PrefacePeople shape societies. They are linked to each other by family ties and networks with social, economic and religious dimensions. People live together in households and form communities. Some own a house, land and other properties, often related to their profession. And all this is in continuous change. People are born, marry, have children and die, and they change houses and addresses, and build careers. For the study of a society in all aspects, people are at the heart of the problem and should be known in the context of their complex relationships. Even today, it is not easy to get this information in an all-enfolding way, but for populations in the past, it is a real challenge. And that is what this book is about. The book addresses the problems that are encountered, and solutions that have been proposed, when we aim to identify people and to reconstruct populations under conditions where information is scarce, ambiguous, fuzzy and sometimes erroneous.It is not a single discipline that is involved in such an endeavour. Historians, social scientists, and linguists represent the humanities through their knowledge of the complexity of the past, the limitations of sources and the possible interpretations of information. The availability of big data from digitised archives and the need of complex analyses to identify individuals require the involvement of computer scientists. With contributions from all these fields, often in direct cooperation, this book is at the heart of digital humanities and hopefully a source of inspiration for future investigations.The process from handwritten registers to a reconstructed digitised population has three major phases which shape the three sections of this book. The first phase is that of data transcription and digitisation while structuring the information in a meaningful and efficient way. Little of this phase can be automated. With archives that comprise easily tens of millions of records, the help of volunteers for transcription and digitisation is indispensable, but requires a rigorous management. Experiences from Denmark demonstrate the complexity of this task in Chap. 1. Spelling variation, aliases, abbreviations, errors and typos all generate difficulties in further processing and require data cleaning. Similarity measures can be helpful to v

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This report was prepared u an account of work sponsored by the United States Government. Neither the United States nor the United States Energy Research and Development Adminislration, nor any of their employees, nor any of their eontracton, IUbcontractors, or their employees, makes any wananty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or respon~~'bility for the accuracy, completeness or u~efulnea of any information, apparatus, product or process disclosed, or represents that iU use would not infringe privately owned rights. HANDYL76, the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory vers1on of SANDYL, the multidimensional Monte Carlo electron/photon computer code, was compared with experimental work performed on the Stanford Mark III Linear Accelerator. The three pieces of experimental ~ork were A.