11. OCR: Digitized Data

Today’s plan

• “Non-computable information”
• Lloyd’s shipping list: The Wind of Change: Maritime Technology, Trade, and Economic Development, Pascali (2017)
• Plantation records: The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java, Dell and Olken (2020)
• Clay tablets: Trade, Merchants, and the Lost Cities of the Bronze Age, Barjamovic et al. (2019)

Non-computable information

• Standard digitization methods often fail to capture historical documents effectively
  • Especially for less frequently used languages, scripts and settings
• Data may also be trapped in various types of images
• Text data contains a significant amount of non-computable information

Economics and data

• Key economic questions necessitate disaggregated data: Misallocation, inequality, social mobility, welfare effects of trade
• Long-term digital disaggregated data uncommon
  • Existing data predominantly originating from high resource contexts
• Growing academic interest, also due to much better computing power and methods

Digitizing data