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Spatializing 6k years of global urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000
Design Type(s) time sampled measurement data set • data normalization objective • text processing and analysis objective • data integration objective Measurement Type(s) population data Technology Type(s) digital curation Factor Type(s) Sample Characteristic(s) city Machine-accessible metadata file describing the reported data (ISA-Tab format)
From these sources, Chandler pieced together global city-level population estimates throughout time by first obtaining a demographic factor for a particular city, such as number of loaves of bread sold, and then applying a relevant multiplier. Although a one-by-one look-up is a tedious process which can also lead to manual transcription errors, due to original data format challenges and omissions which prohibited accurate automated matching to large online databases, as well as the relatively small size of the dataset (1,741 city entries and 10,353 unique city/date/population values), this approach was undertaken. The final dataset digitized through the methods described here added the most probable country name determined through examining the maps at the beginning of the text, agreement between multiple geocoding techniques, and comparing the size of potential city matches with the Chandler’s population estimates for the given time period.
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