JCH/The Promise and Peril of the Data Deluge for Historians

Historical analyses are inevitably based on data – documents, fossils, drawings, oral traditions, artifacts, and more. Recently, historians have been urged to embrace the data deluge (Guldi and Armitage 2014) and teams are now systematically assembling large digital collections of historical data that can be used for rigorous statistical analysis (Slingerland and Sullivan 2017; Turchin et al. 2015; Whitehouse et al. 2019; Slingerland et al. 2018–2019). The promise of large, widely accessible databases is the opportunity for rigorous statistical testing of plausible historical models. The peril is the temptation to ransack these databases for heretofore unknown statistical patterns. Statisticians bearing algorithms are a poor substitute for expertise.