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Purpose: Many libraries and archives maintain collections of research documents, such as administrative records, with paper-based formats that limit the documents' access to in-person use. Digitization transforms paper-based collections into more accessible and analyzable formats. As collections are digitized, there is an opportunity to incorporate deep learning techniques, such as Document Image Analysis (DIA), into workflows to increase the usability of information extracted from archival documents. This paper describes the authors' approach using digital scanning, optical character recognition (OCR) and deep learning to create a digital archive of administrative records related to the mortgage guarantee program of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, also known as the G.I. Bill. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a collection of 25,744 semi-structured paper-based records from the administration of G.I. Bill Mortgages from 1946 to 1954 to develop a digitization and processing workflow. These records include the name and city of the mortgagor, the amount of the mortgage, the location of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation agent, one or more identification numbers and the name and location of the bank handling the loan. The authors extracted structured information from these scanned historical records in order to create a tabular data file and link them to other authoritative individual-level data sources. Findings: The authors compared the flexible character accuracy of five OCR methods. The authors then compared the character error rate (CER) of three text extraction approaches (regular expressions, DIA and named entity recognition (NER)). The authors were able to obtain the highest quality structured text output using DIA with the Layout Parser toolkit by post-processing with regular expressions. Through this project, the authors demonstrate how DIA can improve the digitization of administrative records to automatically produce a structured data resource for researchers and the public. Originality/value: The authors' workflow is readily transferable to other archival digitization projects. Through the use of digital scanning, OCR and DIA processes, the authors created the first digital microdata file of administrative records related to the G.I. Bill mortgage guarantee program available to researchers and the general public. These records offer research insights into the lives of veterans who benefited from loans, the impacts on the communities built by the loans and the institutions that implemented them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the U.S. Census Bureau has microdata files from the 1960 through 1990 Decennial Censuses, respondent names were never digitized. Names from these censuses are only available in handwritten form on microfilm images of the original census manuscripts. In this paper, we document the 1990 Census Name Recovery Pilot (NRP) project, which was used to identify the most accurate and cost-effective means to recover respondent names, focusing on the example of the 1990 Census. In addition to describing the four stages of the project, the results of the NRP are presented in detail. The NRP showed that respondent names can be accurately digitized to support the integration of the 1960 through 1990 Censuses into the Census Bureau's infrastructure of linked data from censuses, surveys, and administrative records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Migration from the South and the rise of racial residential segregation strongly shaped the twentieth-century experience of African Americans. Yet, little attention has been devoted to how the two phenomena were linked, especially with respect to the individual experiences of the migrants. We address this gap by using novel data that links individual records from the complete-count 1940 Census to those in the 2000 Census long form, in conjunction with information about the level of racial residential segregation in metropolitan areas in 1940 and 2000. We first consider whether migrants from the South and their children experienced higher or lower levels of segregation in 1940 relative to their counterparts who were born in the North or who remained in the South. Next, we extend our analysis to second-generation Great Migration migrants and their segregation outcomes by observing their location in 2000. Additionally, we assess whether second-generation migrants experience larger decreases in their exposure to segregation as their socioeconomic status increases relative to their southern and/or northern stayer counterparts. Our study significantly advances our understanding of the Great Migration and the "segregated century." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The U.S. Census Bureau has created a set of linkable census, survey, and administrative records that provides longitudinal data on the American population across the past eight decades. While these files include modern decennial censuses, Census Bureau surveys, and administrative records files from other federal agencies, the long time span is only possible with the addition of the complete count 1940 Census microdata. In this paper, we discuss the development of this linked data infrastructure and provide an overview of the record linkage techniques used. We primarily focus on the techniques used to produce a beta version of a linkable 1940 Census microdata file and discuss the potential to further document and extend the infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mass migration of African Americans out of the South during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century represents one of the most significant internal migration flows in U.S.History: Those undertaking the Great Migration left the South in search of a better life, and their move transformed the cultural, social, and political dynamics of African American life specifically and U.S. society more generally. Recent research offers conflicting evidence regarding the migrants' success in translating their geographic mobility into economic mobility. Due in part to the lack of a large body of longitudinal data, almost all studies of the Great Migration have focused on the migrants themselves, usually over short periods of their working lives. Using longitudinally linked census data, we take a broader view, investigating the long-term economic and social effects of the Great Migration on the migrants' children. Our results reveal modest but statistically significant advantages in education, income, and poverty status for the African American children of the Great Migration relative to the children of southerners who remained in the South. In contrast, second-generation white migrants experienced few benefits from migrating relative to southern or northern stayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we want to build authentic evidence-based policy, we need a strong descriptive foundation of evidence on the everyday experience of poverty. The National Poverty Study (NPS), which is currendy in development, provides this foundation with a new "qualitative census" of the everyday conditions of poverty in rural, suburban, and urban sites. The NPS will allow us to build new evidence-based theories of poverty, evaluate and improve existing place-based antipoverty policies, validate official poverty measures, and assist local communities in improving the safety net for vulnerable populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ernest George Ravenstein's influential "laws of migration" argued that short- distance and within- country moves were typically dominated by women. We use census microdata to take a fresh look at the relationship between gender and internal migration in late nineteenth- century Europe and North America. We argue that there was a significant flaw in Ravenstein's key finding on gender and that this flaw has implications for more recent scholarship of the long- term "feminization of migration." The apparent overrepresentation of women among internal migrants was due not to their higher propensity to move but to the much higher rate at which male migrants left the population, through either death or emigration. Men were just as likely to make internal moves as women were; the difference was that men did not remain in the population to be counted when the decennial census was conducted. Like Ravenstein's "laws of migration," this article relies primarily on data from the 1881 census of England and Wales. Whereas Ravenstein's work was constrained by the contents of tables published by the UK Census Office in the 1880s, we are able to ask new questions by analyzing individual- level data files recently made available by the North Atlantic Population Project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discover and document errors in public-use microdata samples (“PUMS files”) of the 2000 Census, the 2003–2006 American Community Survey, and the 2004–2009 Current Population Survey. For women and men age 65 and older, age- and sex-specific population estimates generated from the PUMS files differ by as much as 15 percent from counts in published data tables. Moreover, an analysis of labor-force participation and marriage rates suggests the PUMS samples are not representative of the population at individual ages for those age 65 and over. PUMS files substantially underestimate labor-force participation of those near retirement age and overestimate labor-force participation rates of those at older ages. These problems were an unintentional byproduct of the misapplication of a newer generation of disclosure-avoidance procedures carried out on the data. The resulting errors in the public-use data could significantly impact studies of people age 65 and older, particularly analyses of variables that are expected to change by age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Virtually all quantitative microdata used by social scientists derive from samples that incorporate clustering, stratification, and weighting adjustments (Kish 1965, 1992). Such data can yield standard error estimates that differ dramatically from those derived from a simple random sample of the same size. Researchers using historical U.S. census microdata, however, usually apply methods designed for simple random samples. The resulting p values and confidence intervals could be inaccurate and could lead to erroneous research conclusions. Because U.S. census microdata samples are among the most widely used sources for social science and policy research, the need for reliable standard error estimation is critical. We evaluate the historical microdata samples of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) project from 1850 to 1950 in order to determine (1) the impact of sample design on standard error estimates, and (2) how to apply modern standard error estimation software to historical census samples. We exploit a unique new data source from the 1880 census to validate our methods for standard error estimation, and then we apply this approach to the 1850-1870 and 1900-1950 decennial censuses. We conclude that Taylor series estimation can be used effectively with the historical decennial census microdata samples and should be applied in research analyses that have the potential for substantial clustering effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a study related to immigrants. The study shows that poverty rates are the most telling measure of immigrant families overall economic distress in the Midwest. The study provides some perspective on how to interpret the magnitude of the differences between Appalachian and Appalachian whites.

This article considers the incidence and meaning of return migration that took place during the twentieth-century "Great Migration" of southern whites and African-Americans to the U.S. North and West. Southern whites in particular had an unusually high rate of return, though this pattern varied significantly from one northern city to another. After presenting an overview of return movement in the Great Migration, this article compares migrants' experiences in two northern cities that had very different histories of return migration. Southern migrants to Indianapolis, Indiana, came mainly from a relatively prosperous southern region to which they returned with great frequency. Southern migrants to Cincinnati, Ohio, on the other hand, moved from one of the most impoverished subregions of the Appalachian South and were much more likely to choose life in the North over a questionable future at home. Ultimately, Cincinnati's migrants drew on their common sense of exile to build a vocal migrant community in the North, while Indianapolis's migrants showed no similar efforts. The two cases together demonstrate the importance of understanding the tight relationship between patterns in return migration and migrant community development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes a public use microdata sample of the 1860 slave population of the U.S. created at the Minnesota Population Center. Advantages to microdata from the census of slave inhabitants; Demography of the slave population; Patterns in slaveholding; Sample design and variable availability.

Demographers identified the phenomenon of step-migration as they studied the movement of large populations within Europe and the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries. Migrants often made the trek from rural areas to cities in steps as they first settled in a town or smaller urban center before moving to a large city. Blacks who moved from the South to northern cities in the 1930's often followed the pattern of step-migration. However, their final success was not necessarily insured by their gradual acculturation to urban life. A case study of Pittsburgh in the 1930's indicates that black women tended to have better jobs and prospects on reaching the city, but black men faced more difficulties.