The Impact of Microdata in Norwegian Historiography 1970 to 2020

Abstract

The establishment of the Norwegian Historical Data Centre, the 1801 project at the University of Bergen and the data transcriptions and scanned versions of the sources in the National Archives made Norwegian microdata much more available. A more detailed description of the digital techniques applied to the wealth of censuses, church records and other types of nominative data from the 18th century onwards, will be presented in a separate article. Our main focus here is to summarize the impact of the research that has been produced based on the Norwegian historical microdata. These studies span a wide range of fields within social history and historical demography: Emigration, immigration, internal migration, fertility, nuptiality, family history and last but not least mortality studies with a priority given to infant mortality. A recent development is the building of a national historical population register covering the 19th and 20th centuries.

What was Killing Babies in Trondheim? An Investigation of Infant Mortality Using Individual Level Causes of Death, 1830–1907

“…The information in the Trondheim-database has been extracted from the Historical Population Register of Norway and covers the period 1830-1907 (Sommerseth & Thorvaldsen, 2022). It includes data from the baptism and burial registers recorded by the priests in each of the city's parishes, yielding a total of 50,461 baptisms and 6,820 infant burials.…”

“…However, what is much less clear is what initiated the fall in mortality amongst infants, although both the role of doctors and midwives (Dyrvik, 1997;Fure 2002) and the extent of improved health amongst mothers (Fure, 2002;Sommerseth, 2018) have been suggested. The majority of micro-data studies of infant mortality in 19th century Norway have focused on rural areas, where deficient registration of cause of death by the local priest is a common feature (Sommerseth & Thorvaldsen, 2022). In comparison, church books in the cities tend to have nearly complete cause of death registration.…”

Geneva. An Urban Sociodemographic Database

“…Adding more sources and systematically linking individual data was crucial to reconstruct "collective biographies" and trajectories across the city (Pinol, 1999). Especially in countries without population registers (Breschi, Fornasin, & Manfredini, 2020;Sommerseth & Thorvaldsen, 2022), researchers face the challenge to construct longitudinal data in turbulent contexts, but can relatively often rely on a wealth of documents produced by various urban administrations (see Paping & Sevdalakis, 2022;Puschmann, Matsuo, & Matthijs, 2022; or the recent Charleville database described in Alexandre, Dupuy, & Gourdon, 2022). Drawing also from the diffusion of analytical methods (especially event-history-analysis) that made possible the analysis of this new generation of databases (Alter, 1998), our Geneva project tried to take the best from all those experiences.…”

The Development of Microhistorical Databases in Norway. A Historiography

“…This article summarizes the history of the computerization of historical microdata in Norway. It is a technically oriented follow up to the historiography article highlighting the research accomplishments using such datasets originating in nominative historical sources (Sommerseth & Thorvaldsen, 2022). These are primarily full count nominative censuses, vital registers in church books and emigration records.…”