Beyond the local marriage market

This study examines whether the increase of geographical heterogamy in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is related to modernization. Specifically, we test whether mass communication and mass transport enhanced the likelihood of a geographically heterogamous marriage as well as the distance over which heterogamous marriages took place. Furthermore, we study whether modernization decreased the relationship between social background and geographical heterogamy. We employ individual and municipality level data of some 30,000 marriages in over 40 municipalities in the Dutch province Overijssel between 1823 and 1922. The results from our multi-level analyses suggest that mass communication was more important than mass transport.geographical homogamy, mass communication, mass transport, migration, modernization, status homogamy

Measuring social structure in the past: A comparison of historical class schemes and occupational stratification scales on Dutch 19th and early 20th century data

To what degree are HISCO based measures of class (HISCLASS and SOCPO) and occupational stratification (HIS-CAM) comparable with each other and contemporary measures? Next to a large degree of congruency, we find considerable differences between the measures, raising questions concerning the comparability of occupation-based measures across studies

Not Like Everybody Else:Essays in Honor of Kees Mandemakers

This collection of essays pays tribute to Kees Mandemaker's great contribution to the data infrastructure of social science history, in the Netherlands and elsewhere. Several essays discuss (the future of) historical databases. Yet other provide examples of research on topics covering important life course transitions. All demonstrate the scale, scope and variation of research based on well-constructed databases

Microclass immobility during industrialisation in the USA and Norway

The ‘microclass' approach advocated by Grusky, Weeden and colleagues emphasises fine-grained occupational differences and their relevance to social reproduction and social mobility. Using recent developments in historical occupational classifications, we apply a microclass approach to the analysis of intergenerational social mobility using linked census data for Norway and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th century (1850-1910). We describe a procedure that offers an operationalisation of microclass units for these datasets, and show how its application enables us to disentangle different forms of immobility which would not be distinguished in other approaches. Results suggest that microclass immobility is an important part of social reproduction in both Norway and the United States during the era of industrialisation. Both countries reveal a similar balance between ‘big class' and ‘microclass' immobility patterns. In Norway, the relative importance of microclasses in social reproduction regimes, when compared to the role of ‘big class' structures, seems to decline very slightly over the course of industrialisation, but in the USA the relative importance of microclasses seems if anything to increase over the period

Unequal excess mortality during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the Netherlands

A century after the Spanish Flu, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought renewed attention to socioeconomic and occupational differences in mortality in the earlier pandemic. The magnitude of these differences and the pathways between occupation and increased mortality remain unclear, however. In this paper, we explore the relation between occupational characteristics and excess mortality among men during the Spanish Flu pandemic in the Netherlands. By creating a new occupational coding for exposure to disease at work, we separate social status and occupational conditions for viral transmission. We use a new data set based on men’s death certificates to calculate excess mortality rates by region, age group, and occupational group. Using OLS regression models, we estimate whether social position, regular interaction in the workplace, and working in an enclosed space affected excess mortality among men in the Netherlands in the autumn of 1918. We find some evidence that men with occupations that featured high levels of social contact had higher mortality in this period. Above all, however, we find a strong socioeconomic gradient to excess mortality among men during the Spanish Flu pandemic, even after accounting for exposure in the workplace

Linking Dutch civil certificates

Finding and linking different appearances of the same entity in an open Web setting is one of the primary challenges of the Semantic Web. In social and economic history, record linkage has dealt with this problem for a long time, linking historical individual records at a local database level. With the advent of semantic technologies, Knowledge Graphs containing these records have been published, raising the need for large-scale linking techniques that consider the particularities of historical individual linking. In this paper we focus on our current investigation of such techniques to link the Dutch civil certificates in the LINKS/CLARIAH project. We describe the production of the LINKS Knowledge Graph, and we show its potential at answering domain research questions through its large number of owl:sameAs links

Data Stories in CLARIAH: Developing a Research Infrastructure for Storytelling with Heritage and Culture Data

Online stories, from blog posts to journalistic articles to scientific publications, are commonly illustrated with media (e.g. images, audio clips) or statistical summaries (e.g. tables and graphs). Such “illustrations” are the result of a process of acquiring, parsing, filtering, mining, representing, refining and interacting with data [3]. Unfortunately, such processes are typically taken for granted and seldom mentioned in the story itself. Although recently a wide variety of interactive data visualisation techniques have been developed (see e.g., [6]), in many cases the illustrations in such publications are static; this prevents different audiences from engaging with the data and analyses as they desire. In this paper, we share our experiences with the concept of “data stories” that tackles both issues, enhancing opportunities for outreach, reporting on scientific inquiry, and FAIR data representation [9]. In journalism data stories are becoming widely accepted as the output of a process that is in many aspects similar to that of a computational scholar: gaining insights by analyzing data sets using (semi-)automatized methods and presenting these insights using (interactive) visualizations and other textual outputs based on data [4] [7] [5] [6]. In the context of scientific output, data stories can be regarded as digital “publications enriched with or linking to related research results, such as research data, workflows, software, and possibly connections among them” [1]. However, as infrastructure for (peerreviewed) enhanced publications is in an early stage of development (see e.g., [2]), scholarly data stories are currently often produced as blog posts, discussing a relevant topic. These may be accompanied by illustrations not limited to a single graph or image but characterized by different forms of interactivity: readers can, for instance, change the perspective or zoom level of graphs, or cycle through images or audio clips. Having experimented successfully with various types and uses of data stories1 in the CLARIAH2 project, we are working towards a more generic, stable and sustainable infrastructure to create, publish, and archive data stories. This includes providing environments for reproduction of data stories and verification of data via “close reading”. From an infrastructure perspective, this involves the provisioning of services for persistent storage of data (e.g. triple stores), data registration and search (registries), data publication (SPARQL end-points, search-APIs), data visualization, and (versioned) query creation. These services can be used by environments to develop data stories, either or not facilitating additional data analysis steps. For data stories that make use of data analysis, for example via Jupyter Notebooks [8], the infrastructure also needs to take computational requirements (load balancing) and restrictions (security) into account. Also, when data sets are restricted for copyright or privacy reasons, authentication and authorization infrastructure (AAI) is required. The large and rich data sets in (European) heritage archives that are increasingly made interoperable using FAIR principles, are eminently qualified as fertile ground for data stories. We therefore hope to be able to present our experiences with data stories, share our strategy for a more generic solution and receive feedback on shared challenges