 Breathing new life into death certificates: Extracting handwritten cause of death in the LIFE-M projectMartha Bailey, Susan H. Leonard, Joseph Price, Evan Roberts, Logan Spector and Mengying Zhang Explorations in Economic History, 2023, vol. 87, issue C Abstract: The demographic and epidemiological transitions of the past 200 years are well documented at an aggregate level. Understanding differences in individual and group risks for mortality during these transitions requires linkage between demographic data and detailed individual cause of death information. This paper describes the digitization of almost 185,000 causes of death for Ohio to supplement demographic information in the Longitudinal, Intergenerational Family Electronic Micro-database (LIFE-M). To extract causes of death, our methodology combines handwriting recognition, extensive data cleaning algorithms, and the semi-automated classification of causes of death into International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes. Our procedures are adaptable to other collections of handwritten data, which require both handwriting recognition and semi-automated coding of the information extracted. Keywords: Death certificate; Semi-automated classification; Cause of death (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:87:y:2023:i:c:s0014498322000523 DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2022.101474 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 |
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