Digital access to historical records is now available on an unprecedent scale. Millions of newspapers, government documents, letters and diaries, among other sources, are only one click away and completely searchable. Similarly, complete population censuses, birth, death and marriage records, military and prisons registers, and other sources have been digitised and made available online. How can we make sense of this ever-increasing wealth of information? Quantitative and computational methods permit extracting and analysing huge amounts of information, both textual and numerical, that would be impossible otherwise. Supplementing traditional qualitative methods with computing methods not only allows shedding new light into old questions, but also addressing new ones. Likewise, digital tools help visualising information in innovative and powerful ways, thus producing compelling arguments and stories.

The Research Group on “Quantitative and Computational History” constitutes a hub for research, teaching, and methodological innovation at the intersection between historical inquiry, social science methods, and computational analysis. The research group will focus on the systematic analysis of historical data using quantitative and computational methods. As well as a bi-weekly seminar series, its main activities include fostering collaborative research projects, the development of teaching materials, and support for students and faculty working with historical datasets. Although based at the Department of Historical Sciences at NTNU, this research group also includes members from other departments at NTNU and other Norwegian universities.