So What Good Is It? Quantitative Data as Qualitative Evidence

The four previous presentations illustrate broadly applicable practices and procedures developed by the Guadalajara Census Project.  I will attempt to show the ways and means by which our data (and hence any census-based database) can address historical issues beyond the provincial walls of the entity that produced the data.  I will explore three qualitative issues addressed by quantitative methods.  The first will highlight the census as cultural text.  There is a common misconception that a census is a collection of statistics.  In fact, a census is a manuscript and can be read, and criticized, as any other historical document.  Imbedded within a census are “small documents” that reveal gendered living arrangements, neighborhood gossip, humor, the language of disability, nicknames, naming patterns, etc.  A database is simply a tool that allows the historian to search more easily through history’s dustbin in search of cultural norms (and deviations), social patterns, etc. The second will demonstrate GCP “tracking” tools to identify social and kinship networks.  Our tentative research uncovered astonishing, short-term levels of intra-household and intra-city/village mobility.  Children, kin and strangers appear and disappear within households, concrete evidence of invisible family and social networks that operate (we believe) as “holding pens,” and as strategies that send children and kin into temporary, often circular, shelter into different households within the city, and between urban families and their rural (village) connections.  The third issue will discuss methodological weaknesses of aggregate data in testing typographies of household and family structures (e.g. the Cambridge Group of population historians).  Aggregate data tends to disguise variation that occurs in real-life, short-term experience of individuals, a conclusion that agrees with recent European scholarship.  In brief, each issue is a template for digitized census data that will be useful for a variety of historical genres and methodological/historiographic issues.