Addressing the Houses: The Introduction of House Numbering in Europe

Tantner, Anton

doi:10.4000/histoiremesure.3942

Cited by 27 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…In 1846, this commission organized the first nationwide population and housing census, participation in which was obligatory for all residents. As Quetelet and others repeatedly stressed, the organization of the census required extensive preparatory efforts, such as the introduction of a system of house numbering (B, 1846: XII–XIII; see also Curtis, 2002: 26–7; Tantner, 2009). Its results also had to provide the basis for a flexible registration system of the Belgian population (see B, 1846: LI–LII).…”

Section: Who Counts?mentioning

confidence: 99%

State-Istics and Statistics: Exclusion Categories in the Population Census (Belgium, 1846-1930)

Louckx

Vanderstraeten

2014

The Sociological Review

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During most of the nineteenth century, the etymology of the term ‘statistics’ was still much alive: statistics was state‐istics, the empirical study of the state. It has been argued that the nineteenth‐century avalanche of printed numbers gave rise to a new discourse about society. Not only was society conceived of as a population; the corps social (Quetelet) was also conceptualized as a subject of statistics. An important contribution of this state‐istics was to conceive a new sort of object, which could be both the target of research and of policy interventions. On the basis of a case‐study of all the Belgian population censuses taken before the Second World War, we attempt to articulate the complex interactions between science, government, and society in the modern era. We thereby direct our attention to the range of exclusions and exclusion places that appeared in these censuses. Our analysis highlights the intimate relationship between population and territory in the ‘search engines’ of the statisticians. The discursive constitution of territorial exclusions allows us to analyse the articulation of inclusion ideals – in the period before such ideals became firmly institutionalized in the so‐called welfare state of the postwar period.

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Section: Who Counts?mentioning

confidence: 99%

State-Istics and Statistics: Exclusion Categories in the Population Census (Belgium, 1846-1930)

Louckx

Vanderstraeten

2014

The Sociological Review

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“…11Nominals can , however, be based on cardinal or ordinal information (see Tantner, 2009; Wiese, 2004). For example, although the main functions of the building number (3 Granby Street), table number (07), and order reference number (1249682) are to uniquely identify the building, table, and food order, respectively, this naming convention is based on ordinal information, such as the order of buildings on the street, or the order of tables in the restaurant.…”

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confidence: 99%

Numbers in Context: Cardinals, Ordinals, and Nominals in American English

Woodin,

Winter

2024

Cognitive Science

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There are three main types of number used in modern, industrialized societies. Cardinals count sets (e.g., people, objects) and quantify elements of conventional scales (e.g., money, distance), ordinals index positions in ordered sequences (e.g., years, pages), and nominals serve as unique identifiers (e.g., telephone numbers, player numbers). Many studies that have cited number frequencies in support of claims about numerical cognition and mathematical cognition hinge on the assumption that most numbers analyzed are cardinal. This paper is the first to investigate the relative frequencies of different number types, presenting a corpus analysis of morphologically unmarked numbers (not, e.g., “eighth” or “21st”) in which we manually annotated 3,600 concordances in the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Overall, cardinals are dominant—both pure cardinals (sets) and measurements (scales)—except in the range 1,000–10,000, which is dominated by ordinal years, like 1996 and 2004. Ordinals occur less often overall, and nominals even less so. Only for cardinals do round numbers, associated with approximation, dominate overall and increase with magnitude. In comparison with other registers, academic writing contains a lower proportion of measurements as well as a higher proportion of ordinals and, to some extent, nominals. In writing, pure cardinals and measurements are usually represented as number words, but measurements—especially larger, unround ones—are more likely to be numerals. Ordinals and nominals are mostly represented as numerals. Altogether, this paper reveals how numbers are used in American English, establishing an initial baseline for any analyses of number frequencies and shedding new light on the cognitive and psychological study of number.

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