Data-driven historiography?

Discuss the world of the Greeks, Romans, Babylonians, and Egyptians.
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ficino
Posts: 745
Joined: Fri Oct 25, 2013 6:15 pm

Data-driven historiography?

Post by ficino »

This article describes the efforts of Josiah Ober and colleagues at Stanford to do more sophisticated data analysis for ancient Greek history. Their project aims to recover how much egalitarian political movements, coming out of the "Dark Ages" of c. 1100 BCE, led to increased wealth, and hence, to cultural efflorescence. One controversial point is whether there are in fact enough data to support their retrojections.

http://chronicle.com/article/Classicist ... gtblFUEg==
Roger Pearse
Posts: 393
Joined: Sat Oct 05, 2013 10:26 am

Re: Data-driven historiography?

Post by Roger Pearse »

The data probably is not there; but attempts to quantify must always be useful. One of the things I loved about T.C.Skeat's papyrology articles was that he always gave numbers and calculated percentages etc.
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