Methods and Tools of Quantification in Historical Research. Napoleonic Employment Applications as a Case Study

This contribution suggests quantitative methods suitable for a one-person history project, explaining their value and their challenges by using my research project as an example. After introducing research questions, I focus on choices of categorization and methods of detecting correlation between variables. Then, after presenting the most popular text-mining techniques, I focus on those that can integrate the analysis of texts with their associated metadata, drawing examples from the Napoleonic Employment Applications project.