Looking forward to this roundtable "From Sources to Data", tonight at "La nuit des données" organized by @normalesup.bsky.social
nuit.ens.psl.eu/programme/6a...
nuit.ens.psl.eu
La nuit de l'ENS 2026
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Programme - Vue détaillée
Luca Scholz
@lscholz.bsky.social
675 followers 503 following 26 posts
Senior Lecturer (Assoc. Prof.) at Uni Manchester | History, Mapping & Data | lucascholz.com
![The first is a working paper by three economists—Elliott Ash, Daniel Chen, and Suresh Naidu—from 2017. While the authors are economists, the actual contribution—summed up in a title that few historians would think debatable, “Ideas Have Consequences”—is about legal or intellectual history. It presents a powerful and discrete account of the transmission of ideas across social networks through textual analysis. The substance argues that privately funded Manne seminars in law and economics—which were attended by a substantial proportion of the federal judiciary—affected the language, decisions, and sentencing of federal justices who attended them and thus, by implication, allowed large-value conservative donors to capture the federal judiciary. The effect seems robust to a variety of covariates [...]
Reading this paper was exciting, but looking through the tools and tricks and sources also made me feel like someone in a science fiction movie encountering an artifact sent back from a few decades in the future. The extraordinary quality of data that economists can obtain is almost unimaginable to humanists. It is not just a million or so circuit court votes and 300,000 opinions but also the institutional capacity to file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get the exact years of attendance for every judge who went to the Manne program and the disciplinary capacity to casually use relatively new methods like word embeddings without spending pages slowly, gently analogizing them to some “simpler” concept. Humanists wandering through algorithms seem to have to justify using an algorithm by first identifying which Borges short story—whether about the Map of the Empire, the analytical language of John Wilkins, or Pierre Menard and the Quijote—it most closely resembles.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:643p6z4ydk2xnwv77maa6eec/bafkreidctt57eseamimgzctkjtu2ly2vmsugcjwcrargerohe5bljg7jie)
