Some Notes on the History of CARME

In 1991, on the initiative of Prof. Walter Kristof (formerly of the Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg), the first international conference ever held on the topic of correspondence analysis was held in Cologne, Germany, hosted by the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (Central Archive for Empirical Social Research) of the University of Cologne. This conference, called “Correspondence Analysis in the Social Sciences”, drew an audience of about 50 people from seven countries.

Four years later in 1995, we decided to repeat the conference, but on a wider theme: “Visualization of Categorical Data”. The audience grew, now we had already 90 participants, and so did our enthusiasm. From these two conferences two edited books appeared, with the same names, and have come to be recognized as major reference works in this area of research.

Again, four years later in 1999, we held another conference, this time distributing CD-ROMS of data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) to all participants, with the requirement that all participants had to analyse data from this database, using any method of their choice. This conference, “Large Scale Data Analysis”, affectionately dubbed “LSD Analysis – a hallucinating experience” drew a yet wider audience of statisticians and sociologists, with parallel sessions entitled Religion and Social Inequality, for example, not a common event at a conference fundamentally dedicated to statistical methodology! The number of participants increased again, now to 120, with participants from 20 countries from all continents.

Four years later in 2003, we had our fourth in the series of “Cologne conferences”, this time in Barcelona. We decided to return to our original topic of correspondence analysis, but keeping the door open to “related methods” to foster the continuing debate on visualization of complex multivariate data, hence the conference was called “Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods”, or simply CARME. This time we received 180 participants, again from all continents, who presented 82 papers and 6 posters.

By the way, “Carme” is a Catalan girl’s name, the Catalan equivalent of the Spanish “Carmen”. Again, we decided to edit a book, this time we changed the title slightly to focus on “Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Related Methods”. Having finalized this manuscript, 15 years after our first conference and a huge amount of travelling between Barcelona and Cologne/Bonn, we thought that there is need for a homepage that is dedicated to CARME and its network “CARME-N”. Now we are looking forward to the fifth conference in 2007, this time organized by our friend and colleague Patrick Groenen from Rotterdam University.
See you at CARME 2007 in Rotterdam!

Michael Greenacre and Jörg Blasius

Barcelona (Spain) and Bonn (Germany), November 2006