Abstract

Officers and Stations is research project in which the careers of over 700 men who served as captains or higher in the Elizabethan military have been entered into a one-to-many relational database with computational capacities. The project joins historians, computer scientists, theologians, statisticians and others with student teams. The focus of the work has been in creating and entering data. This presentation is the first large-scale presentation of results. “Military culture” will be analyzed by creating profiles of various parts of this population over time, place, and office-holding. Patterns will be discussed with reference to both the problems and positive uses of such a method. Limitations in source material for the early modern period have posed a series of problems whose solutions are addressed in the presentation. Data will have been prepared by Professor Michael Bauer at The University of Western Ontario Department of Computer Sciences, with statistical methods and results produced under the guidance of Professor David Bellhouse of the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at UWO. Acres will analyze methods and approaches with particular emphasis on bringing social scientific methods as subtle means of expanding knowledge of what might be an otherwise intractable series of data. Networks of expertise, family, marriage, patronage, political institutions, and office-holding are treated with respect to an extremely diverse group of people whose lives are joined in this study.