge systems that now dictate our lives formed.
If a much larger corpus of sources is able to be considered and analysed in detail, we can reflect more broadly about mechanisms of knowledge evolution. This allows us to move toward a more abstract understanding of our past. We can speak about the mechanisms of history – and other humanities – in a totally new, informed way.
I'd probably add "differently" before "informed". It's not that we were uninformed or even badly informed before, it's that we'll have different information now.
Although mathematical modelling in the frame of history is clearly at its first steps, its introduction already appears unstoppable. This is creating the conditions for the emergence of a new vision, according to which we might be able to develop general mathematical models to explain how ideas and knowledge changed from a social and historical perspective. Perhaps we could even use these models in different areas of scientific research dedicated to the present and the future. And in such a future, humanities and exact science will begin to use the same mathematical language.
Cometh the hour, cometh Hari Seldon.
Oh, and my statistical analysis of Magnesia is still very much in progress, if anyone's interested.
https://theconversation.com/maths-is-revolutionising-the-study-of-history-heres-how-85710
......there are in fact more than 2 flavours of history and quantitative methods have been around for a long time (although they went somewhat out of fashion among American PhD students between 1980 and 2010). Still, I welcome the article’s boosterism. Maths definitely offers different insights where meaningful data are available.
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