‘Sometimes the obvious and the banal are paradoxically absent from the archive.’ So what to do? And in particular, who can tell me *how many* farmers I am missing in my counts? williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/10/16/t... 🗃️ - ThreadSky

willpooley.bsky.social • 137 days ago

‘Sometimes the obvious and the banal are paradoxically absent from the archive.’

So what to do? And in particular, who can tell me *how many* farmers I am missing in my counts?

https://williamgpooley.wordpress.com/2024/10/16/the-missing-farmers/ 🗃️

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gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

An important and very general problem!

One possibility is to use ideas developed to deal with missing data in statistics.

That is to impute missing values using some systematic approach, and to use multiple imputations to summarize the extra uncertainty that brings to the analysis.

willpooley.bsky.social•135 days ago

could I ask if you have recommends on reading for how one would go about doing that 🙏🏻

gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

The textbook on this is: Little and Rubin, Statistical Analysis with Missing data.

About 20-years ago I wrote a couple of articles attempting to translate those ideas to historical cases:

gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

A piece in Historical methods:(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01615440209601206)

gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

And a piece in Journal of Interdisciplinary History:
https://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-abstract/36/2/209/48104/Propensity-Score-Methods-and-the-Lenin-School

gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

The idea in those articles is to translate standard statistical approaches for historical cases.

I still think that is the right basic approach. However, to be honest the implementation isn't that great, and I'd do thing rather differently if I were doing something similar now.

gidoncohen.bsky.social•135 days ago

With a case like your missing farmers the occupational data is going to be 'missing not at random', and your missing data mechanism is 'non-ignorable' and so you are going to have specify a missingness mechanism.

lsangha.bsky.social•135 days ago

I missed this before - very interesting responses in replies. Poss of interest is Alexandra Ortolja-Baird and Julianne Nyhan, ‘Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue’, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 73:3 (2022) - they tag archival absences using TEI markup

themedievaldrk.bsky.social•137 days ago

oh gosh do I ever have a whole box of discourse about who does and does not ID as a farmer today vs who is and is not ID'd as a farmer by others--I can only believe it was even more complicated in earlier centuries!

willpooley.bsky.social•137 days ago

there’s also the whole thing about ‘peasant’ or paysan in france.

and the images of ‘fermiers’ i my post are definitely not the farmers im missing 😂

themedievaldrk.bsky.social•137 days ago

gosh yes, add language in as a complicating factor and it's a real rats nest!

jnisly-goretzki.bsky.social•137 days ago

Yes, and all of these historical nuances of multiple meanings directly play into how those identities are claimed today. The peasant translation problem is real: Bauer is claimed today by both small-scale farmers (AbL) and new, conservative activist groups of conventional farmers (Freie Bauern)

jnisly-goretzki.bsky.social•137 days ago

Which is to say that working with German archives creates similar problems to what you are describing. I generally assume Landmann is going to do at least some farming, but it is also just a generic description of anyone living in a village.

jnisly-goretzki.bsky.social•137 days ago

Bauer were often technically the village upper class with a certain size of farm, but in the 19th century that could get expanded to anyone working primarily in agriculture. Afraid I don't have a solution, just commiseration.

smidbob.bsky.social•137 days ago

At a paper recently someone asked me about how I was translating 'paysan' which surprised me as I thought it pretty obvious (and 'pays' is probably more contentious), but I did get their point about the politics of self-definition in the 20th C. Hopefully, I've managed to navigate that in the book

mtoiv.bsky.social•137 days ago

Ah yes I call this the "as everyone knows..." problem.

alexislitvine.bsky.social•137 days ago

Hey Will - would you like to come down to Cambridge one of these days and discuss this. I can give you some ideas, I think. Would be lovely to finally meet in person, too! Consider this a proper invite :-)

willpooley.bsky.social•137 days ago

Yes!

katherinecrighton.bsky.social•137 days ago

📌

brodiewaddell.bsky.social•137 days ago

Not sure this is helpful, but I've come across the same thing when trying to get a sense of the occupations/status of petitioners - only a minority have specific occupational labels. I don't think I (or you) can project a specific label onto the 'unknowns', but ... (1/2)

brodiewaddell.bsky.social•137 days ago

... I think you can probably say that the 'unknowns' were very likely to be unremarkable. That is to say, in my case, they were not gentlemen or clergymen or paupers. They were probably 'ordinary villagers', which would have included yeomen, husbandmen, labourers, artisans, etc

brodiewaddell.bsky.social•137 days ago

Whereas if they were remarkable (e.g. gent or clergy) they would have been labelled as such in the records. So this can't tell you there specific occupation but it can probably tell you their general social status and socio-economic 'ordinariness'.

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