Data and Social Categories

[Jubal]

[Original post was a set of multiple choice questions regarding possibilities around social categories and their representations in data - now removed because they're unpublished and I was just posting them to see them on another computer for teaching-tech reasons]

[dubsartur]

I would call some of those social categories, since in my own jargon identities are fundamentally "I am" not all the things that get placed on people like race or class or servile status.  I have blogged about how identity is not really useful for premodern history since we so rarely have access to people's internal subjective experience whereas we often have evidence for social categories.

[Jubal]

Snipped my original post because I was just trying to look at some text on another screen, but the topic is interesting so continuing the thread

in my own jargon identities are fundamentally "I am" not all the things that get placed on people like race or class or servile status

Yeah, that differs from how I tend to treat the term for data modelling purposes: I think it's a useful distinction to make but as you say, since we can't get people's internal thinking anyway, I often skip the gap and just call everything an identity. Even in modern periods one can never truly get someone's unfiltered internal monologue.

I also think the relationship between "I am" and "I am seen as" can be pretty complex: class and race are imposed categories, but also things that people absolutely do identify with (working class identity in Britain is a whole thing and not always a negative by any means: young middle class Labour activists will often try and hammer down any bit of a working-class credential they can find in their backgrounds).

[dubsartur]

I wondered what was going on with this thread.

The beautiful thing about identity is that as soon as someone says "I am" it exists.  And we can easily access that in some societies, just like we can often access external measures such as baptisimal records or guild membership. And there is so much confusion around these categories that I like to clearly distinguish the two.