Maps, Data and Methods Related to Guerry (1833) "Moral Statistics of France"
Source:R/Guerry-package.R
Guerry-package.RdAndre-Michel Guerry (1833) was the first to systematically collect and analyze social data on such things as crime, literacy and suicide with the view to determining social laws and the relations among these variables. He provided the first essentially multivariate and georeferenced spatial data on socially important questions, e.g., Is the rate of crime related to education or literacy? How does this vary over the departments of France? Are the rates of crime or suicide within departments stable over time?
Details
In an age well before the idea of correlation had been invented, Guerry used graphics and statistical maps to try to shed light on such questions. In a later work (Guerry, 1864), he explicitly tried to entertain larger questions, but with still-limited statistical tools: Can rates of various crimes be related to multiple causes or predictors? Are the rates and ascribable causes in France similar or different to those found in England?
The Guerry package comprises maps of France in 1830, multivariate data from A.-M. Guerry and others (Angeville, 1836), and statistical and graphic methods related to Guerry's Moral Statistics of France. The goal of providing these as an R package is to facilitate the exploration and development of statistical and graphic methods for multivariate data in a geo-spatial context.
Data sets included in the Guerry package are:
GuerryData from A.-M. Guerry, "Essay on the Moral Statistics of France"
Guerry_ranksRanks of Data from A.-M. Guerry, "Essay on the Moral Statistics of France"
gfranceMap of France in 1830 with the Guerry data
gfrance85Map of France in 1830 with the Guerry data, excluding Corsica
AngevilleData from d'Angeville (1836) on the population of France
propensityDistribution of crimes against persons at different ages
Data from Guerry and others is contained in the data frame Guerry.
Because Corsica is often considered an outlier both spatially and
statistically, the map of France circa 1830, together with the Guerry
data, is provided as SpatialPolygonsDataFrames in two forms: gfrance
for all 86 departments, and gfrance85, for the 85 departments
excluding Corsica.
References
d'Angeville, A. (1836). Essai sur la Statistique de la Population francaise, Paris: F. Darfour.
Dray, S. and Jombart, T. (2011). A Revisit Of Guerry's Data: Introducing Spatial Constraints In Multivariate Analysis. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 5(4).
Brunsdon, C. and Dykes, J. (2007). Geographically weighted visualization: interactive graphics for scale-varying exploratory analysis. Geographical Information Science Research Conference (GISRUK 2007). NUI Maynooth, Ireland, April, 2007. https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/national-centre-geocomputation-ncg.
Friendly, M. (2007). A.-M. Guerry's Moral Statistics of France: Challenges for Multivariable Spatial Analysis. Statistical Science, 22, 368-399. http://www.datavis.ca/papers/guerry-STS241.pdf
Friendly, M. (2007). Supplementary materials for Andre-Michel Guerry's Moral Statistics of France: Challenges for Multivariate Spatial Analysis, http://www.datavis.ca/gallery/guerry/.
Friendly, M. (2022). The life and works of Andre-Michel Guerry, revisited. Sociological Spectrum, 42, 233-259. doi:10.1080/02732173.2022.2078450
Guerry, A.-M. (1833). Essai sur la statistique morale de la France Paris: Crochard. English translation: Hugh P. Whitt and Victor W. Reinking, Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002.
Guerry, A.-M. (1864). Statistique morale de l'Angleterre comparee avec la statistique morale de la France, d'apres les comptes de l'administration de la justice criminelle en Angleterre et en France, etc. Paris: J.-B. Bailliere et fils.