Mosaic Database: Consolidation, Innovation and Challenges in the Comparative Family Demography of Historical Europe

Mikolaj Szoltysek, The Cardinal Wyszynski University of Warsaw

This paper looks at the progress that the Mosaic database “Recovering Surviving Census Records to Reconstruct Population, Economic, and Cultural History” has enabled in the study of family structures in continental Europe in the past. Our main argument is that the combination of comprehensive archival research, digitisation and computation, data mining and open-access dissemination that is at the core of the Mosaic project is bringing about an important shift in the fundamental principles that have driven European family history research to date. These transformative features of Mosaic go beyond mere data infrastructural developments, as scaling up to much larger data sets leads to qualitative differences in measurements, methods and questions. Integrating these perspectives can lead to an important incremental shift in both the scale and scope of knowledge about historical European family systems.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 106. Data Infrastructure Resources Past and Present