About the Quantitative History Webinar Series
The Quantitative History (QH) Webinar Series aims to provide researchers, teachers, and students with an online intellectual platform to keep up to date with the latest research in the field, promoting the dissemination of research findings and interdisciplinary use of quantitative methods in historical research. The QH Webinar Series, now entering its fifth year, is co-organized by the Centre for Quantitative History at the HKU Business School and the International Society for Quantitative History in partnership with the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Series is now substantially supported by the Areas of Excellence (AoE) Scheme from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. [AoE/B-704/22-R]).
Predictive Modelling the Past: A New Machine Learning Method Applied to Seven Centuries of Wages
Meredith Paker of Grinnell College and her co-authors introduce a new method, based in established machine learning techniques, to peer into the past despite the increasing scarcity of data. The key intuition is that, just as data in the future are unknown to today’s modelers, data in the distant past are unknown to historians. They can therefore use state-of-the-art predictive modeling methods and best-practice forecasting techniques to make predictions of historic economic time series with improved accuracy and generalizability.
November 7, 2024
10:00 - 11:30 (HKT)
The Fate of the Taiping Rebellion
Nuno Palma shows, using a new dataset, that scholars educated in Confucian academies became a key force in the suppression of the Taiping. The civil service examinations system helped maintain political stability and associated rents by endowing elites with a stake in the Qing status quo.
How China Became Chinese? Geography or Political Integration
Discover how China became Chinese through empirical evidence and insights on immigration and public goods provision.
Twilight of the Medieval Chinese Aristocracy: Keju, Officeholding, and Assortative Mating in the Tang
Discover how education and the Imperial Examination shaped the medieval Chinese aristocracy and influenced career success during the Tang Dynasty.
Quantitative and Qualitative Changes in the Archaeological Study of Early China
Explore early China through the lens of archaeology with Min Li of UCLA.
Celebrating Legacy: The Intergenerational Transmission of Reproduction and Human Capital in Ming–Qing Chinese Families
Explore the nexus of reproduction, human capital, and economic growth with Sijie Hu, using genealogical records from six Chinese lineages (1350-1920).