Towards a quantitative research framework for historical disciplines

Abstract

The ever-expanding wealth of digital material that researchers have at their disposal today, coupled with growing computing power, makes the use of quantitative methods in historical disciplines in- creasingly more viable. However, applying exist- ing techniques and tools to historical datasets is not a trivial enterprise (Piotrowski, 2012; McGillivray, 2014). Moreover, scholarly communities react dif- ferently to the idea that new research questions and insights can arise from quantitative explorations that could not be made using purely qualitative ap- proaches. Some of them, such as linguistics (Jenset and McGillivray, 2017), have been acquainted with quantitative methods for a longer time. Others, such as history, have seen a growth in quantitat- ive methods on the fringes of the discipline, but have not incorporated them into the mainstream of scholarly practice (Hitchcock, 2013).