Title:	Population Reconstruction
Authors:	Gerrit Bloothooft • Peter Christen Kees Mandemakers • Marijn Schraagen
Keywords:	Reconstruction
Issue Date:	2015
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	People shape societies. They are linked to each other by family ties and networks with social, economic and religious dimensions. People live together in households and form communities. Some own a house, land and other properties, often related to their profession. And all this is in continuous change. People are born, marry, have children and die, and they change houses and addresses, and build careers. For the study of a society in all aspects, people are at the heart of the problem and should be known in the context of their complex relationships. Even today, it is not easy to get this information in an all-enfolding way, but for populations in the past, it is a real challenge. And that is what this book is about. The book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous. It is not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavour. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitised archives and the need of complex analyses to identify individuals require the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of digital humanities and hopefully a source of inspiration for future investigations. The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitised population has three major phases which shape the three sections of this book. The first phase is that of data transcription and digitisation while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. Little of this phase can be automated. With archives that comprise easily tens of millions of records, the help of volunteers for transcription and digitisation is indispensable, but requires a rigorous management. Experiences from Denmark demonstrate the complexity of this task in Chap. 1. Spelling variation, aliases, abbreviations, errors and typos all generate difficulties in further processing and require data cleaning. Similarity measures can be helpful to identify variants on the fly in further processing, but standardisation of variants of geographical locations, occupations and names—addressed in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4— can make data processing much more efficient, while identifying variants that are not similar at all. Automatic procedures can be helpful for standardisation but generally require expert review. In the second phase, records that refer to the same person or persons are identified by a process of linkage. Advanced methods for record linkage are reviewed in Chap. 5, with reference to privacy issues that arise when recent data sources are involved. Given the complex reasoning that can underlie genealogical reconstruction, the availability of reconstructions by genealogists in standardised Gedcom format can support wider population analyses. The validation and usage of this type of information are discussed in Chap. 6. Whereas family relationships can be deduced from birth, marriage and death certificates from the vital registration or parish registers, the reconstruction of wider social networks may need the analysis of other sources such as notary acts. Multi-source record linkage in this context is addressed in Chap. 7. A comparable complexity was encountered in the challenging project to reconstruct the historical population of Norway, in which data from a wide variety of sources are used. The structure of this process is presented in Chap. 8. Population reconstruction from medieval charters is only possible for the very limited group of people with property worth mentioning in the charters. Probabilistic record linkage on the basis of context information is attempted to arrive at reconstruction in Chap. 9.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53729
ISBN:	978-3-319-19884-2
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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