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I’m wrestling with how to put a number on fear in my historical research. What methodological tools could actually let us quantify it and trace its shifts across decades or centuries?

 In my social history dissertation, I'm examining societal fear during periods of crisis. The qualitative sources are rich, but my committee is pushing for quantitative rigor. I'm searching for methodologies that can transform expressions of fear—in texts, behavior, or material culture—into a dataset that can be analyzed for trends, peaks, and decays over long time spans.

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By Amith Answered 1 year ago

From my work in digital history, I would recommend a mixed-methods approach. You can quantify lexical fear by applying sentiment analysis to large corpora of newspapers, diaries, or pamphlets, tracking the frequency of fear-associated words over time. For behavioral proxies, analyze time-series data like changes in crime reports (e.g., assaults, witch trials), commodity hoarding, or insurance purchases. I have seen the most compelling results emerge from correlating these quantitative datasets with close qualitative readings of specific events, which provides necessary context for the numbers you generate.

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