Perks and pitfalls of city directories as a micro-geographic data source

Thilo N.H. Albers and Kalle Kappner

Explorations in Economic History, 2023, vol. 87, issue C

Abstract: Historical city directories are rich sources of micro-geographic data. They provide information on the location of households and firms and their occupations and industries, respectively. We develop a generic algorithmic work flow that converts scans of them into geo- and status-referenced household-level data sets. Applying the work flow to our case study, the Berlin 1880 directory, adds idiosyncratic challenges that should make automation less attractive. Yet, employing an administrative benchmark data set on household counts, incomes, and income distributions across more than 200 census tracts, we show that semi-automatic referencing yields results very similar to those from labour-intensive manual referencing. Finally, we discuss how to scale the work flow to other years and cities as well as potential applications in economic history and beyond.

Keywords: city directories; data extraction; granular spatial data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C8 N9 R1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498322000547
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:87:y:2023:i:c:s0014498322000547

DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2022.101476

Access Statistics for this article

Explorations in Economic History is currently edited by R.H. Steckel

More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().