This all sounds good to me. In fact, I believe that researchers in the humanities are especially (perhaps overly) sensitive to the reciprocal relationship between theory and observation.
I may have overstated the ignorance of the current situation. The scholarly community has already made some claims connecting the Big Book to Print Shops [x,y,z]. The problem is that those claims are either made on non-quantitative bases (eg, “This mark seems characteristic of this Print Shop’s status.”) or on a very naive frequentist basis (eg, “This mark comes up N times, and that’s a big number, so it must be from Print Shop X”). My project would take these existing claims as priors. Is that valid?
I have no idea. If you want answers like that, you should probably go talk to a statistician at sufficient length to convey the domain-specific knowledge involved or learn statistics yourself.
This all sounds good to me. In fact, I believe that researchers in the humanities are especially (perhaps overly) sensitive to the reciprocal relationship between theory and observation.
I may have overstated the ignorance of the current situation. The scholarly community has already made some claims connecting the Big Book to Print Shops [x,y,z]. The problem is that those claims are either made on non-quantitative bases (eg, “This mark seems characteristic of this Print Shop’s status.”) or on a very naive frequentist basis (eg, “This mark comes up N times, and that’s a big number, so it must be from Print Shop X”). My project would take these existing claims as priors. Is that valid?
I have no idea. If you want answers like that, you should probably go talk to a statistician at sufficient length to convey the domain-specific knowledge involved or learn statistics yourself.