Using web demographics to model population change of Vietnamese-Americans in Texas between 2000 and 2009

Abstract

With respect to the great wealth of information available online, the Internet can be viewed as a gigantic database with diverse resources.

Geovisualization of Local and Regional Migration Using Web-mined Demographics

“…The results of this research will be applied to a larger data set containing multiple years, producing geovisualizations of population change over a longer temporal period. This will allow for the continued research into predicting areas of significant population change, resource allocation during census events, and predict growth and decline of ethno-cultural populations as outlined by Chow et al (2012). …”

“…Using a web-based data extraction tool that leveraged a list of popular Vietnamese surnames, Chow et al (2011) acquired demographic data for 40.3% of the estimated Vietnamese-American (VA) population in Texas as reported by the American Community Survey 2009. Chow et al (2012) used this data set to model population change during the period between 2000 and 2009 at both the county and census tract levels. Additionally, web-based VA demographic data was mined during the following years: 2010 and 2012.…”

“We Know Who You Are and We Know Where You Live”: A Research Agenda for Web Demographics

“…Theoretically, web demographics can be created and updated instantaneously in near real time. Preliminary fi ndings and reasonable estimation suggest that the timescale ranges from weeks to months and possibly to years (Chow et al 2010 ) . Nevertheless, web demographics can be gathered and updated at a much shorter and fl exible timescale than conventional enumeration strategies, such as the labor-intensive mail, telephone, or face-to-face surveys involved in a population census.…”

“…Studies in recent years highlight the development of a web-based demographic data extraction tool and offer preliminary comparisons between the web demographics and census enumeration of Vietnamese-Americans in Texas (Chow et al 2010 . This section explores the procedure of utilizing web demographics for population monitoring, including acquisition, processing, applications, validation, privacy, and other related issues.…”

“…To illustrate the level of uncertainty, the Vietnamese-American (VA) population will be used as an example. Chow et al ( 2010 ) The total column represents the count of unique records from WhitePages, Addresses, and Zabasearch records, respectively. The post-processing procedure mentioned in the previous section removed invalid and duplicate records (by consolidating with records from multiple people-fi nder sites) and yielded 53,425 (26.4%), 58,245 (28.8%), and 74,865 (37.1%) records from WhitePages, Addresses, and Zabasearch, respectively.…”