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Historisk tidskrift 133:3 • 2013

Innehåll (Contents) 2013:3

Uppsatser (Articles)

 

En bred palett av metoder för historievetenskaperna

Elisabeth Gräslund Berg, Carolina Durieu du Pradel, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Benny Jacobsson, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Erik Lindberg, Dag Lindström, Jonas Lindström, Sofia Ling, Jan Mispelaere, Linda Oja, Christopher Pihl, Göran Rydén, Maria Å̊gren, Ann-Catrin Östman

Fulltext (pdf)

Summary

Practices that make a difference: the verb-oriented method

This article discusses the so-called verb-oriented method and its role in the research project Gender and Work in early modern Sweden (GaW), which is based at Uppsala University. It provides a presentation of the GaW-database, which has been designed to allow analysis according to the verb-method. Finally, the article points out that this method can be combined with a number of different theoretical approaches as long as the focus is on practices. It is therefore compatible with the approaches of e.g., Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, and Amartya Sen.

Work is defined as “time-use with the purpose of making a living” and the article discusses why data on time-use, or actual work activities, are better suited for research into early modern Swedish working life than other types of data. It shows that activities are usually described in the sources by verbphrases, and explains how and from what sources verb-phrases are collected and analyzed within the project. In order to allow for generalizations the verb-method presupposes large amounts of data. This is the rationale for the GaW-database, which at present includes around 5000 verb-phrases and 75000 data posts.

Keywords

Sweden, early modern period, gender, history of work, historical method, quantitative analysis, verb-oriented method.