Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000
nature.comThis is one of those datasets that no one besides an academic with a very narrow research question is likely to find useful. It's not reflective of what we understand about the extent of historical urbanism today, it's just a synthesis from two earlier, systematically flawed datasets into a machine readable form. It misses a lot, like the entirety of ancient urbanism in North Mexico/the American southwest, Numidia, Axum, large urban centers in central Asia, etc. The authors were aware of many of these shortcomings when they published this, but didn't want to add additional shortcomings from omissions beyond what the original datasets had.
> The authors were aware of many of these shortcomings
Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass".
> Soft sciences are rife with "yeah I'm aware of the problems with the thing I'm doing, but I'll do it anyway. I've presented a disclaimer, that should be enough to cover my ass"
It's not to cover one's ass but communicate limitations. If you think the hard sciences don't do this, I've got a cosmic distance ladder to sell you.
> It's not to cover one's ass but communicate limitations.
Ostensibly to communicate limitations; I respect this case. But often times it's to cover one's ass in the guise of communicating limitations.
Hard sciences do it way way less. The reason is that in the hard sciences, using a methodology that "has limitations", depending on what the limitations are, might mean the output is straight up meaningless. Imagine I tell you "I've managed to prove theorem X. Let's start by assuming that 1+1=3. I know it's not, but I'm communicating limitations and let's see where that gets us".
But ok I think we're on the same page, you're just more generous than me.
Think of it like Unicode. The Unicode Consortium’s job isn’t to create character encodings. Instead, it’s to unify encoding that already in common usage. If the encoding that is In standard usage for a language is missing something, or there’s an issue with it, they’re not going to fix that.
Part of science is incremental work