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Tilahun, Gelila; Feuerverger, Andrey; Gervers, Michael

Dating medieval English charters. (English) Zbl 1257.62004

Ann. Appl. Stat. 6, No. 4, 1615-1640 (2012).
Summary: Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative changes introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. Correctly dating such charters is of vital importance in the study of English medieval history.
This paper is concerned with computer-automated statistical methods for dating such document collections, with the goal of reducing the considerable efforts required to date them manually and of improving the accuracy of assigned dates. The proposed methods are based on such data as the variation over time of word and phrase usage, and on measures of distance between documents. The extensive (and dated) Documents of Early England Data Set (DEEDS) maintained at the University of Toronto was used for this purpose.

Cited in 2 Documents

MSC:

62-07 Data analysis (statistics) (MSC2010)
91F10 History, political science
62P99 Applications of statistics
68U99 Computing methodologies and applications
65C60 Computational problems in statistics (MSC2010)

Keywords:

bandwidth selection; cross-validation; medieval charters; DEEDS data set; generalized linear models; kernel smoothing; local log-likelihood; maximum prevalence method; nearest neighbor methods (kNN); quantile regression; text mining

Software:

ElemStatLearn; KernSmooth
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Full Text: DOI arXiv Euclid

References:

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