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Category: Project

Description: Numeracy is a cultural technology central for human experience which allows the estimation of quantities such as time, distance, resources and group size. Humans can use a number of strategies to estimate quantities and these vary in their precision and magnitude range. For instance, we can observe different strategies in child development, as the capacity for precise estimation of large quantities develops throughout several discrete stages. Interestingly this capacity seems to never develop in several small-scale societies. In addition to developmental and cultural factors, recent studies in economic history suggest that numeracy can also be affected by environmental factors. In particular, the precision with which age was reported in the Early Modern period dropped during economic recessions. In this project, our goal is to replicate the latter finding by quantifying the expression of numbers in English and French Early Modern theatre. We will quantify both the relative precision and magnitude of number use throughout this period and test whether these can be predicted by proxies of living standards and human capital.