Learning to Count: A Role for Quantitative Measures in Memory Studies

Memory studies are fundamentally bound up with the study of culture.  It is therefore hardly surprising that qualitative methodologies play a predominant role in this field of scholarship.  Indeed, a culturalist orientation is most appropriate for the field.  Nonetheless, the further development of the field will benefit from learning to count things, when appropriate.

In this paper I will discuss how quantitative measurements have been useful in my own research as well as drawing upon the examples from the research of others.  What and how have we been counting as the field has developed?  And how do we relate these quantitative measurements back to our fundamental concerns with culture and meaning?

I will situate this discussion by talking about the memory-market dictum model, which can help us interpret the meaning behind the circulation of certain types of narratives in specific mediums, as, for example, in the production of films about the Holocaust in West Germany compared to East Germany.  The memory-market dictum proposes that as memory makers need access to "capital" to take their products to market, the more capital intensive a product is, the more sensitive the producer will be to prevailing attitudes either in the population at large (democratic regime) or in state ideology (authoritarian regime).  We can use the production and consumption of memory goods (films, novels, theater plays) as a clue to what individuals and groups are thinking about when they engage their past.