Presenter/Creator Information

Michael Weaver, Yale UniversityFollow

Description

As part of my dissertation, I creating digital maps of the extent of the railways in the United States during the late 19th century (1880 to 1910) on a yearly basis. While other researchers have created digital maps of the railways in approximately 10-year intervals, this misses out on the rapid change in the railways in the interim. These previous digitization attempts have relied on using detailed maps created of the railways at a given time. But accurate maps were not made on a yearly basis and only exist for roughly every 10 years. However, during the 19th century, people using the railways to travel or ship freight needed accurate guides to the railways. The Official Guides to the Railways served this role. These Guides were updated and published multiple times a year. These guides contain route maps and time tables for all of the railways. Most importantly, however, each guide includes an Index of Railway Stations. I have obtained 30 volumes of this resource from Stanford, worked with the Scan and Deliver services at Yale to scan the relevant portions, and started to digitize the indices of railway stations. While I have had one volume transcribed by hand, I am working to use OCR to digitize the text of the remaining 30 volumes. Once the text is transcribed, I use several geocoding tools to identify the location of railways stations in each year between 1880 (possibly earlier) and 1910. An example of what this looks like for one year (1910) can be seen here. This presentation would focus on using various techniques to digitize and make innovative use of historical textual resources to create useful data.

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Digitally Mapping the Growth of the Railroads in the United States

As part of my dissertation, I creating digital maps of the extent of the railways in the United States during the late 19th century (1880 to 1910) on a yearly basis. While other researchers have created digital maps of the railways in approximately 10-year intervals, this misses out on the rapid change in the railways in the interim. These previous digitization attempts have relied on using detailed maps created of the railways at a given time. But accurate maps were not made on a yearly basis and only exist for roughly every 10 years. However, during the 19th century, people using the railways to travel or ship freight needed accurate guides to the railways. The Official Guides to the Railways served this role. These Guides were updated and published multiple times a year. These guides contain route maps and time tables for all of the railways. Most importantly, however, each guide includes an Index of Railway Stations. I have obtained 30 volumes of this resource from Stanford, worked with the Scan and Deliver services at Yale to scan the relevant portions, and started to digitize the indices of railway stations. While I have had one volume transcribed by hand, I am working to use OCR to digitize the text of the remaining 30 volumes. Once the text is transcribed, I use several geocoding tools to identify the location of railways stations in each year between 1880 (possibly earlier) and 1910. An example of what this looks like for one year (1910) can be seen here. This presentation would focus on using various techniques to digitize and make innovative use of historical textual resources to create useful data.