Bachelor project at Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken to create historical individuals by linking them with all kinds of historical records.
A novel technique for historical record linkage to unique historical individuals.
A unique historical individual is a person that has lived. Its life course can be reconstructed by finding all documented events that mention this person. Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken has digitized approximately 750 thousand certificates. These certificates describe the events of birth, marriage or death. A record linking algorithm can compare the names on certificates to find what names likely describe the same person. These linked person references can be transformed into a data structure that describes unique historical idividuals. By doing so, life courses and pedigress can be studied.
The methods BurgerLinker () and RecordLinker () are compared with a focus on the quality of unique historical individual reconstruction.
- How can unique historical individuals be constructed with a linking algorithm that interconnects data from archived birth, marriage and death certificates after 1811 in Leiden and surrounding municipalities?
- Which parameters give the best results and what should be adjusted to our data in order to make better links?
How BurgerLinker is applied is described in "BurgerLinker/README.md"
The workings behind RecordLinker are broadly described in "RecordLinker/README.md"
How the resulting unique historical individuals are compared and created are described in "Unique Individuals/README.md"