Machine learning, template matching, and the International Tracing Service digital archive: Automating the retrieval of death certificate reference cards from 40 million document scans.
Scattered throughout the International Tracing Service (ITS) digital archive, one of the largest and most heterogeneous collections of Holocaust-related material, are hundreds of thousands of reference cards to official death certificates recording a fraction of individuals who perished within conce...
| Published in: | Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 513 - 536 |
|---|---|
| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press / USA
Sep2019
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=138342373&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 138342373 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 2055768X JEO9 jtl: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities issn: 2055768X maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Sep2019 vid: 34 iid: 3 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 138342373 10.1093/llc/fqy063 ppf: 513 ppct: 23 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.5MB tig: atl: Machine learning, template matching, and the International Tracing Service digital archive: Automating the retrieval of death certificate reference cards from 40 million document scans. aug: au: Lee, Benjamin Charles Germain affil: Levine Institute for Holocaust Education and Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USA and Visiting Fellow, Department of History, Harvard University Cambridge, USA su: Death certificates Digital libraries Machine learning Personal computers Smart cards sug: subj: Death certificates Digital libraries Machine learning Personal computers Smart cards ab: Scattered throughout the International Tracing Service (ITS) digital archive, one of the largest and most heterogeneous collections of Holocaust-related material, are hundreds of thousands of reference cards to official death certificates recording a fraction of individuals who perished within concentration camps. These cards represent the most comprehensive collection of digital material pertaining to these death certificates issued by Sonderstandesamt Arolsen, a German civil registry office. However, the reference cards can only be found dispersed throughout the Central Name Index (CNI), ITS's 46+ million-card finding aid that is indexed only by name. Consequently, aggregating the death certificate reference cards for research requires an intractable manual search. I adopt template matching and machine learning to automate the retrieval of these cards from the ITS digital archive. I demonstrate the efficacy of my method on a test set of 22,117 hand-classified cards, reporting 100% precision and 100% recall. Running this algorithm on 39,967,358 scans of cards from the CNI, I identify 312,183 death certificate reference cards in 13.75 days of elapsed real runtime on a personal computer with only a single, $600 Intel processor. Finally, I demonstrate that this approach can be generalized to many different card types within the CNI, showing great promise for application to other archives. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y custom: © 2019 EADH: The European Association for Digital Humanities. item: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities holder: Oxford University Press / USA dt: @attributes: year: 2019 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
|---|