Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers, The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton 1995

Review for the Digital Humanities

Preliminary remark: Numbers are an important element in the Digital Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine even writes, in connection with the Digital Humanities Conference 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, of the empirical turn in the humanities. High time, then, to read the book of Theodore M. Porter on numbers as well as the book of Alain Desrosières on statistics (please see my separate post) again. Continue reading →

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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Alain Desrosières, La Politique des Grands Nombres, Histoire de la raison statistique, Paris 1993, 2000

Review with respect to the Digital Humanities

Numbers and statistics are an extremely important element in the Digital Humanities. The Frankfurter Allgemeine writes, after the Digital Humanities Conference 2012 in Hamburg, Germany, of the empirical turn in the humanities. High time, then, to read the classic book of Alain Desrosières again (this is also true for Theodore M. Porter’s Trust in Numbers, of course). It is about the social world as a construct, about calculating probabilities, mean values, the law of large numbers, nominalism and taxonomy, the history of the statistics in different countries (France, United Kingdom, Germany, United States), (sample) surveys, econometrics and about the prediction of a victory of the Republicans that was wrong because the survey has been made by telephone. Continue reading →

Guido Koller

Senior Historian, Swiss Federal Archives, CH-3003 Berne, Switzerland

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