1.4: New Data and Eurasian Comparisons

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En provenance du cours de The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The purpose of this course is to summarize new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and to organize this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective. Our course demonstrates how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. Current understandings of human history and social theory are based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience over the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of this new scholarship of discovery divided into two stand-alone parts, which means that students can take any part without prior or subsequent attendance of the other part. Part 1 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-china-history-part-1) focuses on comparative inequality and opportunity and addresses two related questions ‘Who rises to the top?’ and ‘Who gets what?’. Part 2 (this course) turns to an arguably even more important question ‘Who are we?’ as seen through the framework of comparative population behavior - mortality, marriage, and reproduction – and their interaction with economic conditions and human values. We do so because mortality and reproduction are fundamental and universal, because they differ historically just as radically between China and the West as patterns of inequality and opportunity, and because these differences demonstrate the mutability of human behavior and values. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/dzUPRyJ4ETk

À partir de la leçon

Orientation and Module 1: Who Are We and Who Survives

Before you start with the content for Module 1, please review the Assignments and Grading page and introduce yourself to other learners who will be studying this course with you.

1.1 Who Are We? An Introduction4:29

1.2: Big Data and the Scholarship of Discovery10:00

1.3: Big Data, New Facts and Classic Social Theory7:16

1.4: New Data and Eurasian Comparisons6:47

2.1: Who Survives: Life Under Pressure8:17

2.2: Mortality: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons5:49

2.3: Mortality and Who We Are4:33

Rencontrer les enseignants

James Z. Lee
Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

[MUSIC]

Welcome to Understanding China, 1700-2000.

A Data Analytic Approach.

Part Two, Section Four, New Data and Eurasian Comparisons.

Many of the new findings they will present in part two are products

of the Eurasian Population and Family History Project which we call the EAP.

An important two decade long effort to compare analyses

of big historical data in five sets of populations from eastern Belgium,

northeast China, northern Italy, northeast Japan, and southern Sweden.

The EAP compares patterns of demographic responses during hard times, and

maps patterns of differences within regions, communities, and

households to illuminate effects of social and

family organization on the demographic responses to hard times.

We contrast importance of power,

location within the family and other political hierarchies, and

property location within community occupational and wealth hierarchies,

in structuring patterns of inequality reflected in demographic responses.

So in that since the EAP in part two overlaps with the discussion

of inequality and opportunity in part one.

The model in the EAP is to construct comparable individual

big panel data for complete rural communities from population registries,

in this case from five very different Eurasian contexts.

To link these population records to economic time series and food prices and

real wages, and then to estimate through complicated mathematical models,

nearly identical what are called event history calculations.

And to examine how community and

family contexts condition individual demographic responses to economic change.

And comparing the results,

focusing on the patterns of effects of short-term economic and other stress.

In this map, you see the location of the five sets of populations,

from largely northwestern Europe and

largely northeast Asia, in Japan and northeast China.

In this chart you see the totality of the five big population data sets,

which in our study of mortality covers roughly two centuries, 1760 to 1912.

Analyzes almost 850,000 person years and almost 19,000 deaths.

In the study of reproduction contrasts married woman years

of 187,000, 24,000 births.

And in marriage and remarriage, looks at the population

of never married people of almost a million, and

studies almost 50,000 first marriages as well as 5,000 remarriages.

Now unlike studies which are based on aggregate statistics,

which are typically found in the Lee and Wong 1999.

The strengths of the EAP are first the scale.

Multiple populations over very different regions with a large number of records.

Second the luminosity.

Using this individual big data to construct individual level

statistical models, rather than simply averaging these large populations.

To make these data into panels, that is to say to link this data over time,

so you can see how past events condition present day behavior,

or how present day context influences future behavior.

And to do this within a setting where you have complete or near complete recording

of specific communities, so you can see this with a full,

sort of background of the community within which these individuals are invented.

This Harmonized Micro data is then

analyzed within the framework of macro theory

to compare patterns of differentials by community and family context.

To seek commonalities suggestive of universal principles of behavior and

to identify differences linked to continental, regional, or

local social and economic context.

And to embed, in other words,

these comparative results in the local differences and thus,

to describe and explain complexity and they provide a basis for

the interpretation of differences in our understanding of who we are.

The EAP is composed of five research teams.

The principal membership of which are identified here.

From southern Sweden, from Eastern Belgium,

from Central Italy, from Northeastern Japan and from Northeastern China.

And as you can see from our first meeting in 1994 to a later meeting in 2007.

If I can find a photograph, even later meetings in 2014, you can

see the aging and the changing composition of the EAP group.

I'm identified in the second row on the left in the 1994 photograph and

the second in the front in the 2007 photograph.

Cameron Campbell is the second from the right in 1994 and

the first on the left in 2007.

This group in addition to five edited volumes has produced three co-authored,

not edited, but co-authored books working together.

One on mortality, Life Under Pressure, published in 2004.

One on reproduction, Prudence and Pressure published in 2010.

And one on marriage, Similarity in Difference just

published late last year in 2014.

[MUSIC]

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