Dr Bartosz Ogórek: A Proxy or a Delusion? Variable Design in Research on Historical Human Capital

Chair: Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska

Keynote at the interdisciplinary conference "Measuring the Nation: Collecting, Interpreting, and Digital Processing of Historical Data" (September 29th - October 1st, 2026, Warsaw)

Organizers: German Historical Institute in Warsaw, Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences, Masovian Regional Teacher Development Center

Abstract:

Like other social scientists, historians frequently have to work under conditions not of their own choosing. Source scarcity and the lack of direct access to past actors force them to bridge the gap between fragmentary evidence and the phenomena they wish to study. This often requires linking theoretical concepts to measures and classifications that can be constructed from the available sources (Adcock and Collier 2001). In other words, “turn[ing] proper names into variables and words into numbers” (Kreuzer 2010). Yet such proxies vary greatly in their validity. Focusing on research on historical human capital, this paper reviews several strategies of proxy construction and critically assesses what these measures actually capture by confronting alternative approximations with one another. Drawing on civil marriage certificates from the southern Polish lands in the first half of the nineteenth century, it discusses three commonly used indicators: age heaping as a measure of numeracy, but also of administrative proficiency; the ability to sign one’s own name as a proxy for literacy; and signature quality as an indicator of writing fluency (Tollnek and Baten 2024; Soubeyroux

1998; Cressy 2020).