North Atlantic Population Project

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Five countries in the world possess completely digitized individual-level censuses for the late nineteenth century: Canada, Great Britain, Iceland, Norway, and the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, these five nations had close economic ties, shared migration flows, and were undergoing rapid social, economic, and demographic transitions. The availability of census data for these nations and this time period thus creates unprecedented opportunities for international collaborative and comparative social research. The data sets allow for study of topics such as the employment of women and children, domestic service, boarding and lodging, marriage patterns, living arrangements of the aged and children, employment by industry and occupation, self-employment, and internal migration. Moreover, because the data sets contain information on entire populations rather than samples, they allow for the study of small and dispersed population subgroups.However, taking advantage of the opportunities to use these data to advance research in a variety of fields requires collaboration among five organizations that have been central to the creation and dissemination of the data in the five countries. Funding agencies have already supported the collection of the data, but comparative research requires synchronized efforts among the five organizations to make the data comparable. This project provides for synchronization by completing the following tasks: developing common classification systems for the variables, creating web-based software that allows researchers in multiple countries to share coding information, documenting the comparability of variable definitions and coding, creating machine-readable data, and disseminating the data to researchers through mirrored websites in each country.