Mining Spatio-temporal Data on Industrialization from Historical Registries Despite the growing availability of big data in many fields, historical data on socioevironmental phenomena are often not available due to a lack of automated and scalable approaches for collecting, digitizing, and assembling them. We have developed a data-mining method for extracting tabulated, geocoded data from printed directories. While scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) can digitize printed text, these methods alone do not capture the structure of the underlying data. Our pipeline integrates both page layout analysis and OCR to extract tabular, geocoded data from structured text. We demonstrate the utility of this method by applying it to scanned manufacturing registries from Rhode Island that record 41 years of industrial land use. The resulting spatio-temporal data can be used for socioenvironmental analyses of industrialization at a resolution that was not previously possible. In particular, we find strong evidence for the dispersion of manufacturing from the urban core of Providence, the state’s capital, along the Interstate 95 corridor to the north and south. Berenbaum, David Creator Deighan, Dwyer Creator Marlow, Thomas Creator Lee, Ashley Creator Frickel, Scott Creator Howison, Mark Creator 2016 structured text historical data geocoding page layout analysis socio-environmental analysis text research article 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. © Copyright 2016 the authors. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license 10.26300/cqzk-f016