But you never know. My grandfather died before I was born and all they said about him ever was he was an artist, but it was the depression so he didn't get much work. I looked in the 1940 census, found him and under "occupation" it said "WPA artist." So I did some research and he had a position drawing Americana for the WPA and some of his drawing are held by the National Gallery (not on display, but on their website). The little bird I use as an icon is one of his drawings.
Oh, well, yeah, sure. But the handwriting OCR they are using sucks. Basically would be rekeying every single letter of every single page. Would like to find my mom, for example.
Well, I argued back in 2009, and again this time around and also at other times, that we should a small amount of money (20-50 billion on budgets sized in the 3 trillion range) each year to do the work with the libraries and the transfer of old paper/books/films/what have you to fully useful digital forms.
Separately there's an issue with our insanely shoddy statistical record keeping (we are not exactly sure how many murders are committed each year, for example, or the now canonical how many killings (justified or not) police commit year) which I have also argued we should fix.
This falls in both boxes. Census data is highly useful, and getting into proper machine-readable should be mandatory. But for various reasons (our pennywise and pound-foolish Congress) we refuse.
Really want to help. Too many worthy causes, not enough time left.
I looked and the handwriting is often illegible.
I couldn't find any of my relatives, and I was like, oh my. I could do that with the 1920 census.
elm
keying in 200k people to find a couple of relatives seems a bit much
But you never know. My grandfather died before I was born and all they said about him ever was he was an artist, but it was the depression so he didn't get much work. I looked in the 1940 census, found him and under "occupation" it said "WPA artist." So I did some research and he had a position drawing Americana for the WPA and some of his drawing are held by the National Gallery (not on display, but on their website). The little bird I use as an icon is one of his drawings.
Oh, well, yeah, sure. But the handwriting OCR they are using sucks. Basically would be rekeying every single letter of every single page. Would like to find my mom, for example.
elm
they need to pay somebody to do that
crowdsourcing I guess unless they get more $$$ from our taxes.
Well, I argued back in 2009, and again this time around and also at other times, that we should a small amount of money (20-50 billion on budgets sized in the 3 trillion range) each year to do the work with the libraries and the transfer of old paper/books/films/what have you to fully useful digital forms.
Separately there's an issue with our insanely shoddy statistical record keeping (we are not exactly sure how many murders are committed each year, for example, or the now canonical how many killings (justified or not) police commit year) which I have also argued we should fix.
This falls in both boxes. Census data is highly useful, and getting into proper machine-readable should be mandatory. But for various reasons (our pennywise and pound-foolish Congress) we refuse.
elm
sticking with my previous position
NPR had a story this morning about the availability of these census forms. I'm glad so many people are helping to transcribe the data.