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by scottbot 4102 days ago
Pron, as a historian who has come up with quantitative models and resisted the urge to call them predictive, yes, I think that sort of restraint is within humanit(y|ie)'s capable grasp. =]
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I would love to see them. And I have great faith in historians' own abilities to resist that urge -- they are well trained at that; I am not so sure how others would fare.

Becoming a "quantitative historian" used to be a dream of mine (before I abandoned an academic career in either math or history). But then I realized that I enjoyed reading a transcript of a German witch trial no less than a Marc Bloch epic narrative, and found it to no less educational. :)