On revolutions
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Sometimes the normal course of events is disrupted by a particularly swift and profound change. Historians have often referred to such changes as “revolutions”, and, though they have identified many of them, they have rarely supported their claims with statistical evidence. Here, we present a method to identify revolutions based on a measure of multivariate rate of change called Foote novelty. We define revolutions as those periods of time when the value of this measure is, by a non-parametric test, shown to significantly exceed the background rate. Our method also identifies conservative periods when the rate of change is unusually low. We apply it to several quantitative data sets that capture long-term political, social and cultural changes and, in some of them, identify revolutions — both well known and not. Our method is general and can be applied to any phenomenon captured by multivariate time series data of sufficient quality.
Date Issued
2020-01-07
Date Acceptance
2019-11-14
Citation
Palgrave Communications, 2020, 6
ISSN
2055-1045
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan (part of Springer Nature)
Journal / Book Title
Palgrave Communications
Volume
6
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2020. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
License URL
Subjects
2002 Cultural Studies
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
ARTN 4