The Annals of Applied Statistics

Dating medieval English charters

Gelila Tilahun, Andrey Feuerverger, and Michael Gervers

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Abstract

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. 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.

Article information

Source
Ann. Appl. Stat. Volume 6, Number 4 (2012), 1615-1640.

Dates
First available in Project Euclid: 27 December 2012

Permanent link to this document
http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1356629053

Digital Object Identifier
doi:10.1214/12-AOAS566

Mathematical Reviews number (MathSciNet)
MR3058677

Zentralblatt MATH identifier
06141541

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

Citation

Tilahun, Gelila; Feuerverger, Andrey; Gervers, Michael. Dating medieval English charters. Ann. Appl. Stat. 6 (2012), no. 4, 1615--1640. doi:10.1214/12-AOAS566. http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoas/1356629053.


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