What Shall We Do With the Unseen Sailor? Estimating the Size of the Dutch East India Company Using an Unseen Species Model.
Published in Computational Humanities Research, 2022
Recommended citation: Wevers, M. J. H. F., Karsdorp, F., & van Lottum, J. (2022). What Shall We Do With the Unseen Sailor? Estimating the Size of the Dutch East India Company Using an Unseen Species Model. In CHR2022: Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2022 (Vol. 3290, pp. 189-197). https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3290/short_paper1793.pdf
Historians base their inquiries on the sources that are available to them. However, not all sources that are relevant to the historian’s inquiry may have survived the test of time. Consequently, the resulting data can be biased in unknown ways, possibly skewing analyses. This paper deals with the Dutch East India Company its digitized ledgers of contracts. We apply an unseen species model, a method from ecology, to estimate the actual number of unique seafarers contracted. We 昀椀nd that the lower bound of actual seafarers is much higher than what the remaining contracts indicate: at least, thirty-six percent of the seafarers is unknown. Moreover, we 昀椀nd that even in periods when few records survived, we can still credibly estimate a lower bound on the unique number of seafarers.
Recommended citation: Wevers, M. J. H. F., Karsdorp, F., & van Lottum, J. (2022). What Shall We Do With the Unseen Sailor? Estimating the Size of the Dutch East India Company Using an Unseen Species Model. In CHR2022: Proceedings of the Computational Humanities Research Conference 2022 (Vol. 3290, pp. 189-197).