Mike Kestemont: The application of unseen species models in history: correcting registration bias

This presentation was part of the "Open Research Colloquium Digital History" at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, held on January 29, 2025. Mike Kestemont (University of Antwerp, Belgium) delivered a talk titled "The Application of Unseen Species Models in History: Correcting Registration Bias in Nineteenth-Century Police Reports from Brussels." Due to illness, co-speaker Folgert Karsdorp was unable to attend. The event was conducted in a hybrid format, both in person at Humboldt University and online via Zoom.

In his presentation, Kestemont discussed how statistical methods from ecology, specifically "Unseen Species Models," can be applied to historical archives to identify gaps and biases in our understanding of the past. By analyzing incomplete samples, these models help estimate actual cultural diversity and address biases in historical records. The talk included applications of these methods to medieval chivalric literature, and police registers from 19th-century Brussels.

For more details, please refer to the abstract of the talk: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/9525

The program for the Open Research Colloquium Digital History for the winter term 2024/2025: https://dhistory.hypotheses.org/digit...

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Image Credits for the Thumbnail: The “Snow Whites” of Leuven, Belgium: some of the books which survived the library fires in WWI are now kept in glass boxes. © KU Leuven. Digitaal Labo. Via https://forgotten-books.netlify.app/