The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database and the Baix Llobregat Demographic Database. From Algorithms for Handwriting Recognition to Individual-Level Demographic and Socioeconomic Data

Bibliographic Data

ID21244656
AuthorsJoana Maria Pujadas-Mora (0000-0002-4975-639X, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Alícia Fornés (0000-0002-9692-5336, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Oriol Ramos Terrades (0000-0002-3333-8812, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Josep Lladós (0000-0002-4533-4739, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Jialuo Chen (0000-0002-7808-6567, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Miquel Valls-Fígols (Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author), Anna Cabré (0000-0002-9739-6704, Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume12
Pages99-132
Publication date2022-06-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistorical Life Course Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2352-6343 • E-ISSN: 2352-6343
PublisherInternational Institute of Social History (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.51964/hlcs11971
OpenAlexW4283389762
LanguageEN
Citations received11
References cited29

The Barcelona Historical Marriage Database (BHMD) gathers records of the more than 600,000 marriages celebrated in the Diocese of Barcelona and their taxation registered in Barcelona Cathedral's so-called Marriage Licenses Books for the long period 1451–1905 and the BALL Demographic Database brings together the individual information recorded in the population registers, censuses and fiscal censuses of the main municipalities of the county of Baix Llobregat (Barcelona). In this ongoing collection 263,786 individual observations have been assembled, dating from the period between 1828 and 1965 by December 2020. The two databases started as part of different interdisciplinary research projects at the crossroads of Historical Demography and Computer Vision. Their construction uses artificial intelligence and computer vision methods as Handwriting Recognition to reduce the time of execution. However, its current state still requires some human intervention which explains the implemented crowdsourcing and game sourcing experiences. Moreover, knowledge graph techniques have allowed the application of advanced record linkage to link the same individuals and families across time and space. Moreover, we will discuss the main research lines using both databases developed so far in historical demography. This paper was awarded the Louis Henry award from the European Society of Historical Demography. The Louis Henry Award has been established by the European Society of Historical Demography to recognize methodological innovations in data collection, visualization or analysis

Census · Database · Geography · Handwriting · Population · Record linkage · Socioeconomic status · Sociology · Computer Science · Data Quality and Management · Demography · Artificial Intelligence