To measure is to know. Efficient policy needs hard information about a society and its inhabitants. Mindful of this, the central government has carried out censuses and surveys every few years in almost every sector of social life since the French Revolution. This has resulted in a rich patrimony of statistical material covering the last two centuries. Millions of statistics about the population, industry, trade, agriculture and other domains are stored in old books and manuscripts that are scattered in archives and libraries.
The History Department of the University of Ghent has attempted to unlock these sources since the 1990s. The aim of the LOKSTAT project, originally called the Quantitative Database of Belgian Municipalities, is to make the information embedded in the statistics exploitable for research. By establishing a database in which the statistics are centralised and linked to an information system, the data collections can be analysed in-depth for the first time. Old and new research questions can be answered using the achievements of information and communication technology (ICT). LOKSTAT is not limited to collecting data and making it exploitable. It is also an expertise centre for the statistical processing of data from local sources.
©:Ghent University, Department of History