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Alliances and conflicts in social, political and economic relations can be represented by positive and negative edges in signed networks. A cycle is said to be positive if the product of its edge signs is positive, otherwise it is negative. Then, a signed network is balanced if and only if all its cycles are positive. An index characterizing how much a signed network deviates from being balanced is known as a global balance index. Here we give a step forward in the characterization of signed networks by defining a local balance index, which characterizes how much a given vertex of a signed network contributes to its global balance. We analyze the mathematical foundations and unique structural properties of this index. Then, we apply this index to the study of the evolution of international relations in the globe for the period 1816–2014. In this way we detect and categorize major historic events based on balance fluctuations, helping our understanding towards new mixed approaches to history based on network theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to statistics is considerably significant in the analysis of historical events, especially those events whose details are not obvious enough. The awareness on the number of Omar ibn Sa’d’s forces on the day of Ashura, is effective in the analysis of the how of Kufis encountering with Imam Hossein (A.S.), since these forces were sent from Kufa. In order to know the number of the forces under the command of Omar ibn Sa’d and to achieve a historical viewpoint, the data was comparatively analyzed based on the historical sources up to the fifth century.Moreover, the analysis of the incident in the historical context has been deeply considered to validate this view point. The findings clarify that the ancient historical records did not address the number of Omar ibn Sa’d's forces on this day; however, Belazori’s report related to the expeditionary forces is more compatible with other sources and to put the other way, half or more than half of the expeditionary forces from Kufa were not willing to encounter with Imam (A.S.) and fled on the way. Accordingly, there is a difference between the number of the troops sent from Kufa and the people present in Karbala event.

Copyright of History of Islam is the property of Baqir al-Olum University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Spanish Olive Jar is a ubiquitous marker of the Spanish colonial period in the southeastern United States, appearing on both terrestrial and maritime sites where colonists resided and traveled between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Olive Jar ceramic type has been the subject of many archaeological studies, most of which use vessel shape typologies and rim morphology to aid in the chronological placement of sites and proveniences where they are found, and more recently also using compositional analyses to determine locations of manufacture. Frequently lacking, however, is anything more than a cursory generic reference to what these vessels were likely to have originally contained, and how exactly they were used and reused by the people who lived and worked at the archaeological sites where their remains are so commonly found. The intent of this article is to explore primary source documents that provide quantifiable data to answer such questions, with the goal of enhancing the utility of Spanish Olive Jar for archaeological interpretation by situating it within its broader functional context as one of a number of different types of shipping containers used and reused in a variety of circumstances during the Spanish colonial period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on the exhaustive reconstruction of the transnational migration trajectories of Jewish and Catholic inhabitants from a small Polish town during the interwar period to explore the social and relational dimensions of migration. Implementing a mesoscopic analytical scale, the authors quantitatively and qualitatively analyse dense and varied historical material. They examine the relationship between relational configurations of mobility and immobility, as well as the increasing dangers faced by Polish Jews in the decade leading up to the war and the destruction of their communities. This change of scale gauges the specific impact of the temporal context – namely rising peril and anti-Semitic violence against Polish Jews in the 1930s – on the dynamics of mobility. It also leads to a better understanding of the importance and nature of obstacles to migration. By doing so, the authors advocate for a social history of migrations and connections that considers emigration as the product of relational configurations in societies of origin. Moreover, they show that ties, so often described as resources in analyses of migration, can also be burdens when it comes to escaping persecution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tsinghua Journal of Education is the property of Tsinghua University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of History Pages is the property of National Technical University of Ukraine KPI and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Vínculos de Historia is the property of Vinculos de Historia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article the author reconstructs the dynamics of home education sector in monetary value terms as the case study of a province in Central Russia, with application of mathematical modelling methods. As the source base, the author employs evidence primarily from published memoirs, epistolary heritage, fiction, as well as from previous research literature. The findings are obtained by means of calculations including inter-, retro-, and extrapolations of the quantitative evidence from the sources. The principal findings are the set of methods for reconstruction of annual output in the home education services segment of a regional economy and the respective long time series for Yaroslavl Province. They support the hypothesis that the home segment was comparable in scale to the educational establishments or even could exceed them at the start of the period under study. The methods developed by the author may be employed directly for similar reconstructions based on materials from other regions of Central Russia; and they are applied to the materials from the regions of Siberia, Far East and national peripheries of Russia.

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

The records of medieval heresy inquisitions have been a subject of controversy ever since their rediscovery by historians. The detail they convey of specific social interactions has continued to inspire generations of scholars, while the coercive conditions of their production have placed strong caveats over their interpretation. This article offers a comprehensive review of the debate on the uses of inquisition records, encompassing scholarship across multiple languages and schools of thought. It also highlights some shortcomings in that debate, e.g., the overrepresentation of inquisitors' choices; the claim that the use of torture led automatically to reproducing outlandish inquisitorial fears; and the idea that exceptional detail correlates with reliability. The article concludes with the proposal of the Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) to use structured data within a new variety of quantitative history. This method, founded on the Computer-Assisted Semantic Text Modelling approach that DISSINET has pioneered, is well-suited to addressing the biases of inquisition documents and opening them to scrutiny, thus providing a significant complement to close reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While quantitative methods are routinely used to examine historical materials, critics take issue with the use of global regression models that attach a single parameter to each predictor, thereby ignoring the effects of time and space, which together define the context in which historical events unfold. This problem can be addressed by allowing for parameter heterogeneity, as highlighted by the proliferation of work on the use of time-varying parameter models. In this article, I show how this approach can be extended to the case of spatial data using spatially varying coefficient models, with an eye toward the study of electoral politics, where the use of spatial data is especially common in historical settings. Toward this end, I revisit a critical case in the field of quantitative history: the rise of electoral Populism in the American West in the period between 1890 and 1896. Upending popular narratives about the correlates of third-party support in the late nineteenth century, I show that the association between third-party vote share and traditional predictors such as economic hardship and ethnic composition varied considerably from one place to the next, giving rise to distinct varieties of electoral Populism—a finding that is missed by global models, which mistake the mathematically particular for the historically general. These findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for the study of political action in a world where parameter heterogeneity is increasingly recognized as a standard feature of modern social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased availability of quantitative historical datasets has provided new research opportunities for multiple disciplines in social science. In this article, we work closely with the constructors of a new dataset, CGED-Q (China Government Employee Database-Qing), that records the career trajectories of over 340,000 government officials in the Qing bureaucracy in China from 1760 to 1912. We use these data to study career mobility from a historical perspective and understand social mobility and inequality. However, existing statistical approaches are inadequate for analyzing career mobility in this historical dataset with its fine-grained attributes and long time span, since they are mostly hypothesis-driven and require substantial effort. We propose CareerLens, an interactive visual analytics system for assisting experts in exploring, understanding, and reasoning from historical career data. With CareerLens, experts examine mobility patterns in three levels-of-detail, namely, the macro-level providing a summary of overall mobility, the meso-level extracting latent group mobility patterns, and the micro-level revealing social relationships of individuals. We demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of CareerLens through two case studies and receive encouraging feedback from follow-up interviews with domain experts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks a simple question that nevertheless has broad implications for historians of premodern continental Europe: What did notaries do? It answers it by applying descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, and clustering techniques to the typological distribution of all deeds preserved in the notarial collections of six French and Italian cities—Paris, Toulouse, Mende, Turin, Florence, and Livorno—for the year 1751, as well as smaller datasets for other dates and locations. The results of this analysis are surprising. In spite of a high degree of consistency in the notarial profession and terminology (a trait that facilitates our comparisons), the notarial style of each city varied greatly. Variations within a single state were sometimes greater than those across state borders. Both supply and demand of notarial services differed from city to city. Overall, our conclusions are as important as the methodology that we adopt to reach them. Our aim is to offer a replicable analysis that puts quantitative methods in the service not only of the study of a source (notarial records) that is widespread across late medieval and early modern continental Europe and its overseas empires but also of a renewed comparative social history that does not shy away from the heterogeneity of primary sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Biography is a common approach to examining history as event and process. Whether leaders or followers, extraordinary or average individuals, together they are a part of the historical process. The Chinese Biographical Database (CBD), originally created in 1997 – 98, was made available online through 2006 and was intended as a research tool to aid in understanding biography and history. The CBD originated in the study of Chinese politics in Europe during the 1920s and included information on more than 1,100 Chinese who went to France, Germany, and Belgium, and later expanded to include other Chinese individuals, creating a diverse array of people in politics, academics, military, and other spheres. Data attributes included basic biographical information such as names, gender, birthplace, birth and death dates, main career, affiliations, education, positions, youth activities, historical events, family members, alternate names, sources, locator data, and multimedia. Since 2018, the CBD has been transformed into an analytical resource with updated information for 2,109 individuals and 840 attributes. This article will introduce the CBD and then discuss the historical context, documentation, composition, and future of the CBD, as well as presenting two examples of its utilization for historical network analysis.

This interdisciplinary study measures the changes in intergenerational exam performance using a model of directed centrality values. Our test case explores the approximately 14,600 higher civil examination degree holders in the Munkwa database (Munkwa pangmok 文科榜目), in particular the underutilized records of each candidate’s agnatic and affinal relations. Despite some imperfections in the data set, our provisional findings statistically demonstrate that the devastating Imjin War may have indeed been the watershed event responsible for the emergence of a new social order in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Korea. The network model, data structure, and the Python code developed for this study can be applied to other kinship and genealogical data from the Chosŏn dynasty 朝鮮 (1392–1910) and elsewhere.

The article analyzes the titulature used in the documents of the Book of Inscriptions No. 8 of the Lithuanian Metrica. The study of documents clearly indicates 1713 ruler’s titles of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which are classified into 47 different variants. The author characterized the system of presentation of the supreme power through the title of a ruler and its reception by the subjects. The article provides specific features of the modern and previous rulers systems of titulature. It reveals the use of titles "king", "grand duke" and "hospodar". The obtained results demonstrate that the title of the ruler is used in both extended and abridged versions. Most often, the abridged version contains the title of "king", which is a consequence of its greater prestige compared to the title of "grand duke". The author examines the system of using titles of rulers within one document. It is established that the first use of the title is often the most complete. In the case of documents drawn up on behalf of the ruler, the first title denotes the prerogatives of the ruler. "King by the grace of God", "King and Grand Duke by the grace of God", "King of Poland by the grace of God", "By the grace of God" with the addition of a name in all cases are most often used as the first titles in the documents created during the reign of the ruler Sigismund I the Old. The supreme power emphasizes the sacred origin of their prerogatives by adding "by the grace of God" to the title of a modern ruler. In the same case, there is no deliberate emphasis on the sacralization of power of previous rulers. The article provides an analysis of combinations of titles of rulers. In documents drawn up on behalf of the ruler, the title of "king" is often combined with the title of "grand duke", which is characteristic of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. On the other hand, it is typical to frequently use the title of "hospodar" for documents originating from subjects of rulers. The study has confirmed that the remoteness of the reign of the Grand Duke from the time of the creation of the document reduces the variability of the titulature. Vytautas and Sigismund Kęstutaitis are titled exclusively as "grand duke". The titulature of Casimir IV Jagiellon and Alexander Jagiellon has more variations. In documents originating from the subjects, the ruler is often referred to as "his mercy", "hospodar", "his mercy king" and "his mercy hospodar".

Using tools from social network analysis, we study citation patterns since the early 1990s in the two most important journals in economic methodology (aka philosophy of economics). We mostly focus on assessing four historical claims in the existing interpretive literature. In agreement with the literature, we find that (1) it is sensible to split the field along three dimensions (corresponding to action theory, ethics and philosophy of science) and that (2) the interest for general philosophical questions (known as Big M) has steadily declined. Contra the literature, we find that (3) there is no move away from heterodox economics in the main journals: no significant interest was present to begin with. Finally, we update the literature regarding an alleged move toward the study of mainstream pluralism: (4) although this direction describes well the early 2000s, the field in the 2010s is better characterized as mainly fascinated by behavioral economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tour de France is the most popular and prestigious bicycle race in the world. Since the 1980s, it has also had increasing economic success. Is such economic success related to improvements in competitive balance among riders, i.e. the degree of parity among opponents and the resulting difficulty to predict the competition's end result? We compute several measures of static (annual) and dynamic (year-to-year) competitive balance for the yellow jersey from 1947 to 2017, both among the top five riders and among team leaders. Our main result is that competitive balance in the Tour de France has not improved much since 1947: the time performances of top riders and team leaders have not become closer to each other – or harder to predict from one year to the next. Therefore, the increasing economic success of the Tour since the 1980s cannot be attributed to improvements in the race's competitive balance. Other factors must have been driving the increasing demand for the Tour, including better-quality television broadcasting of the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lee-Campbell Group has spent forty years constructing and analysing individual-level datasets based largely on Chinese archival materials to produce a scholarship of discovery. Initially, we constructed datasets for the study of Chinese demographic behaviour, households, kin networks, and socioeconomic attainment. More recently, we have turned to the construction and analysis of datasets on civil and military officials and other educational and professional elites, especially their social origins and their careers. As of July 2020, the datasets include nominative information on the behaviour and life outcomes of approximately two million individuals. This article is a retrospective on the construction of these datasets and a summary of their findings. This is the first time we have presented all our projects together and discussed them and the results of our analysis as a single integrated whole. We begin by summarizing the contents, organization, and notable features of each dataset and provide an integrated history of our data construction, starting in 1979 up to the present. We then summarize the most important results from our research on demographic behaviour, family, and household organization, and more recently inequality and stratification. We conclude with a reflection on the importance of data discovery, flexibility, interaction and collaboration to the success of our efforts.

We introduce the China Government Employee Database—Qing (CGED-Q), a new resource for the quantitative study of Qing officialdom. The CGED-Q details the backgrounds, characteristics and careers of Qing officials who served between 1760 and 1912, with nearly complete coverage of officials serving after 1830. We draw information on careers from the Roster of Government Personnel (jinshenlu), which in each quarterly edition listed approximately 12,500 regular civil offices and their holders in the central government and the provinces. Information about backgrounds and characteristics comes from such linked sources as lists of exam degree holders. In some years, information on military officials is also available. As of February 2020, the CGED-Q comprises 3,817,219 records, of which 3,354,897 are civil offices and the remainder are military. In this article we review the progress and prospects of the project, introduce the sources, transcription procedures, and constructed variables, and provide examples of results to showcase its potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to analyse the distribution of American movies in Italy in the central part of the twentieth century (1930–1996), using methods derived from both social sciences and quantitative history. For this goal, I will apply Pierre Bourdieu's 'serial history' to the Italian local market, also following Franco Moretti's quantitative work on literary industries, so as to detect some historical patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous researchers from various disciplines have explored commonalities and divergences in the evolution of complex social formations. Here, we explore whether there is a "characteristic" time course for the evolution of social complexity in a handful of different geographic areas. Data from the Seshat: Global History Databank is shifted so that the overlapping time series can be fitted to a single logistic regression model for all 23 geographic areas under consideration. The resulting regression shows convincing out-of-sample predictions, and its period of extensive growth in social complexity can be identified via bootstrapping as a time interval of roughly 2,500 years. To analyze the endogenous growth of social complexity, each time series is restricted to a central time interval without major disruptions in cultural or institutional continuity, and both approaches result in a similar logistic regression curve. Our results suggest that these different areas have indeed experienced a similar course in the their evolution of social complexity, but that this is a lengthy process involving both internal developments and external influences., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of National Academy of Sciences.)

This article is an analysis of metadata from 955 closed trials of Soviet people accused of being collaborators during World War II. The trials reveal Soviet officials' understandings of who was capable of collaboration and what kinds of acts were collaboration. At the same time, the aggregate data from trials demonstrates that the accusations were grounded in the realities of the war and were not falsifications like the investigations of the Great Terror in the 1930s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, people have viewed narcotics as a devil impeding the modernisation of China, but they have recently been faced with the challenge of declaring that narcotics are harmless in some instances. A deeper understanding of this issue requires historical approaches which show that the demonisation of narcotics has mainly been a political pursuit. In re-examining the drug problem and its correlation to political and socio-economic issues, data statistics based on substantial archives in modern China play a crucial role. Discovered in 2007 in Longquan, a city in southeast China, Judicial Records of Longquan remains the largest judicial record in modern China by far. Data analysis reveals government efforts regarding drug control were not in line with the peak periods of drug-related cases in Longquan. Drawing on previously unexamined documents, it can be shown that anti-drug mobilisation and hygienic conditions have been overstated to legitimise the authority of governments in modern China. However, the knowledge of local residents regarding medicine and health was indirectly promoted in this agenda. Compared with the negative image of drugs constructed under the biopower of government, the role of narcotics was a positive vehicle for accelerating health mobilization during the Republic of China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A subset of research in the history of economics is organizational history - i.e. the study of the organizations producing, circulating and applying economic ideas. This article maintains that some research questions in organizational history call for quantitative methods because they ask about magnitudes. More precisely, we claim that quantitative methods should complement rather than replace other research methods when the research question is at least partly about magnitudes. We walk the walk with a study of one type of organization, central banks, and of its changing relationship with economic science. Our results point unambiguously toward a growing dominance of central banks in the specialized field of monetary economics. Central banks have swelling research armies, they publish a growing share of the articles in specialized scholarly journals, and these articles tend to have more impact today than the articles produced outside central banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the example of the history of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and citation analysis in order to investigate some differences between qualitative history and a quantitative history. The history of the EMH provides a telling example of the way quantitative analyses can supply different perspectives on the qualitative history of this hypothesis or complement it. For instance, since the EMH was proposed, several criticisms emerged. In addition, the definition and the scope of this hypothesis have been modified several times. Although the qualitative history of the EMH refers to these criticisms and these alternative definitions and scopes, qualitative tools cannot provide a clear measure of the impact of these criticisms and these modifications among economists. By studying the dissemination of the EMH, its major criticisms, and the answers economists provided, citation analysis sheds a different light on the history of the EMH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A quantitative turn in history of economic thought is looming. We argue that engineering it consciously is of crucial importance for historians of economics. We also highlight the limitations of quantitative techniques. Yet, the combination of qualitative and quantitative research could substantially enrich our narratives of the development of economics and its practice, of how ideas and tools disseminate and influence other spheres. A failed quantitative turn could lead our field to a house divided and, in the worst case, a civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gerhard Botz outlines his scholarly autobiography in its interrelationship with and against main developments in Austrian politics and historiographic trends. However, he does not want to present a coherent narrative about his career from social and scholarly peripheries to close to the centres of historical and social scientific research. The unfolding of his scientific profile is compounded of different puzzle pieces like memory-based descriptions, historical analyses of contemporary political contexts, and his live story interviews. As an historian the author tries to integrate social science and cultural history methods and theories into his main professional grounding which is focused thematically on Austria's history since the end of the First World War, particularly on the disastrous effects of violence and the Nazi dictatorship. He presents his main findings and the methodical practices along three fields of long term interests and projects: political violence and social conflict during the interwar period in Austria, the functioning and social consequences of national socialist rule on the example of Vienna, and the social composition and motivations of the NSDAP membership. In doing so he allows also insights into every-day work, obstacles and gains of historical research applying a multitude of methods, including quantification and oral history. These insights were gained in close connection with several leading scholars of QUANTUM and the Centre of Historical Social Research in Cologne. These efforts motivated Gerhard Botz to organize the Salzburg Summer Schools on New Methods in History and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Social Science History (at the University of Vienna until its closure in 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a generation, legal historians investigating colonial Virginia have emphasized the dramaturgy of court day. According to the dramaturgical school of interpretation, administrative and judicial activities of county court officials amounted to theatrical performances that simultaneously enforced economic order and stabilized traditional social relationships. Such interpretations assume a large audience routinely attended county courts to observe legal dramas. Often, however, only a small number of persons can be documented as present during court day. The independence theorem from probability theory suggests that the number of documentable attendees is a useful and easily calculated estimate for actual total crowd size. If so, some Virginia court sessions were attended by hundreds of people, while others drew only a few participants. A variety of factors apparently inhibited court attendance in older Virginia counties. By contrast, in newer frontier counties, mid-eighteenth-century revisions of court calendars produced heavy attendance at court day. Regardless of the number of people in attendance, any Virginia county court could still effectively enforce credit contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study was to explore the reaction of the music education community to Section 504 and PL 94-142 regarding mainstreaming practices. A content analysis was conducted for the articles published between January 1, 1960, and December 31, 1989, in the Music Educators Journal (MEJ), Journal of Research in Music Education (JRME), and the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education (Bulletin). Research questions regarding the number of articles published, the ratio of research to pedagogical articles, disabilities addressed within the articles, and the affiliations and geographic locations of the article authors guided the analysis. Pedagogical articles were separated from research articles for analysis purposes. Based on the results of the analyses, the reaction to the legislation was one of enthusiasm for some while others had little or no reaction. Over a three-decade period (1960-1989), only forty-nine articles were published in the selected journals regarding mainstreaming in the music classroom. The articles were primarily pedagogical, with more than half of the articles published including information regarding various disabilities or Intellectual Disabilities specifically. A majority of the authors were affiliated with higher education institutions, with authors from Kansas producing the most articles by state. Implications and suggestions for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]