Numbers and Words

It’s that time of year again.  This semester I’m teaching my “Social Science Approaches to the American Past” and as I type today, my students are meeting in their small groups to prepare for their presentations next week on runaway slave advertisements.   I’m with Kelly on the value of group work from time to time.  My goal: to get them to think about quantitative and qualitative research methods, and to think a bit more about the value of numbers.  (I posted about the assignment the last time I taught this course.)

As we’ve been making our way to this point in the semester, we’ve been talking about numbers and words.  When we started to talk about quantitative methods, I had them read two articles, including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s “The Living Mother of a Living Child: Midwifery and Mortality in Post-Revolutionary New England.”  They seem to like the article, and who can blame them?  This is some of the material from Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale, but presented differently than in the book.  Here the tables are front and center, as Ulrich works to show us the error in our ways if we were so foolish as to assume that in the era before medical doctors took charge of obstetric care, midwives were not up to the challenge.  Martha Ballard, we learn, was an exemplary midwife with impressive rates of maternal and infant survival over the course of her career.  We had a great discussion.  I ask them about the questions she asks, about her methods and her evidence and why she is so successful in making her argument.  The numbers, we all agree, are incredibly effective.  We trust numbers.

This is all well and good, and indeed Ulrich’s quantitative work is very impressive (it is, indeed, why I assign the article in the first place).  But what struck me this semester, as it has every time I’ve assigned the piece, was the way that the students were talking about these numbers as if they existed in a vacuum.  Somewhere they expected there to have been a clear table that every doctor or midwife had entered their data into, only to be plucked up by the historian to report to the public.  For all of our discussion of how the historian/social scientist’s job is interpretation, numbers seemed beyond interpretation.

Until, that is, I pulled up the digital versions of Ballard’s diary that formed the basis of Ulrich’s research.  I think one of the students’ jaws actually dropped.  Is this what they expected it to look like?  No.  It was not.  How do you get numbers out of words?  For me, this is what is so incredibly impressive about the kind of work that Ulrich did.  For my students, hopefully they came out of that class again thinking about the role of interpretation in creating scholarly work and thinking a bit more deeply about where numbers they came from.

Perhaps they will even admire the handwriting-reading skills of those of us who work on the 18th and 19th centuries, although maybe that is too much to ask for.

After that discussion, though, I am very excited to see what they come up with this week as they are working on their runaway slave databases and trying to come up with a way to tell the rest of the class a story about slavery in America.  What kinds of numbers will they come up with?  Or will they do something else entirely?  I can’t wait for class on Monday to find out.

 

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