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Automated data extraction from historical city directories: the rise and fall of mid-century gas stations in Providence, RI

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Overview

Year:
2019
Contributor:
Bell, Samuel (Author)
Marlow, Thomas (Author)
Wombacher, Kai (Author)
Hitt, Anina (Author)
Neev Parikh, Andras Zsom, Scott Frickel (Author)
Zsom, Andras (Author)
Frickel, Scott (Author)
Subject:
historical registries
Industrialization
historical industrial sites
Gas stations
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1101/701136

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Description

Abstract:
This is a pre-print of the authors' manuscript. Abstract: The location of defunct environmentally hazardous businesses like gas stations has many implications for modern American cities. To track down these locations, we present the directoreadr code (github.com/brown-ccv/directoreadr). Using scans of Polk city directories from Providence, RI, directoreadr extracts and parses business location data with a high degree of accuracy. The image processing pipeline ran without any human input for 94.4% of the pages we examined. For the remaining 5.6%, we processed them with some human input. Through hand-checking a sample of three years, we estimate that ~94.6% of historical gas stations are correctly identified and located, with historical street changes and non-standard address formats being the main drivers of errors. As an example use, we look at gas stations, finding that gas stations were most common early in the study period in 1936, beginning a sharp and steady decline around 1950. We are making the dataset produced by directoreadr publicly available. We hope it will be used to explore a range of important questions about socioeconomic patterns in Providence and cities like it during the transformations of the mid-1900s.
Notes:
This research was supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Research Program of the National Institutes of Health under award number P42ES013660.

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Access Conditions

Use and Reproduction
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license

Citation

Bell, Samuel, Marlow, Thomas, Wombacher, Kai, et al., "Automated data extraction from historical city directories: the rise and fall of mid-century gas stations in Providence, RI" (2019). Superfund Project: Socio-environmental Cities, Brown Superfund Presentations & Publications. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.1101/701136

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    Superfund Project: Socio-environmental Cities

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