Developing computer vision and machine learning strategies to unlock government-created records

This paper outlines the development of a proof-of-concept workflow using machine learning and computer vision techniques to unlock the data within digitized handwritten US Census forms from the 1950s. The 1950s US Census includes over 6.5 million page images and was only recently made available to the public on April 1, 2022, following a 72-year access restriction period. Our project uses computational treatments to assist researchers in their efforts to recover and preserve the history of the erased Sacramento Japantown. Sacramento once housed the fourth largest Japantown in the United States before experiencing WWII Japanese American Incarceration and the 1950s US Government program of urban renewal. The goal is to augment a researcher’s work in selecting a subset of Census pages for further transcription and analysis. We demonstrate a workflow for extracting demographic information using computer vision for image segmentation, and machine learning for handwritten character recognition. The workflow consists of a computational filtering process for Census records and a user interface for page review. These computational techniques are suitable for other cities, states, and communities, and demonstrate new strategies to unlock vital demographic information. The approach highlights the potential benefits of computational techniques for the analysis of form-based historical records of the twentieth century that can have an impact on social justice.