I owe our readers an apology. I clearly wasn’t thinking about election-related burnout when I picked November 11, 2020 to write a follow-up post on the relationship between presidential voting in 2016 and the legacy of slavery in the American South. If you can forgive me, I would like to share some more results from … Continue reading The Boundary Problem Revisited
Following up on the discussion in my previous entries, this week’s post focuses on what do when working with spatial data where the boundaries of the units change over time. This is a familiar problem for those of doing quantitative history. In the absence of the type of individual-level data that has become commonplace in … Continue reading Using Network Analysis to Identify Common Geographies
In my last post, I discussed what I referred to as the endogeneity of historical data. The basic idea here is that the very existence of the historical records that researchers use to generate quantitative data is often a byproduct of the process being studied. To illustrate this concept, I described how the efforts to … Continue reading The Organization of Poltical Space in the American West
I am a historical sociologist by training. While contemporary historical sociology is undoubtedly inspired by the work of classical sociologists including Karl Marx, Max Weber, and W. E. B. DuBois, what we know as historical sociology began to emerge in the 1960s, eventually becoming a recognized subfield in the 1980s. By most accounts, the push … Continue reading The Endogeneity of Historical Data