The census place project: A method for geolocating unstructured place names

Using Digitized Newspapers to Address Measurement Error in Historical Data

“…Also, practitioners can simply search for newspaper pages containing the names of any sub-county areas for which they need to collect data. We provide an example using 960 sub-county areas (hereinafter towns) in North Carolina from Berkes, Karger, and Nencka (2023). Using newly scraped data for all pages from North Carolina newspapers that mention “boll weevil” and each town’s name, we compute the following town-level measure, …”

“…Most online archives report the city, town, or place of publication. The data can then be combined with newly available crosswalks to sub-county locations for every individual in the census and consistently defined place names that are provided by the Census Place Project (Berkes, Karger, and Nencka 2023). Also, practitioners can simply search for newspaper pages containing the names of any sub-county areas for which they need to collect data.…”

Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations

“…The paper uses full-count census data for California in 1870 and 1880, with most analyses conducted at the township level. Townships were sub-county designations approximately commensurate with Minor Civil Divisions; they are the smallest geographic aggregation in the 1870 data (Berkes, Karger, and Nencka 2023).…”

Homeward Bound: How Migrants Seek Out Familiar Climates

“…We locate Norwegian immigrants in the US using data from the Census Place Project (Berkes et al, 2023). Information on Norwegians municipality of residence in Norway is obtained from the Norwegian Census.…”

“…We also exclude any individual who was younger than 15 in the baseline year. 89 We then rely on the Census Place Project (Berkes et al, 2023) 87 Results are virtually unchanged when dropping this additional restriction. 88 Since the 1890 Census was destroyed in a fire, this year cannot be used in the analysis; we thus consider the 1880-1900 period.…”