The use of quantitative information in History – Topic for discussion

Abstract

This paper discusses quantitative information as a historiographic instrument: its individual characteristics and those it shows in sets of data, its capacity to describe historical phenomena and the uses historian give to them. It specially examines the sense and limits of quantitative precision in historiographic practice. It also discusses various aspects of the object of quantitative information, its process of generation and the standard in which it is expressed. The paper makes use of the concept of a historian’s focus, which combines time, space and conceptual scales, as well as the set of sources employed. It analyses the consequences of homogeneity and heterogeneity in time series and synchronic data.