HNDS-I: From Stacks to Stats: Unlocking International Census Data from Print Volumes

HNDS-I：从堆栈到统计：从印刷卷中解锁国际人口普查数据

• 批准号: 2121891
• 负责人: Steven Manson
• 金额: $ 100万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2021-09-01 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2121891&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: HNDS; Stacks; Stats; Unlocking; International

Nearly every country in the world conducts a census. These censuses generate information about who people are, their education, and where they work and live. Census data are important for understanding how human populations change over time. However, most of these data are found only in printed volumes on library shelves. It is challenging to get data from printed pages ready for analysis, so these data are difficult to use for research. This project will collect census volumes; scan the data inside; convert the data into digital formats that are easy to analyze; and make them freely available to researchers worldwide. Making these data easy to access will allow researchers, policy makers, and others to answer questions about important issues like aging, migration, fertility, and mortality. This project builds on work that created the IPUMS International Historical Geographic Information System (IHGIS). IHGIS software currently works to process and document data from PDF documents. This project extends the IHGIS tools to work with print volumes by using optical character recognition to convert scanned images into digital data tables. To do so, special problems related to scanning data tables are addressed. For example, there is no way to tell from the number itself that a scanned 3,222 should be 8,222 instead. This project develops software to determine the right value; for example, using a digitized table, the software might determine consistency, within a given age group, among the number of people attending school, the number of people not attending school, and the total number of people in the age group to determine the correct 8,322 value. More complicated problems arise with multidimensional tables, such as a table that contains the levels of education attained for people in different age groups across many different geographic regions. The software uses structured information about the content of tables to determine consistency across specific row and column elements and performs the checks to find scanning errors. Automating otherwise labor-intensive problems like these will provide a large collection of data for countries and time periods where digitally published data are not available. Thanks to the geographic detail, historical depth, and global coverage, researchers will be able to use the data to study change over time and differences between places within and between countries.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

世界上几乎每个国家都进行人口普查。这些人口普查产生了关于人们是谁、他们的教育以及他们在哪里工作和生活的信息。人口普查数据对于了解人口如何随时间变化很重要。然而，这些数据中的大多数只能在图书馆书架上的印刷书籍中找到。从打印的页面中获取数据以供分析是一项挑战，因此这些数据很难用于研究。该项目将收集人口普查卷;扫描其中的数据;将数据转换为易于分析的数字格式;并向全世界的研究人员免费提供。使这些数据易于访问将使研究人员，政策制定者和其他人能够回答有关老龄化，移民，生育率和死亡率等重要问题的问题。该项目建立在创建IPUMS国际历史地理信息系统（IHGIS）的基础上。IHGIS软件目前用于处理和记录PDF文档中的数据。该项目通过使用光学字符识别将扫描图像转换为数字数据表，扩展了IHGIS工具，使其能够处理印刷卷。为此，解决了与扫描数据表相关的特殊问题。例如，无法从数字本身判断扫描的3，222应该是8，222。该项目开发了确定正确数值的软件;例如，使用数字化表格，该软件可以确定某一年龄组内上学人数、不上学人数以及该年龄组总人数之间的一致性，以确定正确的8 322数值。多维表会出现更复杂的问题，例如包含许多不同地理区域不同年龄组的人所达到的教育水平的表。该软件使用有关表内容的结构化信息来确定特定行和列元素之间的一致性，并执行检查以查找扫描错误。自动化这些劳动密集型问题将为无法获得数字发布数据的国家和时间段提供大量数据。由于地理细节、历史深度和全球覆盖范围，研究人员将能够使用这些数据来研究随着时间的推移而发生的变化以及国家内部和国家之间的差异。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。