Project description
Social stratification has regained prominence in research, particularly in the Global South, where inequality remains a persistent challenge. However, substantive and methodological limitations constrain this scholarship’s ability to examine the causes and consequences of social stratification, often reducing inequality analyses to aggregate economic indicators that overlook spatiality and multidimensionality.
This project addresses these challenges by investigating social stratification in Argentina between 1850 and 1900, a pivotal period of development for a country that was once among the world's wealthiest but is now marked by high inequality and economic instability. Leveraging advanced OCR techniques to digitise individual-level census data, the project reconstructs multidimensional indicators of social stratification—such as occupational structure, literacy, social mobility, labour participation, and partner selection—at both regional and national levels over time. This approach overcomes data limitations and, by incorporating intersecting factors such as gender, age, and migratory status, provides new insights into the evolution of social stratification.
Furthermore, the project introduces a flexible, reproducible framework for extracting and analysing handwritten tabular data, offering a methodological contribution applicable to historical datasets worldwide.
Institutes/organizations
Unit for Economic History, Department of Economy and Society, University of Gothenburg
Språkbanken Text, Department of Swedish, multilingualism, language technology, University of Gothenburg
Department of Linguistics, Stockholms university
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