Question

Historian Elena Kensington’s latest work on agrarian uprisings reconstructs the undocumented motivations of the peasantry by eschewing traditional primary sources—which she notes are notoriously mediated by elite observers—in favor of applying predictive sociological modeling to extant crop yield data. The ambition of such a methodological pivot is undeniable, seeking as it does to emancipate the historical subject from the confines of the literate archive. Yet, by transmuting the complex, lived experiences of these laborers into rigid algorithmic outputs, Kensington risks imposing a modern, hyper-rationalist framework onto a population governed by fundamentally distinct socio-cultural imperatives. Ultimately, in her zeal to bypass the biases of the nineteenth-century archivist, Kensington appears to have merely substituted them with the epistemological blind spots of the twenty-first-century data scientist.

Which one of the following most accurately describes the author's attitude toward Kensington's use of predictive sociological modeling?