Historians of astronomy use many different types of sources to analyze the ways in which ancient people interpreted what they saw in the sky and how they attempted to predict what they might expect to see in the future. Despite important contributions made by the study of ancient material objects and architectural structures relating to the heavens, the most significant sources still are written texts. Amongst such texts, those containing numerical data and calculations have been the focus of major research efforts. This symposium will offer a forum for specialists from a wide variety of backgrounds to discuss the opportunities offered by the power and flexibility of modern computers and their software to deal with ancient numerical material as well as the risks and problems that may follow from such approaches.

Although extensive quantitative analysis of ancient numerical material has been used at least since Kügler and Neugebauer applied it to the study of Babylonian astronomy more than a century ago, in the last 30 years there has been an explosion in the number of publications involving the use of computer-based quantitative analysis. The symposium will seek to take stock of what has been learned across the disparate areas of an emerging community that so far has had little chance to gather. Some historians have developed very general methods of analysis applicable to a wide variety of cases in order to survey large bodies of sources; others have concentrated on developing tools that give precise insights into specific sources. A collective discussion of this particular issue may open new methodological directions and help to integrate both approaches in a fruitful way.

The wider audience of historians of science has often responded ambivalently to these quantitative methods of analysis. On the one hand, many agree that we should make the best possible use of what computer-assisted analysis of historical sources can provide. On the other hand, some skeptics fear that a “technical smoke screen” may mask conclusions that lack historical or cultural sensitivity. Organizing this symposium during the ICHST will create a unique opportunity to address such issues, which impact not only ways in which quantitative analysis should be presented in publications but also possible articulations between these numerical methods and the more familiar analytical tools of the historian of science.