datesuch

Datesuch is a term used in data science and digital humanities to describe the practice of determining, inferring, or reconciling dates and date ranges for events, records, or entities across heterogeneous sources. The goal of datesuch is to produce a coherent temporal frame for a dataset while explicitly representing uncertainty.

Origins and usage: The term is not widely standardized and appears in method-focused discussions and project documentation as a descriptive label for the dating component of a workflow. It is typically employed by researchers who work with historical, archival, or genealogical data where dates are incomplete, conflicting, or expressed in varying calendar systems.

Methodology: Core components include extracting date information from text or metadata, normalizing dates to a common calendar, and assigning a temporal resolution (exact date, year, decade, or approximate range). Dating often involves probabilistic or interval-based methods and may combine evidence from multiple sources, provenance notes, and source credibility to produce an estimated date with an uncertainty interval.

Applications: Datesuch is applied in archival management, genealogical databases, historical event catalogs, and bibliographic records to improve chronology, searchability, and cross-dataset linkage while signaling uncertainty where dates are not exact.

Limitations and reception: The lack of standardized definitions can lead to inconsistent practices. Challenges include data quality, ambiguous or conflicting sources, calendar conventions, and the interpretation of uncertainty. Critics emphasize the need for transparent uncertainty reporting and clear provenance for each dated entry.

See also: temporal data, date normalization, Bayesian dating, fuzzy matching, chronology.