I’m catching up with A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. They have a guest post from James Baillie about prosopography from a few weeks ago. I did not know that prosopography has expanded from family relationships to more general connections. In fact, it seems to have crossed over into graph analysis. I hope they have taken Frank Harary’s appeal to heart and aren’t just drawing pictures, but are also using the mathematical power of a graph.

There’s interesting stuff there about medieval Georgia1, but the larger point Baillie gets across is about data-driven historical research: “a data structure or a block of code are things that make implicit and subjective arguments about how to see the world.” This is a good point, which I’ve lived in another context. In our modern world, data are everywhere. The job of combining data and synthesizing information from them employs a lot of people.

A historian has to do the reverse task as well, though. The evidence that we are given from the past is not data, pace2 the dictionary, we aren’t given data; we’re given information. We have immensely-powerful tools for processing digital data, which everyone should apply wherever they can. In order to exploit the power of data processing, though, a lot of human thought has to go into creating the database.

This is the way it used to be. The word “analysis” referred to the step where observations of the real world were cut up into data, then “synthesis” was how we reassembled the data into a theoretical framework.3 Our world of ubiquitous surveillance has greatly reduced the first step, causing us to put the lion’s share of our effort into the second. If we’re not careful we can lose sight of all the thought that needs to go into observation and analysis, and misinterpret what we’re seeing when we look at the synthesis. Good job by Baillie putting out that reminder.

 

Notes

  1. About which my ignorance is close to perfection
  2. Def’n, according to George Starbuck, “with a fig for the fatuous fulminations of”
  3. I can’t resist harking back to Saruman.